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of his person, and her heart danced with rapture-Mrs. Thompson had no such ring, with all her boasting of all her finery.

"I have come to see my child before I die," said the old man, gazing on his son with earnest eyes; "you broke the ties of nature between us on your part, when, ten years ago, you refused your father a few shillings from your abundance, but

He was interrupted by Mrs. Lawson, who uttered many voluble protestations of her deep grief at her having, even though for the sake of economy, refused the money her dear father had solicited before he left them. She vowed that she had neither ate, nor slept, nor even dressed herself for weeks after his departure; and that, sleeping or waking, she was perpetually wishing she had given him the money, even though she had known that he was going to throw it into the fire, or lose it in any way. Her poor, dear father-oh, she wept so after she heard that he had left the country. To be sure Henry could tell how, for two or three nights, her pillow was soaked with

tears.

A cold, bitter smile again flitted across the old man's lips; he made no response to her words, but in the one look which his hollow eyes cast on her, he seemed to read the falsehood of her assertions.

"I was going to add," he said, "that though you forgot you were my son, and refused to act as my son, when you withheld the paltry sum for which I begged, yet I could not refrain from coming once more to look on my child's face to look on the face of my departed wife in your's-for I know that a very brief period must finish my life now. I should not have come here, I feel I know it is the weakness of my nature-Ishould have died amongst strangers, for the strangers of other countries, the people of a different hue, and a different language, I have found kind and pitiful, compared with those of my own house.

"Oh, don't say so-don't say soyou are our own beloved father; ah, my heart clings to every feature of your poor, dear, old face; there are the eyes and all that I used to talk to Henry so much about. Don't talk of strangers-I shall nurse you and attend to you night and day.”

She made a movement, as if she

would throw her arms around his neck again, but the old man drew back.

Woman! your hypocritical words show me that your pitiless heart is still unchanged that it has grown even worse. You forced me out to the world in my old age, when I should have had no thoughts except of God and the world to come; you forced me to think of money-making, when my hair was grey and my blood cold with years. Yes, I had to draw my thoughts from the future existence, and to waste them on the miserable toils of traflic, in order to make money; for it was better to do this than to drag out my life a pensioner on your bounty, receiving shillings and pence which you gave me as if it had been your heart's blood, though I only asked my own. Woman! the black slavery of my dependence on you was frightful; but now I can look you thanklessly in the face, for I have the means of living without you. I spent sick and sleepless days and nights, but I gained an independence; the merciful God blessed the efforts of the old man, who strove to gain his livelihood-yes, I am independent of you both. I came to see my son before I die-that is all I want."

Mrs. Lawson attempted a further justification of herself, but the words died on her lips. The stern looks of the old man silenced her.

After remaining for a short time, he rose to take his departure; but, at the earnest solicitations of his son, he consented to remain for a few days, only on condition that he should pay for his board and lodging. To this Mrs. Lawson made a feint of resistance, but agreed in the end, as the terms offered by the old man were very advantageous.

"I shall soon have a lodging for which no mortal is called on to paythe great mother-earth," said the old man, "and I am glad, glad to escape from this money-governed world. Do not smile so blandly on me, both of you, and attend me with such false tenderness. There, take it away," he said, as Mrs. Lawson was placing her most comfortable footstool under his feet; "there was no attendance, no care, not a civil action or kind look for me when I was poor John Lawson, the silly, most silly old man, who had given up all to his son and his son's wife, for the love of them, and ex

pected, like a fool as he was, to live with them on terms of perfect equality, and to have the family purse open to him for any trifling sums he wished to take. Go, go for God's sake; try and look bitterly on me now, as you did when you forced me out of your house. I detest your obsequious attentions-I was as worthy of them ten years ago, before I dragged down my old age to the debasing efforts of money-making. You know I am rich; you would worship my money in me now. Not a smiling look, not a soft word you bestow on me, but is for my riches, not for me. Ay, you think you have my wealth in your grasp already; you know I cannot live long. Thank God that my life is almost ended, and I hope my death will be a benefit to you, in softening your hard hearts.”

Mrs. Lawson drew some hope from his last words, and she turned away her head to hide the joy which shone on her face.

In a few days the old man became seriously ill, and was altogether confined to his room. As death evidently approached, his mind became serene and calm, and he received the attentions which Mrs. Lawson and his son lavished on him with a silent composure, which led them to hope that he had completely forgotten their previous conduct to him.

