A SOLITARY red lane or road running through the verdant woodland of pleasant Warwickshire. On the right hand are green banks, humped with huge and grassy knolls, from which spring spreading elm or large umbrageous oak, the growth of centuries. On the left the ground is more flat, guarded by a long, low stone wall, festooned with hanging ivy, and breached-in upon with oft-recurring gaps, the bombardments of old Time, beyond which the landscape trends away into far verdant vistas, where deer wander and water glistens. The road is winding, and now begins to fall towards a valley, which, seen from the higher ground, presents the appearance of one wide ocean of waving forest foliage. And this is Earlsdale, an English Vallombrosa, with a village embosomed in trees; on the left, a tapering church-steeple shoots above the wood; and, lower down, the grey antique of a massive hold or bawn is visible, standing up venerably amongst the foliage, rugged, stern, and time-broken, like the figure of Archibald Bell-the-Cat, illustrated in stone and timber: and this is the Old House of Darkbrothers. Half-way up the hill, on the opposite side of the valley, basks and glares in the sun a spacious mansion, built of white stone, glistening with windows relieved by green blinds, and manifestly the resi dence of some person of good fortune: and this is Brockholes Hall. The inseparable feature of English woodland. scenery the genius loci, Stillness-is here in perfection; and as you wander along the lane on the checquered and mottled brick-red earth, which the dancing leaves overhead, and the sun breaking through them, alternately paint like a natural encaustic pavement, you fall into dreaminess, produced by the spirit of repose around you, till the quietness of the scene is broken by a most incongruous procession, which passes along the road before your musing view. First, a large, yellow, swinging, shining, family-coach, varnished, booted, imperialed, and dickied before and behind; with heavy blue hammercloth, on both sides of which are the shields, crests, and sup

porters of the noble owner, wrought in solid brass, the same emblazoned in exuberant heraldry on the panels. Two footmen occupy the front seat; in the rumble behind are contained her ladyship's maid and my lord's courier, a Swiss by birth, with a face bronzed to brass, physically and morally, with sun and with sauciness. Within the coach is the Earl of Pompadour-a ruddy, square-faced man, with a white hat full of his large head, and a large head full of nothing; beside him nods his lady, a sleepy mass of silk and velvet, gold chains and gauze-hardbreathing obesity, kid-leather, and self-complacency. The two young ladies occupy each an opposite corner of the carriage, and look from their silken recesses like incarnations of starch-prim, motionless, and overdressed, they might be mistaken for a purchase the peer was taking home from Madame Tussaud's gallery. The handsomest animals appertaining to the equipage were the four thoroughbreds, which, ridden by two boy-postilions, swept the carriage rapidly and almost noiselessly to Brockholes, the large house on the hillside before mentioned.

And silence once more begins to assume her reign in the sylvan Ïane, when the dull and intermittent rumble of a cart, and the tramp of a horse, become audible, and presently a rude and motley cavalcade are seen approaching through the trees. This was an itinerating gipsy camp, consisting of a large covered wagon, drawn by an old horse and donkey yoked by rope-harness together the rounded roof, covered with tarnished tin plates, and ornamented with pendant kettles, and other loose ironmongery, dangling from nails; dark faces, with matted, sooty hair and bright eyes, peeping from the door of the vehicle; while behind the cart followed a few swarthy Zingaree men, with tinker implements slung at their back, or dangling from their hand. Right on the lordly trail of the peer's equipage rumbled and jolted the caird's cart; and scarcely had the unmusical demonstrations of its presence faded off, when again the tramp of cavalry

resounded up the lane, and a lady, mounted on a stately black horse, and unattended either by companion or servant, came in sight. She was much past the meridian of life-was tall, spare, and stern-looking. She sat her horse firmly and well, and with a certain air of ease and command which well suited her handsome aquiline features, upright carriage, and glancing proud grey eye; the animal she rode was aged, but high-bred and well kept. Pride and sorrow seemed to strive for mastery in the rider's countenance, and inflexibility was written in the close lip, and ploughed-in amongst the furrows which age and care had traced around the mouth. And this lonely lady was Miss Jane Beaufoy, sister to the late Vicar of Earlsdale, and occupier of the ancient house of Darkbrothers, to which domicile her steed was now conveying her at an easy canter. And as she disappeared among the trees, and again the sylvan road had resumed its air of stillness, it was fated once more to be broken by a new but gentle intruder.

