clouds, and upon new mown hay and clover flowers distilled in dew: this alone is delight. But with solitude behind, and sorrow, a mistress long parted—a wife, before! what word can reach the inettable state of such a traveller's mind? No, it must be thought alone. Perhaps Robin's smiling to himself all the while he ate (to enormity!) of his oat cake, and drank of his homely cruize of milk, best expressed it; which fixed smile leaped into a downright laugh all at once, (or was it a cry? for some haymaker, behind the hedge, just come as he was done, thought it such, for he saw his eyes full,) at the commonest object in the world, only a lamb kneeling down, with pleased wagging of its little puff of a tail, to be suckled by its patient mother, bending her head round to touch it, as if to say "welcome baby, welcome.' What he saw typified by that natural spectacle, whether a snowy bosom, an expanded little hand, a peep of blue and sleepy eye upturned to one downcast to it, all tenderness, or what else—who can tell? That image of maternal and infantile love, however, conjured a touching train of ideas, and though Robin knew not what an Old Dramatist meant, (those living glories still buried alive!) he surely thought their thoughts, as beautifully clothed by a poet of a far nobler age than this, (with all its "march," its "schoolmaster," and self-applauding frivolity):

"How near am I now to a happiness

Which Earth exceeds not! not another like it!
The treasures of the Deep are not so precious
As are the concealed comforts of a man
Locked up in Woman's love!"

What wanted he of company with such thoughts? Day after day they kept annihilating space and time, and fatigue, and accompanied him quite into the metropolis, not banished by the gay and novel uproar of a mighty city. Entering by night he was astonished at the strong light of the streets, they seemed in illumination for some great rejoicing, and the crowd joy-mad. Nor was he doubtless less an object of some curiosity, to such as chanced to notice him. Travel-stained and footsore, his dustiness and lameness oddly combined with his happy elate look, in spite of evident pale exhaustion; for he had walked on and on without feeling his fatigue, till his day's journey had become enormous, added to his hurrying pace as he approached the neighbourhood of St. Paul's, where she lived. Then his hands were bloody and torn with forcing his way through a quickset hedge to pick for her a nosegay,-the one of huge size which he bore in his left, for (as he told her afterwards,) he smelt all at once, about dusk, near "the town," such a perfume of flowers, as if all the May, and all the meadow-sweet of all Wye side, was blowing t'other side the hedge, so through he struggled, after long labour, and found, indeed, such a field! being in fact a nursery garden full of stocks and all flowers, of which all

twilight prevented his observing the formality. Thus proceeding down High Holborn, where it widens towards the Bars, with what pride did he compare in his mind his own innocent beauty, now so near him, with one of those wretched women of misery, (misnamed of pleasure,) who allured by his country appearance thought to find in him an easy dupe and prey! Robin had too much real natural gallantry to be a rake: that is, he loved too passionately the female character, the sex, as it should be, to endure without horror, its truly horrible transfiguration. Hence, while he shuddered at her venal blandishments, he pursued the train of happy triumphant hopes and thoughts, still thinking with Middleton

"Oh, honest wedlock

Is like a banqueting-house built in a garden,

On which the Spring's chaste blossoms take delight
To cast their modest odours; while base lust

With all her powders, paintings, and best pride,

Is but a fair house built by a ditch side."

And "likened straight"

"Her beautified body to a goodly temple

Built upon vaults where carcasses lie rotting."

But when this lost creature, at whose touch he shuddered, tried another mode to move him, urged by want, and declared she had not broken her fast that day: there was a something in her hollow real voice, no longer of feigned softness, that startled him with a frightful fancy, almost as if he had seen duskily in a mirror an uplifted arm and knife behind him, ready to descend direct upon his heart, he looked madly at her face, a gas-lamp beamed full upon it, the look was that dagger indeed, stricken through his heart, it was Margery Morgan. Painted, hectic, sad, and now struggling with a revived sense of shame, of innocence, of old times, -hers was the hand he had shaken, shaken off! hers the touch at which he had shuddered! "Ah Robin!" she affected to lisp gaily, but the effort failed, and her voice dropped plaintive. For him, he did not hear it, but looked and looked without a word-still looked, till staggering, grasping at the lamp-post, all things reeled round him, the nosegay fell from his hand, he sunk down and fainted away. Sickness, estrangement, death itself, these had crossed his mind in the few intervals of hope's intoxication, for these he had partly therefore prepared as possible,-but this! no, he had indeed never thought of this!