The night on which he died, he turned to his son, and said a few words, a very few words, regarding worldly matters. He exhorted Henry to live in a somewhat less expensive style, and to cultivate a spirit of contentment without riches; then he blessed God that he was entering on a world in which he would hear no more of money, or earthly possession.

He re

mained in a calm sleep during the greater part of the night, they thought, but in the morning they found him

dead.

The funeral was over, and the time was come in which the old man's will was to be opened. Mrs. Lawson had waited for that moment-she would have forcibly dragged time onwards to that moment she had execrated the long hours of night since the old man's death-she had still more anathematised the slowly passing days, when gazing furtively through a corner of the blinded window, she saw fine equipages and finely-dressed ladies passing, and she planned how she would shine

when the old man's wealth would be her own. She drew glorious mental pictures of how she would burst from behind the shadowing cloud of poverty, and dazzle all her acquaintances. Her dress, her carriage, her style of living would be unique in her rank of life for taste and costliness. She would show them she had got money-money at last more money than them all.

Now at last she sat and saw the will being opened; she felt that it was a mere formality, for the old man had no one but them to whom he could leave his money; she never once doubted but all would be theirs; she had reasoned, and fancied herself into the firm conviction. Her only fear was, that the amount might not be so large as she calculated on.

She saw the pacquet opened. Her eyes dilated, her lips became parched; her heart and brain burned with a fierce eagerness-money, money!—at last uttered the griping spirit within her.

The will, after beginning in the usual formal style, was as follows:

"I bequeath to my son Henry's wife, Augusta Lawson, a high and noble gift" (Mrs. Lawson almost sprung from her seat with eagerness), "the greatest of all legacies, I bequeath to Augusta Lawson-Charity! Augusta Lawson refused me a few shillings which I wished to bestow on a starving woman; but now I leave her joint executrix, with my son Henry, in the distribution of all my money and all my effects, without any reservation, in charity, to be applied to such charitable purposes as in this, my last will and testament, I have directed."

Then followed a statement of his ef fects and money, down to the most minute particular; the money amounted to a very considerable sum; his personal effects he directed to be sold, with the exception of his very valuable diamond ring, which he bequeathed to the orphan daughter of the poor relation in whose house he had taken refuge, and remained for a short time, previous to his going abroad. All the proceeds of his other effects, together with the whole amount of his money, he bequeathed for different charitable purposes, and gave minute directions as to the manner in which various sums were to be expended. The largest amount he directed to be distributed in yearly donations amongst the most indigent old

men and women within a circuit of ten miles of his native place. Those who were residing with their sons, and their sons' wives, were to receive by far the largest relief. He appointed as trustees two of the most respectable merchants of the town, to whom he gave authority to see the provisions of his will carried out, in case his son and Mrs. Lawson should decline the duties of executorship which he had bequeathed to them; the trustees were to exercise a surveil lance over Mr. and Mrs. Lawson, to see that the will should in every particular be strictly carried into effect. The will was dated, and duly signed in the town in South America where

the old man had for some years resided; a codicil, containing the bequest of the ring, with some further particulars regarding the charities, had been added a few days previous to the old man's death.

Mrs. Lawson was carried fainting from the room before the reading of the will was concluded. She was seized with violent fever, and her life was despaired of. She recovered, however, and from the verge of the eternal existence on which she had been, she returned to life with a less worldly and ostentatious nature, and a soul more alive to the impulses of kindness and charity.

A FLIGHT OF LADY-BIRDS.

Is the disappointing year of 1848that year parturient, as it seemed, and only seemed, of revolutions in Ireland, and at a time when it was most prolific of menace and convulsion, we had the fortune to be present when a singular advice was given to an agitated individual, and (contrary to the usual fate of such non-expensive generosities) was accepted and acted on. The

party to whom this counsel was given had suffered much mental disquiet, under a persuasion that the Repeal threatenings meant more mischief than the transitory disorder they excited. Day after day he read of mustering clubs, daring conspiracies, and monster meetings; speeches like streams of burning lava rent their way through his affrighted memory in deluges of fire; literal and bodily forms of pistol, and pike, and dagger, assumed a spectral influence over his tortured imagination; and, incapable of conceiving that the swelling ambitions and the desperate resolutions of Conciliation Hall and the Councils, could possibly die tamely out, as they did, in Ballingarry, he lived in a fever of fear; his dream by night, his thought by day, that impending convulsion of blood and crime, in which, whoever were the victors, the country would become worse than

a howling wilderness. Such was his condition, intellectual and moral, when, looking with bleared and bloodshot eyes into the face of a friend, he told his melancholy tale, and supplicated counsel.

