his own pimpled proboscis, which he had shorn off almost to the face. The extempore grapery vanished as speedily as it had appeared, and the balance of the company discovered that if they followed the example of the head of Licktheladle Priory, they would have experienced a similar catastrophe to that which had overtaken the hapless ecclesiastic.

[It is fitting here to state that the preceding narrations are still currently recited, and obtain no small credit in the north of Scotland. Query -have the enlightened disciples of mesmerism and spiritual wrappings any right to discredit the truth of legends, which are not one jot more difficult to swallow than the marvellous manifestations every day occurring? Surely the old withered infidel Robert Owen, would not have the assurance to sneer at the serpent of the Forth, or the grapes of Boddam, when he would have us to believe that he periodically holds gossiping converse with the spirits of Tom Paine, and troops of kindred vagabonds ?-ED. A. A. M.]

Having completed his curriculum at Salamanca, Kentigern Keith returned to Scotland, and commenced house-keeping in his paternal castle. His tendencies inclining neither towards the court or the camp, he passed most of his time at Boddam, and in the pursuit of those studies for which he had obtained an appetite and a craving beyond the seas. In particular, with many a dreaming scholar of that era, the Baron sedulously applied himself to the investigation of the secrets of alchymy; and toilsome days and sleepless nights were spent by him in endeavouring to expiscate the process by which lead and such like ignoble metals might be transmuted into aristocratic gold.

Now it so chanced that in the near vicinity of Boddam Castle there dwelt a cross-grained and miserably old knight, answering to the designation of Sir Humphry Montealto-the same name as I may mention in passing, which has degenerated in these degenerate days, into the singularly perverted appellation of Mowat. Sir Humphry's whole soul was devoted to the service of Mammon, and as the homely adage hath it, he would have skinned the most ignoble flea for the profit which its hide would yield him.

confessed the surpassing attractions of the gracious lady, and his passion was reciprocated by the debonair damsel. At St. Ninian's well, a cherished resort of lovers at that time in those parts, they met by moonlight, and pledged their troth either to other, and in token of the compact broke a piece of gold in twain, each hanging a moiety of the same in close proximity to the heart.

Our hero in due form waited upon the fair one's sire, and craved the privilege of becoming his son-in-law, but his suit did not meet with special favour. Sir Humphry certiorated him in the most peremptory manner that the fish which he longed for could only be caught by a golden hook. No one, he swore by the bones of St. Andrew, would ever lead Margery to the altar who could not, prior to that proceeding, pay down ten thousand Jacobus's by way of marriage portion.

This intimation fell like a chill cloud, upon the bright and genial hopes of poor Kentigern. After making an inventory and valuation of his means and estate, he could not see his way to the realization of half the amount of the requisite dower.

With bootless earnestness did he try to obtain more reasonable terms. In vain did he represent that where hearts were united a few pieces more or less of gold could be of little importance. The inexorable Sir Humphry listened with all the stolidity of a deaf man at a concert of music, and asked, with a sardonic grin puckering his ungainly visage, whether the baron had not been able to discover anything in his cabalistic researches.

What rendered matters a thousand times more gloomy was a piece of intelligence which the knight volunteered to give to the desponding Keith. It was to the effect that he had received proposals for Margy's hand, from a gentleman, who very nearly could command the sum fixed for the price thereof. The balance, it was expected, would be made good, in the course of a twelvemonth, in which event the nuptials would inevitably proceed, even although the Pope himself should take it upon him to forbid the banns. Montealto would not condescend to dis close the name of the personage in question This titled churl boasted of a treasure more either to his daughter or her lover, declaring precious than all his stores of pelf, viz:—a fair that girls had no occasion to know anything and most winning daughter. Margery Montealto touching their husbands till their fingers had was indeed a peerless maiden, and many a song been decked with the mystic symbol of matrimony. was composed in laudation of her charms, and By way of concession, however, to the tears and numberless hearts pined for a smile from her entreaties of his sore tried daughter, the mercecoral lips. nary father declared that should Kentigern be Amongst others, the young Baron of Boddam able on or before the ensuing Christmas to pro

duce the requisite amount he should have the with a warmer glow ;-and he cherished an unpreference over the unknown suitor.

