whizzing sound rushed past me. Then my hand felt as a schoolboy's feels when his writing-master tries to guide it along a line of round text, and the fingers moved, but with some impulse which I could not recognise as coming from myself, and the next moment I heard a cry, "He is dead!" And I remember nothing more until I found myself in a railway carriage, and Patmore's voice said, "Here is your ticket straight through to Paris. Don't take it to heart; you only did what you were obliged to do."

When the first shock of what had happened had gone by, I must confess that I soon recovered my equanimity. A fortnight's enjoyment of the pleasures of Paris made me almost regard it with complacency. But, nevertheless, at the end of that time, I read with tears of deep gratitude to Providence a letter from Patmore, in which he told me that Kepp had not been mortally wounded, and that there was good reason to hope that he would recover. "I refrained from writing to you before, old fellow, lest it might lead to unpleasant consequences. But I shall write every week now. The whole thing has been kept wonderfully quiet as yet, Kepp being popularly supposed to have dislocated his shoulder."

Week after week I received letters of similar import, and at length, after an interval of about two months, Patmore's letter concluded thus: "I think you may come back directly, my dearest Beck, in perfect safety. Of course there is a vague rumour all over the town about the matter, but nothing is known for certain, and as Kepp (who sends his kindest love to you, and swears he will go down on his knees to you and beg your pardon when you return) is almost quite well, you have very little to fear. You will find the old place just the same as when you left it; indeed, there has been no change that I know of, except that two or three families have arrived, and that an English girl, whom scarcely any one knew, a Miss Leslie, has died of fever. The Anglo-American Club met last Saturday evening, and I was in the chair," &c.

This mention of my return to Heidelberg in such close conjunction with the Leslie family made my heart beat fast indeed. The news of the death of poor Miss Mary caused me a passing pang; but then I had long expected it, and I had been so completely absorbed by my admiration for her sister, that I really knew very little of her, frequently as I had been in her company.

By the next train after the arrival of Patmore's letter I was on my way to Heidelberg. Within eighteen hours I was once more in my old rooms in the Kettengasse. My first visit was paid to Kepp-he was out; my next-need I say it ?-was to Lilienfeld. As I passed under the Carl-thor, and entered the shadow of the walnut-trees (now, alas! cut down to make room for the new railroad), I felt that the course of my whole future life depended upon the events of the hour. My heart beat quick with impatience, but I walked more slowly and more slowly as I drew nearer my destination. My head bent languidly in vague thought my eyes were fixed upon the ground.

"Mr. Beck!"

My name was uttered by a voice which I well knew, but which was, ah! so much sadder than when I had earlier known it. I looked up and saw Mrs. Leslie and her daughter sitting on a bench in a little nook amidst the rocks, just beyond their garden wall. They were in the

deepest mourning, and wore heavy crape veils. Mrs. Leslie lifted up hers as she spoke to me, and gazed at me with a look of kindness and of sorrow which almost made my heart break. She tried to speak to me on indifferent subjects; to ask me where I had been, to tell me her own plans; but her words were too often interrupted by sobs. I tried to speak in my turn; to speak of the death of her daughter Mary; to ask if she died in pain; but my voice failed me, and I was silent.

At length Mrs. Leslie turned to her daughter, and said, "Will you not speak to him, my dear?"

Then-then!

Oh! days and months and years that have passed since then, give me patience as I think of it. Soothe, for Heaven's sake, soothe this beating agony of heart and brain, as I remember what I saw when the girl drew

back her veil.

It was Mary who sat there!

For a moment I thought that it was really Miss Leslie-Emily-but that grief had altered her-that my tears had blinded me—that I had lost my senses! Then, after that moment, I saw that I was not mistaken, that it was really Mary on whom I gazed, and I shrieked aloud, as I clasped my hands in agony, " Who was it who died, then ?"

For weeks I tossed restlessly in the delirious life of a world which none can know but those whom brain fever has led near to the confines of death. Afterwards, on the shores of the lake of Geneva, holding my hand in his, Patmore told me how it had all happened. How Emily, my Emilyeven now my Emily though dead-had suddenly sickened from fever; how the exhaustion resulting from her constant attendance on her sister had so weakened her constitution as to render her an easy prey to such an attack; and how she had died calmly on the fifth day, murmuring my

name.

A PROPOSAL IN THE FIRE.