The chamber in which this carnest request was made, rises around us as we write. It was a library, quaintly but highly ornamented in the elabrate decorations of the olden time. Richly carved cases contained treasures of higher price than anything of mere material structure. But there were manifest proofs that that vast treasury of disciplined thought was suffered to rest untouched on shelves, where it was carefully put "out of the way;" and that the slow-ripened wisdom of the days gone by had become superseded by the prolific out-pourings of ready literature, and politics, and partisan, as well as personal, excitement, which commend the daily press to its readers. This was manifestly the form in which written thought assimilated most promptly to the mental constitution of our perturbed friend. Folios and octavos reposed undisturbed in their monumental receptacles; chairs and tables, carpet and lounger, were overspread, confusedly and thickly, with piles of newspapers, read

or in process of perusal. On this department of the patient's studious pursuit, the counsel he solicited took an effect of extermination. "Cast them out-cast them all out," said his friend; "put yourself under a course of the ancients; and, whatever you do, ab. jure newspapers for a year, or until this tyranny be overpast."

It is unnecessary, and would be wearisome, to continue the history of this consultation through all its fluctuating details. Sufficient it is to say, that a compromise was entered into between adviser and advised. Ancients, and moderns worthy to be their associates in the severer exercises of genius, were suffered to sleep in their place of rest. Newspapers were placed under a temporary interdict, and a new flight of literary visitants descended on the library-table. Our disquieted friend changed the character with the cause or subject of his alarms. Fictitious perplexities and distresses awakened a new kind of interest. Anxiety and alarm, in changing their object, changed their nature. If, when the harpies were chased away from the feasts they persecuted and polluted, the sylvan shades they had infested became populous with singing birds, and the Trojan bands, as they resumed their places at the table, were saluted by the richest harmony the forest boughs could offer the change would not be greater than was that in the life of our friend, when the threatenings of the daily press were denied admission to his study, and a light literature, in which politics had no part, came on to supersede them.

Regarded in this somewhat utilitarian aspect, light literature is, as it were, a salubrious retreat for the great mass of intellectual valetudinarians. The few can appease their mental disquiet, and escape from harrowing care, by exploring the paths of science or learning the wisdom of "divine philosophy;" the many, who cannot "hold their pace on deep experiments," must seek a readier relief their change of air must be to a lighter style of literary occupation.

If readers may thus be influenced for good by the creations of thought, into which they withdraw from dis quietudes of condition or circum

stances, the contrivers of this imaginary existence incur, it is manifest, a serious responsibility, that there be no unwholesome agencies in those retreats where they offer refreshment to the weary, and health to "the mind diseased." We have known the horror of thick darkness with which a vitiated nervous system has oppressed a sad spirit, dispersed by a chapter of Lever or Dickens; and we have known when a page of imaginary terrors has fearfully prevailed over a mind feebly struggling with ideal calamities, and confirmed its affliction into a state of melancholy madness. "Books, the. medicine of the soul," as they have been styled, "must be," it has been well observed, "adapted, as any other medicine, to the disease they are to cure."

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And, assuredly, if in the abundance of counsellors there is always safety, light literature, in this our day of mental enterprise, has one strong claim to be respected. It is omnigenous and abundant. Not only have we seen the rising of two or three lights of most commanding influence, but the "minora sidera amidst which they shine begem our firmament in vast profusion, and in various instances beam upon us with a very salubrious efficacy. We have now before us a starry host; but why should we hold ourselves trammelled in the meshes of those embarrassing metaphors, and call our octavos and duodecimos by the name of stars. We have on the table before us an assortment of pictures, some well, some little, known; some which trace their being to authors of name-some which are to make a name for their authors; among whom, by the way, the prayer of Ossian's hero is the ordinary language of their ambitions, that they may be known in their posterity, and be, as was Morni the father of Gaul, known as authors of the works in which their intellectual being is reproduced.