Finding it in vain to hope for better terms, Keith set about churning his brains, in order to devise some ways and means by which his fortune could be doubled. After turning every other scheme inside-out, and heads over heels, he was constrained to come to the conclusion that upon the PHILOSOPHER'S STONE, alone, could he anchor his hopes; and accordingly the operations of the laboratory were prosecuted with greater diligence than ever. The furnace at Boddam Castle was never suffered to become cold, but crackled and burned Sundays as well as Saturdays; and frequently the peasant returning home after dark muttered a fear-extorted Pater or Ave as he beheld flames of a strange and unorthodox complexion ascending from the suspicious lum of the Baron's mysterious study!

Though Kentigern was possessed of the best and most philosophical treatises on the subject which absorbed his time and attention-and though he studied these with a zeal and perseverance not to be surpassed, he made but slender progress towards the attainment of the GRAND SECRET. In vain did he procure the choicest qualities of the drugs and simples prescribed as requisite by the most famous adepts. In vain did he compound and mix the ingredients with a care as great as if his existence depended upon the rectitude of the measures and scales which he employed. In vain did he scorch himself into the hue of parchment in hanging over seething crucibles, and hanging alembics. He might as well have been occupied in spinning ropes out of sand! The value of much gold did he consume in his experiments, but not one particle of the longed for metal ever blessed his sight, amidst the residua which his pots and pans presented.

Of course there could be only one upshot to such a state of matters. Instead of his patrimony becoming more plethorical, the poor Baron found it dwindling away, like a tailor in a galloping consumption. His thousands degenerated to hundreds, and his hundreds evaporated to tens, till at length one fine morning, when he wished to despatch his servitor to Aberdeen for a fresh supply of quick-silver, he made the crushing discovery that the treasury of Boddam Castle could not furnish a plurality of groats!

What was to be done in this dismal predicament? There was but one device to which he could have resource, and that was to borrow a supply of lucre upon the security of his fair domains. His repeated disappointments, so far from extinguishing his hopes, had only served to make them burn

faltering expectation that he was just on the eve of accomplishing the undertaking which thousands upon thousands had vainly striven to compass.

Accordingly Kentigern without hesitation or scruple set about to procure a loan, convinced that in a few months he would be in a condition to repay it, with any amount of interest which usury could demand.

The person to whom he made application for the desiderated accomodation, was a neighboring medico, denominated Doctor Fergus Foxglove. This worthy in addition to regulating the bowels of the community, likewise professed to attend to the requirements of their exchequers, and in more senses than one prescribed for diseases in the chest!

So far as externals were concerned Doctor Foxglove boasted few of the attributes of Adonis. Short in stature and rotund in belly, he suggested the idea of an animated ton supported by a brace of crooked spigots. When we add that one of his visual organs had fallen a victim to the small pox-that the survivor, perchance out of sorrow for the bereavement, had abandoned itself to the dissipation of squinting—and that his feet presented the unpicturesque phenomenon usually described as club-it will readily be conceded hat Fergus would have furnished a fitter model for Apollyon than Apollo !

The soul of this learned pharmacologist did not present many features at variance with his physical characteristics. Lust, avarice, hypocrisy, and malice claimed a common share of his inner man, and alternately manifested themselves in his every day walk and conversation. When he had an object to gain, the Doctor's tongue was soft and sweet, as the voice of a scheming mermaid;—but when his end was reached, he became inexorable and vindictive as the aforesaid aquatic myth, when plunging to her ocean den with the victim her strains had seduced to ruin!

To this person the necessitous Baron had recourse, because in the first place the Doctor chanced to be his kinsman, and secondly because from the slender intercourse which he had held with society, he knew of no other dealer in money to whom he might apply.

When Foxglove heard the request of the youth stated, a strange expression lighted up his solitary and sinister optic. It denoted intense satisfaction and the hope of some future triumph—and with a chuckling grin he at once acceded to the proposition, advancing a larger sum upon the security of the Boddam estate than Kentigern had per mitted himself to anticipate or hope for.

Thus re-possessed of the sinews of war, our hero resumed his mystical labours with redoubled vim, but alas! with as slender success as ever The broad pieces obtained from the usurious leech melted, like snow, under the action of the furnace, without producing one grain of the longed for metallic fruit. Only two hundred pounds remained of the sum for which he had mortgaged the broad acres of his forefathers, and when these were expended he would be a pennyless pauper without house or home.

heard the sound produced by a hard ridden steed, in the intervals of the wild hurly burly. Listening attentively he discovered that his ears had not played him false, and ere many seconds had elapsed a strong but not unmusical voice was uplifted in front of the main entrance craving shelter from the storm. Amidst all his troubles the Baron had not forgotten the duties of hospitality, and hastily ordering a fire to be kindled in the great hall, he directed the seneschal to admit the postulant.

