soul to the view. From some rocks near her, a sheet of water falling down spread freshness and coolness through the air, and by its murmurs soothed the senses after the toilsome march through the arid volcanic region just passed.

Here all was loveliness and peace, but on the opposite side, frowning over the vale there rose an abrupt hill; flanked and battlemented by rocks, it looked like a Cyclopean castle, a fit abode for giants. In the lower part, from fissures in the stone, hung enormous wreaths of luxuriant vegetation; and, lower still, there extended what seemed an impenetrable jungle for many miles around.

On this mountain of rock, half-a-mile in perpendicular height, this fortress of nature's framing, a fortress which man had made looked like a petty diadem of turrets-such an ornament as Cybele might easily have borne. So it appeared from the distance at

which Harriet beheld it, just in front, and gilded as it then was by the rays of the declining sun. In gloomier silence the troop, always regardless of the beautiful vale below them, wound along the face of the hills, and soon, in another point of view, the fortress presented itself to her in a very different aspect.

The rock on which it stood was divided by a great chasm, and she now saw that it was a double fortress, for each summit bore its own citadel. There shot through the chasm, and between the two sombre towers, a crimson gleam, the last of day-light, which threw a sinister colouring on the frightful jungle beneath. At that moment, startled by the thought that through this jungle she was to pass, that to those towers she was about to be carried, Harriet awoke from her self-oblivion to feel, after the excitement of the last few hours, more hopeless and less courageous than she had yet felt. And

where was now the good faqueer to say,

Courage patience! !

And who said, Courage! patience! to the young Rajah, wounded in body and sick in soul, for whom all the hopes of life were no more? To him who had come hither,

As the struck deer, in some sequestered spot,
Lies down to die, the arrow in his heart!

At midnight Harriet and the Rajah stood before the gate of the larger of the fortressess, and looked up to such a heaven of stars as should have calmed their anxious, saddened hearts-perhaps, it did so. The way to their different apartments was pointed out to them, but, just before she went she heard him utter what seemed to her only one word. asked her servant what it was-he replied, "It is the name of this stronghold-The Rock of Death."

She

VOL. II.

M

CHAPTER XIII.

"Soldiers! Keep your ball three days! Fire seldom, but fire sure! Push hard with the bayonet! The ball will lose its way, the bayonet never. The ball is a fool -the bayonet a hero! Stab once!-Stab the second! Stab the third!-A hero will stab half a dozen!-The guns are yours-The people are yours-Down with them upon the spot! Pursue them! Stab them! To the remainder give quarter-it is a sin to kill without reason. The soldier is not a robber, booty is a holy thing!-if you take a camp, it is all yours!-If you take a fortress, it is all yours!"

Discourse under the trigger, by

FIELD MARSHAL, THE PRINCE SUWAROFF.

AND where was the faqueer who had tried to comfort Harriet? He was in the camp with Colonel Aveley.

This faqueer, be it known, was a Mussulman who had long been Colonel Aveley's friend, Asaph Hussein Khan, and who was on a private mission of his own. He had heard from the Colonel that there were reports respecting his brother, a nawaub, tending to compromise him in the affairs of the young rajah. There had grown up between his brother and himself a coolness which had estranged them from each other, so that he adopted the disguise of the pious mendicant as the best means of approaching him and ascertaining the truth. It was not that he might take advantage of his errors to win favour with the British that he sought this-his wish was rather to set his brother right, that he might be more secure in his semblance of sovereignty. The stratagem was so far successful, that being looked on as a stranger and a safe messenger, he was employed to bear letters from the nawaub to the rajah.