We will open our stores :

And first to our hand come "The Ogilvies ;"* a novel in three volumes, the composition, as rumour has it, of a lady, and a young lady. It is a slight story, with little in its plot out of the ordinary track, but having scenes and situations of much interest, and indi

"The Ogilvies:" Chapman and Hall. 1819.

cative of far more than ordinary power. The subject of the story is that which we regard as en regle" The course of true love never did run smooth." A walking gentleman, while suing for the love of one fair creature, wins the affections of another. Rejected by the object of his love, as usual, he leaves the country; and, at his return, finds the slighted girl grown into majestic womanhood, a wife and a beauty. We regret to read of moral delinquencies in fiction, and wish lady-writers especially would eschew them. But what are our wishes in the judgment of a novelist? The hero of the tale, who had unthinkingly awakened an interest in the heart of the half child, half girl, with whom he entertained himself while wooing her obdurate cousin, avows a passion under the circumstances in which he ought to have thwarted and concealed it; and, instead of flying, as he flew when his prayer was rejected, he remains within the circle of his new, but too tardy affection, long enough to tell his sinful story. An accident of a deplorable character comes to the rescue of the compromised and perilled wife and "friend." The husband, as if in compliance with the half-formed wishes of his unhappy partner, meets a sudden and violent death. A marriage follows between what may well be called the guilty parties; and as they return from the ceremony by which they were united-even in an hour after the consecrated words are spoken-the inauspicious marriage is dissolved

"Who comes from the bridal chamber?-Azrael, the angel of death."

We cite the passage in which this catastrophe, unprecedented in mance, is recorded. We cite at a disadvantage, because the reader will peruse it without any feeling of suspense; and yet we shall be much disappointed if it do not convey an idea of power and genius, which demands only careful culture to become eminent :

"Katharine finished the letter all but the signature. A few hours more, and she would write as her own that long-beloved name. The thought came upon her with a flood of bewildering joy. She leaned her forehead on the paper in one long, still pause; and then sprang up, pressing her clasped hands in turns to her heaving breast and throbbing temples, in a delirium of rapture that was almost pain.

VOL. XXXVI.-NO. CCXI.

"It is true--it is all true!' she criedjoy has come at last. This day I shall be his wife this day, nay, this hour; and he will be mine-mine only-mine for ever!'

"As she stood, her once drooping form was sublimated into almost superhuman beauty -the beauty which had dawned with the dawning love. It was the same face, radiant with the same shining, which had kindled into passionate hope the young girl who once gazed into the mirror at Summerwood. But ten times more glorious was the loveli. ness born of the hope fulfilled.

"The hope fulfilled! Could it be so, when, excited by this frenzied joy, there darted through her heart that warning pang? She sank on the bed, struck with a cold numbAbove the morning sounds withoutthe bees humming among the roses, the swallows twittering in the eaves--Katharine heard and felt the death-pulse, which warned her that her hours were numbered.

ness.

"To die, so young still, so full of life and love to sink from Lynedon's arms to the cold dark grave-to pass from this glad spring sunshine into darkness, and silence, and nothingness! it was a horrible doom! And it might come at any moment-soonsoon-perhaps even before the bridal!

"It shall not come!' shrieked the voice of Katharine's despair, though her palsied lips scarcely gave vent to the sound.

"I will live to be his wife, if only for one week, one day, one hour! Love has conquered life-it shall conquer death! I will not die !'

"She held her breath; she strove to press down the pulsations that stirred her very garments; she moved her feeble, ice-bound limbs, and stood upright.

"I must be calm, very calm. What is this poor weak body to my strong soul? I will fight with death-I will drive it from me. Love is my life, nought else: while that lasts I cannot die!'

"But still the loud beating choked her very breath, as she moaned, 'Paul, Paul, come! Save me, clasp me; let your spirit pass into mine and give me life-life!'

"And while she yet called upon his name, Katharine heard from below the voice of her bridegroom. He came bounding over the little gate, and entered the rose-porch, wearing a bridegroom's most radiant mien. She saw him; she heard him asking for her; a scarce perceptible anxiety trembled through his cheerful tone. Could she cast over his happiness the cold horror which froze her own? could she tell him that his bride was doomed? No; she would smile, she would bring him joy, even to the last.

"Tell him I am coming,' she said, in a calm, cheerful voice, to the nurse who repeated Lynedon's anxious summons. And then Katharine bathed her temples, smoothed her hair, and went to meet her bridegroom."

In this strain the story proceeds

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