This was the vision of a very young lady, who, sitting in a light phæton, guided two fiery little ponies of the New Forest breed, which she managed with equal adroitness and grace. She was a lovely creature, with a charming expression of natural goodness, freshness, and truth in her appearance. She was not tall; was lightly formed; had very dark blue eyes, fringed with long lashes; her black hair simply braided back across her white open brow; the mouth pure, resolved, and finely cut; the complexion clear; a countenance altogether of great sweetness, "indicative," as Lavater would say, of modesty, intelligence and energy in action. And in the tiny rumble behind her, alternately sat or stood two lively little lads, her brothers. And this young lady was Grace O'Donel, daughter of the present Vicar of Earlsdale, the Rev. Henry O'Donel, to whom Ireland had given birth, England education, Scotland a fair but delicate wife (who had now been dead some years), and the Earl of Pompadour the living of Earlsdale, on the death of the late incumbent, Mr. Beaufoy. She was returning from some charitable visit to a cottager's wife, and was driving briskly in the direction of the village, when an adventure befel her in the wood. The

rapid trot of the ponies had brought her on the trail of the gipsy cart, which slowly lumbered along, occupying the centre of the road, which at that part was too narrow to suffer two carriages to pass abreast, except with difficulty. As the men looked sulky, Miss O'Donel was content to walk her team behind their wagon for some time; till at last the ponies, taking umbrage at the tintinnabulatory concert kept up by the kettles and pans aforesaid, began to fidget, and finally to plunge in the harness. The young lady then despatched the eldest of her brothers to beg for room to pass, but the youthful ambassador was received with sullen contempt by the men; and a tall and raw-boned gipsy wife, who had descended from the cart, now turned on Miss O'Donel a face as fiery brown as a withered beech-leaf, and said, in a harsh, high voice, "The gentles who made this road made it as much for the cart as for the carriage. It is their fault, not ours, that the young lady is detained. Our horse is too tired to be pulling to one side. We got the crown of the causeway first, and we will keep it;" and she laughed in a short and angry way. She to whom this rough speech was addressed suffered a momentary paleness, for she was alone in a wood with these rude people; but in a moment the bright colour came back to her cheek, as she appeared to have formed her resolution. The road just here suddenly ascended to meet a very lofty old bridge, which spanned the river running through the valley. At the right hand, curving off the road, a bridlepath, used for watering cattle, ran down steep and narrow to the water's edge; and a corresponding path climbed the opposite hill, and joined the main road again beyond the bridge. Exhorting the children to sit fast, the young lady now turned the ponies, with a sudden sweep, in upon this path, through a large gap, and drove them rapidly down to the water, through which the carriage splashed and jolted, not without danger of being upset; and now one smart application of the whip, and the spirited little animals are straining up the opposite path, and in a moment are safely out on the road, and beyond the bridge, whose key-stone the tardy wagon and its sulky drivers had not yet attained to.

"How now! Mousy!-Beauty! Pets,

do be quiet; you are the best of good boys, and performed that beautifully. So!-so! now do be quiet, and cease fidgeting, and get both of you into a nice gentle trot, that we may go quietly home to the Vicarage."

And the Vicarage was a good modern house, spacious, roomy, and well furnished, standing at the end of the village, on a green eminence. The church was lower down in the hollow; while in the very depths of the valley, about two hundred yards off the road, stood, in the midst of a sedgy and solitary meadow, engirdled by a plantation, "The House of Dark Brothers -an ancient monastic building, now dilapidated by time.

Out of the ruins, at some remote period, and connected with the bestpreserved portion of them, a tall, ungraceful house had been created, with immensely thick walls, long slits of windows, and high doors; wide staircases, with huge balustrades, and broad landing-places; the hall door opening on a vestibule of black oak, lofty, and deriving its light from a great window over the entrance.

On

the right hand ran up the old wide staircase, while an arched passage on the left led into the cloisters, which were wonderfully perfect, quadrate, and enclosing a damp, grass-grown court, whose centre exhibited a mutilated figure of stone, called by the country people "The Black Angel," but in reality a statue of Time, minus a nose, leg, and wing, which had been carried off by the ravages of its relentless antitype and namesake, probably in revenge for the original caricature of his own person,

The upper part of the mansion was in keeping. A long gallery bisected the building. Here Miss Beaufoy and her housekeeper occupied a few of the best apartments; many of the others were ricketty and untenable. At the very end of this long corridor, a staircase of about ten steps sunk down, with a thick, green rope for a balustrade, to meet a remote suite of rooms, which were uninhabited and locked up, and the key carefully kept by Miss Beaufoy, who resided here in complete seclusion.