He awoke in a filthy squalid room, ill lighted by a stinking lamp against the daubed and smoked wall; a drunken man growled or snored on the floor before the sooty hearth and huge ash-heap; another, as it seemed, (but it was a woman whose gruff voice made her appear one,) kept swearing and raving from within a strong door, a prostitute mad with drinking, at which horrible duet between sleepy intoxication without, and raving within, two

or three muffled men who had brought in poor Robin while insensible, laughed grimly, as did another dosing in a high-backed chair at a dirty table, all over dried floods of beer, to which the book before him seemed glued; with sooty tobacco pipes, halfburnt pipe-papers, &c. By which description the London reader will guess that the "guardians of the night" had picked up our shepherd, imagining him dead drunk, and conveyed him to St. Andrew's watchhouse, in the way of their vocation. A strange noise (to him) hastened his recovery, the springing of rattles, at which the watchmen ran out, but presently met their brethren dragging in a pale wretch without a coat, slipped off when he was seized, a frequent mode of escape; a street robbery and attempt to murder was the charge taken down by the drowsy night constable, and blood was upon him, his own or another's. A sort of fight betwixt the crowd of thieves and streetwalkers which pressed in after him, and those inside with their staves to force them back, followed amidst mingled shrieks, blasphemies, cries of murder, and laughter. Perhaps his return to recollection in such a place, rather than another, was a mercy; to burst at once and for ever any remains of that dream of innocence and green fields, and a virgin heart, in which he had slept so long. After that swift perdition which had fallen on his hope and heart, love and life; while the pain and the horror, the strangeness and the black loathsomeness of his thoughts and of his soul, made a very hell within him, it was well, it was congenial to his new state of existence, that what seemed to him a hell of depravity and a misery of the damned, should be actually around him, waking out of his little interval of oblivion; that the lost should hail him lost to that insufferable state!

After some insult, much merriment, and more extortion, poor Robin escaped these new companions, to prowl the now solitary streets with the houseless vagrant, the robber, and the prostitute, who alone were stirring, seen gliding by the half-extinguished lamps, or screaming up dark and noisome alleys in their drunken mirth, or conflicts with the watch. Desolate he stood, and heard the crying of the hour-midnight! without a thought of bed, or house, or rest. And where was she? What mattered where she was? It was no longer she, his master's loving daughter, that sweet, and pure, and innocent creature, his sister sweetheart, but her shocking shadow! It was-and it was not his Margery, the thought whirled his brain, confused his reason,-it was the dream of the mad, but did not the less tear his heart beyond the agony of death. His was indeed a strange and cruel fate: he was alone in a solitude of palaces, there was but one being among the careless thousands around him, that he could feel allied to his nature; her he had found, he had seen, yet she was lost, lost notwithstanding, and wretchedly lonely as she was in heart and state, he could not wish, nay he could not bear, to see her again.

Unconscious where he was going, he had now loitered, without aim, as far as the dead wall and rail of the churchyard of St. Sepulchre, and there it was he espied, standing in its shadow, a figure much like that of her who had killed all hope within him. And like a murderess, indeed, conscience-stricken, she had awaited his coming forth, and followed, under the cloud of night, in shame and at a distance, him whom she had stricken to the heart. The sudden rencontre with him, bringing back father, mother, home, and all the past at once to the unhappy girl, had acted upon her disguised, rather than altered, nature, like the touch of the spear of Ithuriel on the fallen angel; compelling him to stand up himself again out of his bestial transfiguration. The tormented young man, when he discovered that it was she indeed, seemingly wishful to be spoken to, when he fancied a tear twinkled to the beam of a lamp as she turned, began to pity, though he could not bear to speak, to even look at her. But a strange sort of cough struck his ear, the cough of the consumptive, hollow and sepulchral, it seemed the knell that tolled her to that home of the homeless by which she stood. And he approached her: the struggle, the shudder, the agony of that meeting,-the lip, the hand, the heart that at once yearned towards her and recoiled, description fails in such a scene, but Robin felt at that moment that death itself could have prepared for him no tragedy like this.