It will be kept in mind that the fate of the lovers was to be fixed and determined on Christmas day. Christmas eve cast its shadows over the frost- had to intermit his narration for a season.] bound, and snow-mantled earth.

[Here Dr. Pittendrum was seized with a severe fit of coughing, provoked, as I much fear, by the fumes of my tobacco pipe, and in consequence

Dreary and dismal was the night. The blustering east wind rushed with inexorable bitterness through the forest, and up-hill and down-dale, like a bum-bailiff in search of a debtor who had escaped from his custody.

Solitary and shivering the Baron of Boddam sat in his comfortless laboratory. Having abandoned his experiments in sullen despair, the fire he had suffered to die away, and the flickering light afforded by an iron lamp which bung suspended from the arched ceiling only sufficed to make darkness visible. Sick and sore at heart was the hapless alchymist, and bitter exceedingly were the musings which fevered his brain. The world appeared to his apprehension, a dark and howling wilderness, presenting not a single green spot on which the dove of hope might rest her worn-out foot. Little sorrow was caused by the reflection that the ancient domains of his ancestors, were inevitably doomed to pass from his possession, but the thought that to-morrow's sun would witness Margery another's bride, wrung his soul to madness, and constrained him to curse the hour of his nativity.

Whilst he was thus chewing the cud of bitter fancy, the storm increased in violence a hundred fold. Showers of sleet rattled against the vibrating walls of the castle. Though most unwonted in the winter season, thunder uttered its hoarse summons from the frowning heavens, and angry flashes of lightning fitfully revealed the convulsions with which the tortured clouds were torn. A tall ash tree which sprung from the court yard, waved its sear arms before the grated window of Kentigern's apartment, as if bidding the self-disinherited one farewell; and the deep voice of the ocean pealed forth a valedictory dirge which was chorused by the rocks surrounding

the towers of Boddam.

All of a sudden Kentigern thought that he

A NIGHT AT NIAGARA.

BY WILLIAM THOMAS HALEY.

at length,

At length, at length, the storm-tried pilgrim stands,
Thou grand Niagara, on thy foamy brink!
young Manhood now,
The dream of his
Is realized to his sad and hoary age!
God the Creator! If upon thy vast,
And beautiful, and grand, though wrong-fraught Earth,
(Wrong-fraught, alas! through Man's perverseness
solely)!

God the Creator! if upon thine Earth
The full effulgence of thy Deity

Flashes upon the aching sight, and thrills,
Stirs, startles, well nigh maddens the quick soul,
God the Creator! here thy power is seen and felt!
Foaming and thundering, down the torrent cometh,
Bend to the breeze, and owe a brighter hue,
In majesty resistless; the dark Pines
To the still upward springing spray; and when
The lightning-eye-flash of the Deity!
Gleams fitfully on the deeply flowing river,
There seems a mine of pure and molten gold,
Into a stream of molten silver falling.
God the Creator! here thy proudest creature
Must learn humility, must feel how poor,
How paltry, his achievements to THY works,
Father, and Lord, and Architect of all!

Niagara! thou eternal wonder! when,

Chasing his game or tracking his fleet foe,
The swart, red Indian first beheld thy rush,
Did he not kneel to thee, and deem he knelt
To the great Spirit of all-his worshipp'd Manitou?
And he, the better taught, yet erring, Christian,
Who, fleeing from vile tyranny, that made
The native hearth and the ancestral grave
Hateful, first wandered hither, thou dread torrent!
Did he not more than ever marvel how,
Man, the poor worm, can dare to trample down

His brother worm and fellow weakling, Man?
Thou gloriously majestic scene! How poor,
How powerless the Poet's art to tell
The Poet's thought, the Poet's thrilling thought,
Father of Mercies! holy ones are singing
Niagara! As he gazes here on thee!
Their love and laud to thee in many a hymn;
To "our Father" children dear are paying

Thus raved the hapless wretch that long night successful. through.

ROMANCE AND REALITY.

Powerless, alas! for good that wealth proved now
Which all too oft for evil is so potent;

And strong men wept like infants as they saw
Their generous strife in vain, that poor doomed wretch
to save!

The chill of the long night, the day's fierce heat,
The famine, and the torturing thought of both,
Have done their dreadful work; the stalwart frame
Shudders; the drooping head and filmy eye,
And the less certain grasp of the large hand,
Tell that not long the sufferer can endure
The myriad tortures of his awful state.