THE Monte Pincio is the Kensington Gardens of Rome; thither the English girl can resort for air, exercise, even admiration, with a security from insult, which, if we are rightly informed, no Roman lady could reckon on in the same circumstances. It seems to be an understood thing that English ladies carry with them into these distant lands the free habits of their free country, and that the continentals have learned to understand the fact that young Englishwomen do walk abroad for their own healthful enjoyment, without having in view either an assignation or an intrigue; hence it is that two young English ladies, or more (I would not advise one to make the experiment), may take their afternoon walk in this public promenade, protected by what a poet of our own calls the "wild sweet-briary fence" of their national habits of purity and independence.

My niece, Ellen was a very pretty and attractive girl, natural and unaffected, not courting admiration in any unfeminine manner, though I should vaunt her for more than feminine if I said she disliked it. She walked the Pincian a good deal while at Rome, and during her stay more than one Roman lady, meeting her on public occasions, addressed her, as having noticed her on the "Collis Hortulorum,' "and asked, with civilities, the pleasure of her acquaintance. Whether any of the Roman gentlemen desired the same pleasure we did not remain long enough to know, and I will do Ellen the justice to say, I do not believe she greatly cared to know. She walked the Pincian with her cousins for her own pleasure and health-sake, to meet her English acquaintance, and, as I am quite sure, with no object beyond.

"A very strange thing happened to-day," said Ellen at dinner, after one of these promenades. "A man came up to me with a profusion of bows, and said, in very good English, Miss, may I speak with you?' He knew my name quite well."

"Very strange!" I said. "What kind of looking person was he?" "I can't well describe him," replied Ellen. "He did not look like a beggar, and yet he certainly was not a gentleman. His clothes were whole and clean, and he spoke English very well, but I don't think he is English."

"Oh," observed her mother, "he is some begging adventurer, who has found out our name from a commissario. Rome is full of such people. You should not have spoken to him in a public place, my What did you say to him, Ellen ?”

dear.

"Oh, mamma, I said nothing to him," replied Ellen, "except that I could not speak to him there-that if he wanted anything he must apply to you at our lodgings-and we walked on as quickly as possible."

Then followed some "promiscuous" conversation upon the importunity and devices of Roman beggars, the numbers who "get their wealth" by begging in Rome, and the air with which the true Roman beggar takes your donation, as if he were conferring an honour by accepting it; all which we, in our blind Protestant bigotry, charged as a direct and necessary result of the Romish tenets and principles as to the meritoriousness of almsgiving. And so the matter ended.

The young people of this generation being of more indolent habits than we of the past, I was at the breakfast-table next morning before any of our young folks had made their appearance, when my sister, Ellen's mamma, greeted me with a mixture of fun and vexation in her countenance, the latter feeling evidently preponderating, and fast chasing the former away. She held an open paper in her hand, and "Here's a nice affair!" she said.

"What is the matter?" I asked.

"A pretty thing that a lady can't walk out without being tormented by such fellows! And now, I suppose, she must stay within doors while we are in Rome, and lose her health for want of exercise."

"But you have not yet told me what's the matter."

"A proposal for Ellen."

"Upon my word," I answered, "if you are to lock a pretty girl like Ellen up because somebody admires her, her case will be a hard one, and May-VOL. CXXII. NO. CCCCLXXXV.

H

our English liberty, to do as we like on the Continent, sadly abridged. A proposal, as I take it, is rather a compliment than otherwise."

"A proposal!" she said, vexation now thoroughly dominant in her face, as she flung the paper in her hand across the table. "A proposal, indeed! Why, it is from that impudent fellow who spoke to her on the Pincian yesterday, and whom she took for a beggar !"

It would not be in humanity to have resisted a hearty laugh as I took the love-letter, and remembered, in poor Ellen's description of the person who had addressed her, her evident unconsciousness of the conquest she had made. I checked my merriment, however, when I saw the tears filling her mother's eyes, as she said, "It may be very funny to you, but it is no laughing matter to us, though; I dare say we shall be the laughing-stock of Rome, if we are to be subject to this persecution."

I hastened to assure her, that though it was impossible to withstand the absurdity of the whole affair, she might rely on my taking measures to put an end to the annoyance as soon as I understood what it really meant; and I then proceeded to read the love-letter with all due sense of the seriousness of the matter to the mother's feelings; I would not have smiled again for worlds.

