any thing more serious, since Cain killed Abel. I am determined to try the experiment, whether as little preparation serves your turn in the field of battle as in a lady's chamber. Hope not that you will be suffered to possess without a rival that heaven of bliss, in which you have been indulging but this moment at the castle. By all the martyrdoms we phlebotomizers have ever suffered or inflicted! replied the surgeon, setting up a shout of laughter, this is a most whimsical adventure. As heaven is my judge! appearances are very little to be trusted. At this put off, fancying that he had no keener stomach for cold iron than myself, I got to be ten times more overbearing. Teach your parrot to talk better Spanish, my friend, interrupted I: do you think we do not know a hawk from a hernshaw? Imagine not that a simple denial of the fact will settle the business. I see plainly, replied he, that I shall be obliged to speak out, or some mischief must happen either to you or me. I shall therefore disclose a secret to you; though men in our profession cannot be too much on the reserve. If dame Lorenza sends for me into her apartment under suspicious circumstances, it is only to conceal from the servants the knowledge of her malady. She has an incurable ulcer in her back, which I come every evening to dress. This is the real occasion of those visits which disturb your peace. Henceforward, rest assured that you have her all to yourself. But

if you are not satisfied with this expectation, and are absolutely bent on a fencing-match, you have only to say so: I am not a man to turn my back upon a game at sword-play. With these words in his mouth, he drew his long rapier, which made my heart jump into my throat, and stood upon his guard. It is enough, said I, putting my sword up again into its scabbard, I am not a wild beast, to turn a deaf ear to reason: after what you have told me, there is no cause of enmity between us. Let us shake hands. At this proposal, by which he found out that I was not such a devil of a fellow as he had taken me for, he returned his weapon with a laugh; met my advances to be reconciled, and we parted the best friends in the world.

From that time forward Sephora never came into my thoughts, but with the most disgusting associations. I shunned all the opportunities she gave me of entertaining her in private; and this with so obvious a study, almost bordering on rudeness, that she could not but notice it. Astonished at so sudden a reverse, she was dying to know the cause; and at length, finding the means of pinning me down to a tête-a-tête, Good Mr. Steward, said she, tell me, if so please you, why you avoid the very sight of me? It is true that I made the first advances; but then you fed the consuming fire. Recal to memory, if it is not too great a favour, the private interview we had together. Then you were a maga

zine of combustibles; now you are as frozen as the north sea. What is the meaning of all this? The question was not a little difficult of solution, for a man unaccustomed to the violence of amorous interrogatories. The consequence was, that it puzzled me most confoundedly. I do not precisely recollect the identical lie I told the lady; but I remember perfectly that nothing but the truth could have affronted her more highly. Sephora, though by her mincing air and modest outside one might have taken her for a lamb, was a tigress when the savage was roused in her nature. I did think, said she, darting a glance at me full of malice and hideousness, I did think to have conferred such honour as was never conferred before, on a little scoundrel like you, by betraying sentiments which the first nobility in the country would make it their boast to excite. Fitly indeed am I punished, for having preposterously lowered myself to the level of a dirty, sniveling adventurer.

That was pretty well; but she did not stop there: I should have come off too cheaply on such terms. Her fury taking a long lease of her tongue, that brawling instrument of discord rung a bob-major of invective, each strain more clamorous and confounding than the former. It certainly was my duty to have received it all with cool indifference, and to have considered candidly that in triumphing over female reserve, and then not taking possession of

the conquest, I had committed that sin against the sex, which would have transformed the most feminine of them into a Sephora. But I was too irritable to bear abuse, at which a man of sense in my place would only have laughed; and my patience was at length exhausted. Madam, said I, let us not rake into each other's personal misfortunes. If the first nobility in the country had only looked at your back, they would have forgotten all your other charms, and have boasted but little of the sentiments they had excited you to betray. I had no sooner laid in this home stroke, than the enraged duenna visited me with the hardest box on the ear that ever yet proceeded from the delicate fingers of a woman scorned. Such favours might pall on repetition; so I did not wait for a second, but took shelter in the nimbleness of my legs from the clatter of castigation she was going to shower down on me.

I returned thanks to the protecting powers for having brought me clear off from this unequal encounter, and fancied that I had nothing further to apprehend, since the lady had taken corporal vengeance. It was likely too that she would be wise and hold her tongue, for the honour of her own back and in point of fact, a full fortnight had elapsed, without my hearing a word upon the subject. The very tingling in my own cheek began to abate, when I was told that Sephora was taken ill. With that forgiveness of injuries so natural to me, I

was sincerely afflicted at the news. I really felt for the poor lady. I concluded that, unable to contend with a passion so ill repaid, that hapless victim of her own tenderness was giving up the ghost. It was with exquisite pain that I turned this subject in my thoughts. I was the cruel cause that her heart was breaking; and my pity at least was the duenna's, though love is too wayward to be controuled by advice. But I was miserably mistaken in her nature. Her tenderness had all curdled into acrimonious hatred; and at that very moment was she plotting to be my bane.

One morning while I was with don Alphonso, that amiable young master of mine was absent, moody, and out of spirits. I enquired respectfully what was the matter. I am vexed to the soul, said he, to find Seraphina weak, unjust, ungrateful. You are not a little surprised at this, added he, remarking the expression of astonishment with which I heard him; yet nothing is more strictly and lamentably true. I know not what reason you have given dame Lorenza to be at variance with you; but true it is, you are become so unbearably hateful to her, that if you do not get out of this castle as soon as possible, her death, she says, must be the sure consequence. You cannot but suppose that Seraphina, who knows your value, used all her influence at first against a prejudice, to which she could not administer without injustice and ingratitude. But though the best