nought but the twilight sky behind his dusky form, when, uttering a faint and wailing cry, he bounded from where he stood, and plunged into a dark glen, where the pine and larch growing thickly hid him from my sight in a moment. I know not, nor can I tell, nor do I distinctly remember, the desperate and defying feeling in which I plunged after him. I sprung from crag to crag on my descent with a speed and safety that seemed to myself supernatural: the thick dark wood in the hollow opened its bosom to receive me — as I entered it, my brain cooled, and my senses settled; and I saw, as distinctly as I now see this group, in the wide opening glade, the same band of heretics, barbe, torch-bearer, and all, in a kind of ghastly mockery of devotion-they looked, but not with the same visages; they prayed, but not with the same voices; and they turned on me, but-oh! they were the same, and not the same. Maddened at the sight, as I am now by the bare recital, I rushed among them - I thought I did but all rose to meet me, the

barbe with his book, the mother with her child,

the father with his young daughter, the crone with her grandchild, the stripling with his boy-brother, and the aged with their gray shaking locks and all were as the dead. I heard the clattering bones- I saw the eyeless sockets, the bare and grinning jaws. I would sooner have rushed on a thousand spears. I raised mine hunting-spear, but their cold eyes seemed to have blunted its point and withered the hand that held it. They gathered round

they closed in on me - St. Mary! I hear them now!" he cried, clasping his hands on his rough forehead, and bending forward for a moment, as if a viewless choir were still pealing in his ears.

"I know not how it fared with me my fellows found me stretched on the sward, in a swoon, they said," he added in a more subdued voice, but without raising his head, "and I survived it. - But," he cried, suddenly lifting up head and figure at once, and bursting into a wild laugh, "was it not-might it not be all a dream, a vision?- how sayest thou, lord abbot ?"

"That it was a mere device of the foul fiend," quoth the abbot: "regard it no more than I do this empty cup; fill it, knave!"

your

"But, my Lord of Courtenaye," said De Monfort, whose brief fit of superstitious remorse was over, you who have urged us to those dark tales could yourself tell a darker still. What was that mysterious fate that befell my lord, brother? Men have spoken strangely of it. Nay, never look on the tapestry, man, as if its waving chided you, or on the portraits as if they would start from their frames. Tell us truly how perished the Lord of Courtenaye. Fellow, fill your lord's goblet! he looks deadly pale."

"Fill my lord's goblet, knave, dost thou hear?" said the abbot, from association: "in vino veritas,"

"For a vile marksman, thou hast for once hit the white," said the bishop of Toulouse, internally." My Lord of Courtenaye, we wait for your tale ;" and his eye and voice assumed a peculiar expression, that made the

Lord of Courtenaye quit his untasted goblet, and, though dreadfully pale, enter abruptly on the subject he was thus forced to.

My brother," he said, or rather whispered, "was a bold and approved warrior, and a true Catholic; but he had ever a spirit and will to pry into those things that are hidden from

"I trust that spirit has not descended to his family," said the bishop somewhat sternly, and yet hesitatingly, as if he felt the remark might be retorted.

My brother's death," said the Lord of Courtenaye, shuddering, "has been loudly mouthed, and darkly whispered, as the talkers were more or less confident or ignorant - but I know the truth!"

"As if truth ever came out of that mouth!" muttered the bishop: "let us have it then, we pray you."

My departed brother was fond of those dark studies I have hinted at," said the Lord of Courtenaye, commencing his solemn tale.

"From which of his family did he learn that taste?" said the abbot of Normoutier in his insouciance.

No one heeded him, and the Lord of Courtenaye proceeded -"Every year, it was his wont, (I mean in the latter troubled and unhappy years of his life,) on the eve of St. Michael-but I tell my tale ill, noble hearers. I should have first related that there was in the neighbourhood of our castle of Beaurevoir a lake that lay among the mountains a dark, still, gloomy sheet of water, that the traveller started when he beheld in such a spot, where he looked only for a yawning gorge amid the stony hills: it was said that in its waters no fish lived, and no fowl dipped its wing-that it bore on its dark surface only the reflection of the rocks that impended over it, and of the twilight sky, which their precipices darkened even at noon into somewhat like the shadows of evening. No peasant built his hut near the spot; the wanderer who had lost his way struck into