own side. The blood sprang forth across the face of the Poie, for it was he whom the gipsy monarch had overthrown, and that with no great difficulty either.

The vagrant queen, with instant self-possession, tightly compressed the place where she had been stabbed with her right hand, while she uplifted her left arm in an impressive attitude, and uttered a loud and stirring string of exclamations in the same unintelligible language which had been used by the male gipsies who had first appeared. The whole band over which she and her husband had presided, immediately answered by a shout, accompanied with gestures expressive of vengeance against her murderer. He rose from his kneeling position on the Pole, and answered with gloomy looks of firmness their threatening movements. Nina let her head drop upon her breast; the blood was trickling through her fingers, and flowing down her clothes to the ground.

The Pirates stood as spectators. Again she raised her face, which was ghastly pale-her eyes were lighted up with a brief, but dazzling and vindictive fire-she threw up both her arms, and again made the highest rocks re-echo to her exclamations. There were many responses made by individuals of her band in the same tone; and then she suddenly turned and disappeared at that opening from which all the gipsies had issued. She was gone no more than a few seconds, and when she rushed back, a boy of three years old was in her arms. She sank down with it on the ground, and laying it before the crew, repeated, first in the language they all understood, and then in English

"He shall be your king!-he shall be your king!"

The reply was general-" He shall, when he is old enough-or may we rot away body and soul, and leave no children behind us!"

She seemed satisfied, and kissed, with all her departing strength, the eyes, the lips, the forehead, and the neck of her child; then falling back, stretched herself out, and rendered up her soul!

Jane beheld all this without moving; but now the gipsies, crowding about Nina, prevented her from seeing what next took place, and she arose, and appealed pathetically to the Pirates, begging that they would take her back to the mansion. They answered that she mus go with them to the ship, and that the Marquis mus give money for her liberty. She begged them to say how much they would accept for her, and promised, if the amount was at all within her ability, to obtain it for them as soon as ever they should have restored her to her home.

The answer was-" We will consider of what you say-in the meantime you must go forward with us."

This was too indefinite to make her easier in mind, and wringing her hands in the extremity of her distress, she poured out the most moving entreaties. All heard her with indifference, with the exception of Gilpin, who lifted his single and unsupported voice on he behalf.

"I say no!" was the reply of Brien, the leader. "It was a foolish trick the bringing her off-but by this time the Marquis and all the house know of it, and as the mischief is done, we will not throw away the profits there are to be had from it-we will have the monev before we give her up."

"Mashter Gilpin," said the Pole, who had arisen from his dangerous recumbency at the feet of the gipsy king, "let me say you tat you tinks one vasht deal too mosh of te laty !-you hath name me coward for her!-you hath kill Timoty for her! Par Dieu, mashter Gilpin! you be in love wid her! and by and bye you shall do nobody knows how mosh to serve her! Par Got, mashter Gilpin! we be not safe in your company, and I do very mosh soshpect you to be one traitor to us!"

Gilpin reddened a little as he laughed sneeringly, and retorted

"Is it Scrynecki calls me traitor to the crew? Ha! ha! Scrynecki! valiant Scrynecki! The gipsy threw you down with a pat of his hand as he might the little boy which is now by his knees. Well may Scrynecki fear he is not safe where I am. I have only to give him a fillip with my finger, thus-and he would drop as if he had swallowed a few ounces of hot lead. You can't put me in a passion, Mister Polander, so I tell you. I wont quarrel with a man who can't fight."

"Saire! saire !" cried the choking Pole, " thish ish te hondredth time tat you have inshult me! I will ask te men about us if you shall do tish any more! It ish too bad, sailors, and I shall not stay wid you, par Got! if you do parmit it. I will go thish instante if you do let me be inshult like thish!"

Now all the crew liked nothing better than that the Pole should be punished for his cowardice, and instead of taking his part they joined Gilpin in taunting and laughing at him.

The Pole looked daggers, but used none;" and there he stood, stung to frenzy by the ridicule which

assailed him, yet wanting even the courage to turn about and quit their society.

"and

"I hath brought te laty here," he articulated, I shall not go until I hath money for her-elshe I would not shtop wid you one minute after te preshent time!" and he sneaked into the rear without saying more.

Jane hoped in vain however that Gilpin's interference might effect what she wished. At the same instant that she noticed, with a new thrill of dismay, the increasing gloom of the wild pass, betokening the approach of night, she noticed also that Brien was shaking hands with one of the gipsies, whom he had met before under circumstances that, to judge by their mutual looks, must have been highly pleasing. This recognition, too soon for her, led to a better understanding between the ontlawed parties. The gipsy was one of the few in his band who spoke English tolerably, and having received from Brien a lively explanation of the intentions of the Pirates with respect to their captive, he laughed merrily, and communicated the same to his friends in their common language with mirthful gestures. Weapons were immediately thrown down, and the Pirates were invited to rest through the night in the gipsies' encampment. Jane's anxious eye then sought Gilpin again, but he had apparently forgot her; he was talking with Brien, and Brien's former acquaintance, in a light and jovial strain.

"What will become of me!" she ejaculated, as the road darkened still more.

The gipsy women, turning from the corpse of their queen, fastened their bold black eyes on her with scrutinising curiosity, especially regarding the expensive furs

and silks which composed her dress. She shrank from them, nor felt the least relieved by their presence; for although they were of her own sex, there was little that was feminine to be seen in the expression of their faces. Many of them were handsome, some were young, but on no countenance among them shone one ray of the female heart.

A deeper shade of darkness descended upon the road. Jane observed it, and looked about her with a terror that was not the less deep because outwardly she was more calm. The crags, which seemed to have been piled up to prop the clouds by some giant hand, appeared more awful to her now than they had done before, by reason of the blacker hues in which they were steeped ; the little patch of sky that she could discern was already beginning to show the faint semblance of a star. Never before had a star been unwelcome to her eye-but now she would rather have seen a spectre than that little, faint, twinkling speck in the blue ether!

Brien's acquaintance led the way to the encampment, turning off from the road along a downward path, such as Jane could have easily imagined conducted to nothing else but a lair of wild beasts; the leader of the Pirates and Gilpin followed next to him; then came the gipsy king, with his hands tied behind his back, moving in sullen silence between his subjects, who carried naked daggers and knives, prepared to execute summary vengeance upon him for Nina's death if he should attempt to escape; to these succeeded the women, one bearing the child who was to be their future sovereign, and two others carrying between them its murdered mother; after these Jane was compelled to walk in front of the