However, I will not blame him unheard, nor permit myself to doubt the manly firmness of a character which I have so often extolled to you. Were he capable of doubt, of fear, of the shadow of change, I should have little to regret.

"And why, you will say, when I expect such steady and unalterable constancy from a lover, why should I be anxious about what Hazlewood does, or to whom he offers his attentions ?-I ask myself the question a hundred times a-day, and it only receives the very silly answer, that one does not like to be neglected, though one would not encourage a serious infidelity.

"I write all these trifles, because you say that they amuse you, and yet I wonder how they should. I remember in our stolen voyages to the world of fiction, you always admired the grand and the romantic-tales of knights, dwarfs, giants, and distressed damsels, soothsayers, visions, beckoning ghosts, and bloody hands,

whereas I was partial to the involved intrigues of private life, or at farthest, to so much only of the supernatural as is con-ferred by the agency of an eastern genie or a beneficent fairy. You would have loved to shape your course of life over the broad ocean, with its dead calms and howling tempests, its tornadoes, and its billows: mountain high,-whereas I should like to trim my little pinnace to a brisk breeze in some inland lake or tranquil bay, where there was just difficulty of navigation suf. ficient to give interest and to require skill,. without any great degree of danger. Só that, upon the whole, Matilda, I think you . should have had my father, with his pride of arms and of ancestry, his chivalrous point of honour, his high talents, and his abstruse and mystic studies-You should have had Lucy Bertram too for your friend, whose fathers, with names which alike defy memory and orthography, ruled over this romantic country, and whose birth took place, as I have been indistinctly in

formed, under circumstances of deep and peculiar interest-You should have had, too, our residence surrounded by mountains, and our lonely walks to haunted ruins And I should have had, in exchange, the lawns and shrubs, and greenhouses, and conservatories of Pine-park, with your good quiet indulgent aunt, her chapel in the morning, her nap after dinner, her hand at whist in the evening, not forgetting her fat coach-horses and fatter coachman.. Take notice, however, that Brown is not included in this proposed barter of mine-his. good humour, lively conversation, and open gallantry, suit my plan of life, as well as his athletic form, handsome features, and high spirit, would accord with a character of chivalry. So as we cannot change altogether out and out, I think we must e'en abide as we are."

CHAPTER IX.

I renounce your defiance; if

you parley so roughly I'll barricado my gates against you. Do you see yon bay window? Storm,-I care not, serving the good Duke of Norfolk. Merry Devil of Edmonton.

Julia Mannering to Matilda Marchmont.

"I RISE from a sick bed, my dearest Matilda, to communicate the strange and frightful scenes which have just passed. Alas! how little we ought to jest with futurity! I closed my letter to you in high spirits, with some flippant remarks on your taste for the romantic and the extraordinary in fictitious narrative. How little I expected to have had such events to record in the course of a few days! And to witness scenes of terror, or to contem

plate them in description, is as different, my dearest Matilda, as to bend over the brink of a precipice holding by the frail tenure of a half-rooted shrub, or to admire the same precipice in the landscape of Salvator. But I will not anticipate my narrative.

"The first part of my story is frightful enough, though it had nothing to interest my feelings. You must know that this country is particularly favourable to the commerce of a set of desperate men from the Isle of Man, which is nearly opposite. These smugglers are numerous, resolute, and formidable, and have at different times become the dread of the neighbourhood, when any one has interfered with their contraband trade. The local magistrates, from timidity or worse motives, are become shy of acting against them, and impunity has rendered them equally daring and desperate. With all this, my father, a stranger in the land, and invested with no official authority, had, one would think,