Her history was peculiar. Her bro ther Reginald had been vicar of this parish, and she had lived with him till his death, which had taken place some ten years ago. Descended from a long

line of well-born ancestors, she seemed to have inherited little but their pride, an untameable spirit, and a few family legends, half-fable, half-fact, to console her for the advance of age, and the world's neglect. Rumours there were in the village that the closed rooms, or "the dark wing," as they were called, contained ancestral pictures, and relics of value, especially a silver collar which Cœur de Lion had hung round the neck of the good knight Sir Guy Martenbroke, on the occasion of his having transfixed three Saracen knights successively in a tiltyard at Acre, in acknowledgment of which truly Christian transaction, his name had been changed to Beaufoy.

The late Vicar apparently possessed but little of his ancestor's combativeness; one would have said the organs of acquisitiveness and self-esteem were more in the ascendant with him. He was an extremely gentlemanly man, but somewhat of what Davie Deans would term a graceless minister, more bent on upholding his personal dignity than performing his professional duties. His manner was high, his sermons dry, his ministrations formal; his visits to his flock were, like those of angels, short and "far between;" and in no other ways angelic save in these two qualities. And thus he lived, as such men do, unbeloved; and died unlamented, save by his sister, who, on his decease, came to reside at Darkbrothers, renting it from Lord Pompadour, and keeping up so straitened a show of housekeeping, that those who would not call her very penurious, pronounced her to be extremely poor; her corps domestique consisting of an old housekeeper, and her grandnephew, James Simpson, a boy of fifteen, who was a half-crazed simpleton and house-scrub, and an old groom, named Launcelot, who came each morning to dress and feed the black horse.

The parish was in the gift of Lord Pompadour. He was the lay rector, and received three-fourths of the income-viz., £600 per annum in addition to his own £20,000 a-year, an ecclesiastical drop in the golden ocean of his secularities. The Vicar-alias the working man-had the odd £200 for his pains, or share, out of which he had to pay a curate, answer all demands for parochial subscriptions, and support himself and his family like a gentleman. To the present incum

bent, Mr. O'Donel, this paltry income was of little moment. He was a man of ample property; his mother had been an Englishwoman, a kinswoman of the Pompadours, and my lord was but too happy to offer his living to a man who combined character, independence, and the claim of consanguinity. True, the peer considered Mr. O'Donel as rather puritanical, seeing that he preached without a MS. on the cushion of his pulpit; was perfectly indifferent on the great surplice controversy; and frequented neither ballroom nor race-course. Yet, malgré these objectionable qualities, he was a particularly agreeable man, a good scholar, and a thorough gentleman. True, he was an Irishman; but his family were among the oldest gentry of that country. And so it came to pass, that in a very short time after Mr. O'Donel's induction, the church and schools were crowded, and the new vicar's name was bruited far and wide as an active, faithful minister the poor man's friend-the sick man's comforter-the rich man's coun

sellor the teacher, the guide, the pattern and the pastor of all.

Let us say a word of Brockholes Park-a perfect English residence: the grand elms towering near the house; the green velvety lawn shaven as close as an Oxford quad; the large plate-glass windows; the proud and pillared hall, lofty and long, with double fireplace; sofas and rugs, and thickest Turkey carpet, and great billiard-table, and old pictures of Jacobite warriors on the walls-for the title was a creation of Charles I.; cavaliers who had shouted and charged with Prince Rupert, now passively tolerating the attacks of Time; dead judges in lively scarlet and ermine; and bishops, who had ever been dull in the pulpit, now preaching eloquently from their canvas on the texts, "Memento mori," or "Sic transit gloria." There was an Irish lord-deputy here, famous for his rapacity, meanness, and corruption, and now looking as if he were lamenting that he could not step out of his frame, and commence again his work of spoliation, wrong, and villainy.

The family had just descended from their carriage. Unlike many in high life, who exhibit gentle manners and loveable qualities, these people were thoroughly unamiable and repulsive: the peer cold, heavy, dull-headed,

hard; the countess cold, dressy, common-place, hard; the sons at Eton; the daughters cold, vain, hard, not handsome; in fact hardness was the family feature. They were a petrifaction of prosperity's making. They cared not for books, for music, or for flowers. They seemed to care for nothing, but securing their own enjoyments; otherwise they were pococurantes in principle and practice, and rarely suffered an emotion, if ever they had one, to bubble to the surface of their stagnant placidity. They were, in fact, all surface. They were a dressing family, a driving-out family, a dining-out family. There was much refined carnality in all they did, and thorough, though well-bred, selfishness in all they said. They had nothing interesting to exhibit but their beautiful place; nothing intellectual, but their library; nothing picturesque, but their gallery of paintings. After breakfast my lord read the Times, when it had been duly smoothed out and dried by the butler with a hot iron. The countess studied the St. James's Chronicle, and the whole family sat in the library, surrounded by the uncongenial dead. Silent sat they amidst the eloquence of a thousand authors; ignorant, amidst unconsulted knowledge; irreligious, amidst quickening divinity; dull, amidst unread wit; prosaic, amidst unappreciated poetry; and tasteless, amidst the teachings of art; as cold and as correct as the busts on the marble plinths around them, and as soulless and mechanical as the great Louis Quatorze clock which chimed the quarters and clinked the minutes from the mantelpiece.