Love-letters are of many kinds, and of various degrees of heroism, fervency, bad grammar, and bad spelling. "The Polite Letter-writer" has many exemplars for the use of admirers at a loss, of which, in their sedate admiration, measured raptures, and well-pointed periods, if a "lover at a loss" should ever avail himself, any girl of the slightest observation and taste, in short, any girl not ready at the "wind of the word" to say, "You must ask mamma," would immediately pronounce her verdict, "This man is not in earnest; his sufferings are-a humbug; his love—a sham!" Again, we sometimes see letters produced in English "breach of promise" cases, the bare reading of which, before a laughing public, must (be the verdict what it may) reckon as equivalent to one hundred pounds damages for each epistle, when the enamoured defendant "longs to clasp his hangel in his harms," and "vows that but to 'ear her hangelic voice is his 'ighest idear of Paradise." When continentals commit their raptures and devotion to some "charmante Englishche meese" to paper, they generally soar pretty high for tropes and figures, but for the "sublime of the ridiculous," for the all-unutterable absurdity of diction and sentiment, which

can

Make sadness laugh, and laughter end in sighs,

commend me to the mercurial, melancholy, half-educated, three-parts crazed, and wholly-enamoured Irishman!

Roderick O'Kane, as I now recollect, was the name subscribed to this surprising love-letter of Ellen's adorer; of the address under written I am certain, for I registered it well in my memory, for purposes of use, "Via Frattino, numero-, piano sexto;" of the paper-a leaf abstracted from some old folio; of the seal-coarse wax, made fast by an impressive thumb; of the style-vapid and vulgar, with words interspersed, glowing far-fetched and tri-syllabled, some of which, as the writer's inimitable countryman, Sir Lucius O'Trigger, has said, "might sue out their Habeas Corpus in any court in Christendom;" of these I will not speak more precisely. The reader must imagine for himself the worst style of the

Irish hedge-schoolmaster inflated by the enthusiasm of a poor love-struck Cymon, and make up the production for himself.

One sentence, however, "miching malicho," as Hamlet has it, I must give in its entirety. After declaring how often his heart had "laid itself down dead at her feet" (a purely Irish figure of speech) " as she walked the Pincian ;" after confessing how long he had "hovered round her, as a guardian angel round a sylph!" he proceeded thus:

"My heart tells me, angelic one, that they are going to tear you from me; the time is come when I must speak, or be dumbfoundered for ever. Now's the day, and now's the hour,' as the patriot poet says, when I must do or die.”

I rather disliked this " do or die" part of the business; not that I had the slightest fear of any bloody termination to such an avowal, for I believe it is a universally acknowledged truth that a man or woman bent on dying never announces it beforehand, but I did much fear some annoying or ridiculous exhibition on the part of a moonstruck, love-smitten swain, who could be so far gone in absurdity as not to perceive the nonsense of the part he was enacting in thus making violent love to a young lady to whom he could not be said to have ever addressed two sentences in his life, and I felt quite as anxious as her mother to put an extinguisher on this absurd affair, without any further éclat; so I begged her to leave me the letter, and let me try what I could do with this inamorato after breakfast.

"I am delighted to hear you say so; take it, and let me never hear any more of the odious subject," said my sister. "I was afraid I should have to put it into the hands of that hot-headed boy her brother Harry." "Oh no,” said I, "that would never do. I think I am a better match for this red-hot Irish lover than Harry could be, for I hope to settle it all without reference to the code of honour or the logic of the horsewhip, and without furnishing a treat to the gossips of Rome."

Breakfast despatched, I set out for the address given, being but a few streets distant from our own. Roman lodgings answer pretty nearly to Voltaire's idea of the English beer and natives: the bottom dregs, the top froth, and the middle excellent. The ground floor is generally cellarage; the second story, as further removed from the "fumum strepitumque Rome, is preferable to the first floor; the third story still habitable, and "good air;" but all above that goes off into the veriest froth and scum of the shifty, nasty Roman population. As I mounted and mounted yet, in search of Mr. O'Kane's piano sexto, I felt myself engaged in probing and proving the gradations of Roman filth and abomination, foul smells, foul sights, and all those unutterable marks which tell of "the Roman at home," on which the casual visitor never looks, and is seldom conscious that 'mid the chief relics of "imperial Rome" such things exist and ferment.

Arrived at the piano sexto at last, I found it to be what in Mr. O'Kane's vernacular would at home be called "the parlour that's next to the sky." A long corridor ran from front to rear of the large house, doors dotted it all along its length, and from the Babel of sounds proceeding from all, it was evident that behind every door lodged a separate family or establishment.

I tapped par hasard at the first; it was opened by a lavandaja, dis