Hark! hark! Glad cheers rise from the crowded shore !
Another and a stauncher Life-boat comes,
And once again Hope makes that sad heart bound!
The Life-boat nears him, strikes his narrow raft;
He rises, wildly throws his arms t'wards Heaven,
And, uttering one wild cry, is swept from sight,
Along the foaming waves, and down the horrid steep!
God the Creator! How inscrutable

To thy vain creature, Man, are thy dark ways!
How marvellous thy rule upon thine Earth!
To man's weak, finite gaze, it seems that he,
Poor Avery, long suffering, doomed at last,
'Midst suffering thus prolonged, should envy those
Who, with but one brief moment's agony,
And scarcely conscious of their awful doom,
Were spared his long and awful agonies,

And Hope so oft aroused, to prove but vain at last!
Yeal in our finite and misjudging pity
We well nigh murmur-" hard his fate to theirs!"
But pause! oh, pause! presumptuous man, nor dare
To doubt th' Eternal's Wisdom or His Mercy!
Not all who suffer most are blessed least;
And it may be that Earthly sufferance,
Tremendous and prolonged, is oft' the means,
The blessed means, of urging to repentance
Our else, obdurate souls, and saving us
From pangs Eternal, for Eternal bliss.

For, not in act alone consists man's guilt;

In thought, perchance, we oft' times sin more grossly
More mortally, than when our overt acts
Draw down the censure of our fellow sinners;
And oft, perchance, the seeming sinlessness
Of those whose tortures seem most undeserved,

BY WILLIAM THOMAS HALEY,

EVERY author, and, still more painfully, every publisher, is but too firmly convinced that, at the least as far as the sale of verse is concerned, we have "fallen upon evil days"; it would not be difficult to compile a goodly octavo, closely printed of more or less eloquent denunciations and lamentations of the terribly prosaic character of "the age we live in." As regards form, I very cheerfully give my adhesion to the general opinion, prose, no doubt, is at a premium and verse at fearful discount, and yet, if we but take the trouble to look a little below the surface, if, turning our attention from mere form to substance, we look closely into modern Literature, alike in the old world and in the new, we shall find, in what the few write and the many read as REALITY, a very astounding amount of ROMANCE, as bold as any that ever was perpetrated by Ferdinand Mendez Puito, or the renowned Baron Munchausen. Truly astonnding, in truth, it is to observe how, not merely small coteries, but whole nations, gravely affirm or right passionately propagate and maintain, as Realities, divers and sundry political, literary, and moral nonentities. In the course of above half a century of life, it has often perplexed and still more often annoyed me, to observe the vast powers of self-deception which are, every now and then, manifested by nations otherwise so admirable; and in nothing have I ever witnessed more complete triumph of this self-deluding power than in what that strange compound of eloquence and jargon, truth and error, high moral aspiration and mystic pantheism, Thomas Carlyle, would

Hides hideous thoughts, from which, were they not term Hero worship. Let a people once set up a

hidden,

The worst in act would shrink as from the contact
Of venomed serpent, or blood-hungry tiger.
Pause, then, presumptuous Man! "Tis well to aid
Our brother in his need, and well to grieve
The woes and agonies ourselves are spared;
Yet 'tis our wisdom, and our duty, too,
While aiding or while grieving, still to say,
WISDOM IS THINE, OH, LORD! AND BE THY WISE
WILL DONE!

It is a peculiar felicity to be praised by a person who is himself eminently a subject of praise. Woman's silence, althongh it is less frequent, signifies much more than man's.

Every one is at least in one thing, against his will, original;-in his manner of sneezing.

Hero to their taste, and there are absolutely no bounds to the absurdities which, gravely, earnestly, and in seeming good faith, they will perpetrate in his laudation. I have Italicized the word seeming, because I shall bye and bye have to point out certain discrepancies between national word and national deed, which, after all, cause me some painful doubt as to the entire sincerity of that loud laudation in which nations are every now and then wont to indulge, as to the qualities of their Hero of the hour.

I am old enough to remember the popularity, in France, in England, and in America, of a host of Heroes, Naval, Military, Political, and Literary; and I declare upon my conscience that I am unable to mention more than one or two, who, after a strict examination of their achieve

There is much novelty that is without hope, much antiquity without sacredness. Romance is the truth of imagination and boy-ments, seem to me to deserve even a tithe of the

hood.

praise that has been bestowed upon them. Let