Between this family and Miss Beaufoy there was little intercourse, and less sympathy. Twice a year their carriage would roll in upon the grassgrown pavé of Darkbrothers, and a visitorial penance was inflicted, felt, and reciprocated between the parties; and in due time this half-yearly allowance of conventional courtesy was paid back by the dignified spinster, mounted on her steed, in her black riding-habit, white hat, and gold spectacles, and looking much the thorough lady; old Launcelot on such occasions walking by her bridle, in a brown and purple livery, and his hat laced with gold cord.

If I may seem to make the family at Brockholes too unamiable, and to

have sketched them with a needlessly hard pencil, I may add, as a redeeming trait, that they were not vicious; but on the contrary, coldly moral, and charitable too, by nicest rule, and in a small way. Between them and the family at the Vicarage there was some intimacy, though but little communion. My lord enjoyed Mr. O'Donel's society; and the ladies rather liked their cousin Grace, she had such pretty natural manners, and rode and drove so well, though many of her ways they considered to be not selon régle, and her visitings among the poor rather Quixotic. However, about a year before the date of this story, a circumstance had taken place at Brockholes, of country-wide repute, which had the effect of drawing together the cords of what would else appear to be an incongruous kind of friendship.

About five miles northward from the park-gates of Brockholes, was the snug, and if truth must be told, the tho roughly rotten borough of Fadlingham, the election of a member for which, to vote in the Parliament of Great Britain, lay entirely in the hands of whatever noble Pompadour wore the coronet with the high pearls and leaves for the time being. Of course, and as nature directs that a due regard for one's own family should always precede any consideration of political honesty, the present patron had nominated one of his name and blood to his borough, and the member thus nominated had the good fortune to represent not only the place and the politics of my lord, but likewise, in a very singular manner, his disagreeable qualities also, being an imperious, dry, and hard-headed man. During some debates on factory questions, he had borne most heavily on the operatives, and his vote and "voice were still for war," in the discussion of a bill which was meant to secure their comforts. He was, therefore, much disliked by the inhabitants of the district which returned him, inasmuch as there were two large manufactories in the neighbourhood, the workmen of which would have been considerable gainers had the aforesaid bill passed into a law. And this odium, which he had earned justly, passed on-proximus ardet Ucalegon to Lord Pompadour and the family at Brockholes.

About this time the largest of these mills was unfortunately burned down in the night of the great storm, which

took place in May, 18- The owner had neglected to renew his insurance, and the misfortune made him a bankrupt and a fugitive; and the next morning's sun arose on two hundred men out of employment, and consequently out of bread. The times were hard, corn scarce, food of all kinds dear, and much national discontent; certain orators, too, philosophers in their own way, Birmingham buttonmakers were they, or wire-wovers from Wolverhampton, perambulated the country, and these democrats, with dirty faces, threadbare coats, and nothing in their pockets, lectured and ranted from village to village, spouting bad English in villainous taste, and de-" nouncing the aristocracy; and the people were in general excited and dis contented. A few days after the burning of the mill at Fadlingham, a large body of the workmen had assembled on the road which led to Earlsdale with them were their wives and children; they were slowly proceeding southward without any special object, idle and hungry, and, therefore, ripe for mischief, when unhappily a brew. er's cart, conveying sundry barrels of foaming barley corn of the best strong Warwick brew, hove in sight; this event was hailed by the thirsty mob as a regular deodand, and they did not scru-" ple to appropriate to their throats and stomachs a cask or two of the enlivening beverage, on the "good old rule,” and poetical as well as practical principle of "take the goods the gods provide you;" doing so to the great terror and indignation of the driver of the dray, and spilling much more of the good liquor than they consumed in the natural way. With this additional stimulus. to mischief this spur in the headthey rushed on, yet still without a fixed destination, when, as chance would bave it, they were overtaken on the road by one of the under-footmen at Brockholes, who, mounted on a powerful young thorough-bred, was returning from the execution of a commission of her ladyship at a neighbouring village. The crowd were at once aware of who he was, and to whom he belonged, and, without being actually violent, they seemed determined to offer every obstruction they possibly could to his passing through their ranks.

"I say, good folks, will you let me pass?" the man would say, civilly.

But the opposition was so manifest,