of

The story of her fall may be told in a few words: her first fault, which was in fact her only one, was the venial weakness of girlish vanity, under the notice of one she deemed much superior to herself in rank. This led to repeated imprudent admissions of him to her society, without (on her part) an idea beyond a sort of vague gratitude and pride, her heart being as firmly her Welsh lover's as ever. But her cousin was a man of much cunning and experience, and caused his yet innocent interviews with her to be represented to his proud aunt, for the purpose infuriating the old lady against her, who might thus cast her from under her protection, and leave her no alternative but accepting his. The event answered his hopes, for the angry invalid in one of those fits of fury to which paralytic persons are of tensubject, turned her out of doors, when her cousin named the "good kind of elderly woman," near Covent Garden, who had a lodging to let. The infamous conspiring, the complete success of the plot against a helpless weeping girl, who never plotted in her life, and scarcely knew any one beyond the walls she was driven from; these need not be dwelt on, nor the after steps by which (soon deserted under the repulsiveness of her grief, or rage,) she plunged to that lowest depth of degradation; ashamed to write, to complain; loathing life, herself, her ruiner, every thing but a wretched remembrance of that pure and innocent scene of

her short existence, she never thought to see again, nor wished to revisit, unless as a corpse, for interment in her own churchyard, and a tear and embrace from the parents, from whom she must for ever shrink alive. Thus, strange as it appears, her heart had never been untrue to its first possessor: her first step to ruin was but the buoyant gaiety of youth, the idle flutter of a young heart, though sworn another's, at the voice of a handsome flatterer; perhaps buoyed into that dangerous self-confidence which dared to listen, to linger to it, by the very passion whose fidelity it seemed to threaten or deny the existence of. Thus she might be compared in her innocence, security, and fall, to a lamb on the ridge of a green mountain, fresh and beautiful, but shelving and bottomed by a foul and black morass: no sooner has the snowy ignorant little creature felt the first warmth of the spring sun, than, unconcious of all danger, it frisks in its joy, takes but one bound in its gaiety and comfort, and another, and another, and a hundred, in terror and in pain, and by compulsion down the whole face of the bank, even into the awful chasm below. There it lies, half white still, half the colour of its dingy ooze, struggles feebly and dies!

It was on a gentle dripping day, after some thunder-showers, when the sun shone out near its setting, and its yellow lustre mingling with the steaming damp of the meadows, formed a rich golden haze, which lighted up the spangling hedgerows and dewdropped leaves with unusual glory, that I strolled to the little baillie-house. All was solitary and wildly beautiful, and I concluded that Robin was not returned, or he would have cropped some of the overgrown sweetbriars and the box-hedge that almost obstructed the path, when I was surprised by his appearance, so pale that I hardly knew him, much less the faint young woman who leaned upon his arm. Knowing nothing, then, of his cruel. trial, I was astonished at his passing me with the merely ordinary compliment of the hat, either not remembering me, or desirous to avoid, in her presence, allusion to the hopes and prospects connected with that house. A quiver of his lip and fall of countenance make me since believe the latter conjecture the right: for to what purpose was it to impress on her all the happiness fortune had prepared for them together in that pretty hermitage, when fate was already preparing her sad and separate home for ever in the earth? for so it was: she had intrusted to him all her sad story with floods of tears; their peace had been made, he had turned to her in heart at least again, forgiven and restored her, a dying flower, to her native soil, to her parents, and to them a stainless one. The tenderness of Robin's (now brotherly) love could ill endure to wring her heart with the shame, theirs with the pain, of a disclosure; he entreated, he conjured her to cooperate with him in this pious fraud, and shut in to his single