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"O my children!" she exclaimed in a hysterical cry ; "O my children, your father, your father!"-The poor little things tottered towards them, and one held a hand, and another was hanging at the skirts of his doublet.

Suddenly a fiery glare of light filled the chamber, and Elizabeth, turning in her bewilderment to the window, beheld there a beautiful woman's face, glowing with scorn, and rage, and every evil passion, yet beautiful in spite of all, surpassingly, superhumanly beautiful,-an angel-fiend, holding high over her head a blazing pine-torch, and waving her other hand in the impatience of phrenzy." God shield us all!" breathed scarcely audible from Elizabeth's lips; and at that moment the visage, and the light with it, disappeared." Here, here, here, here!" groaned Walter ;—he thrust a heavy purse into her bosom, printed one fierce kiss more upon her cheek, and tore himself with the violence of a wild beast from her embrace.

All was darkness for a moment ;-then Elizabeth, screaming aloud, rushed after the vanished form. Strength more than woman's, more than man's, seemed to be given to her.

She ran for some instants at this maniac pace, but wildly, and without seeing anything, or knowing anything of the course she was taking.

She came to a high palisade, and began to climb ;she had just got one knee on the summit of it, and perceived that it was the barrier of the wood which surrounded the village. At that moment a furious sound of horses' hoofs was heard. She clung on the top of the fence with the vigour of despair, and gazed abroad. Swift and dark two gigantic steeds

rushed almost close to her amidst the crashing underwood;—a single flaming torch threw a lurid glare as they passed." My God, my God!" once more burst from the miserable woman's lips. An old, withered, one-eyed hag turned upon her one glance of hideous triumph; the hell-hound bounded high and bellowed loud; and Walter, the victim, groaned audibly as they plunged into the viewless blackness of wood and night.*

* The foregoing Tale is founded on a popular legend, which has been treated of by several German authors,-in particular by L. Tieck, in his Runenberg.

MILES ATHERTON.

THERE are many beautiful little dwellings of industrious men scattered through the suburbs of Manchester; and none who have viewed with consideration their honey-suckled walls and the flowery gardens in which they stand, just out of the reach of the smoke and stir of the town, will doubt the good feeling and intelligence of the working classes. Manufactures have by no means that deteriorating influence on the character which some moralists would draw in such frightful colours. Industry at the loom may not be so poetical as industry at the plough, but surely it is not less intellectual. In manufacturing districts, where multitudes are gathered together, the vice that exists will force itself painfully on observation, while retired virtue often escapes notice; and in the din issuing at evening from the licensed haunts of the profligate, the passer-by is apt to forget the stillness of many a neighbouring fireside, where the Operative is sitting happy with his wife and children, reading, perhaps aloud, for their instruction and his own, or eking out, should wages be low, the week's means by an occasional by-hour of skill and ingenuity.

In one of those dwellings, for which, if beautiful be too strong an epithet, let us substitute neat and

comfortable, Miles Atherton had lived for ten years, and in his own little world of labour had enjoyed an equable contentment,-the only human felícity. His wife was from Scotland, the daughter of a shepherd,-brought, when just woman-grown, from her native pastoral braes into the midst of a new life. But, in the watchfulness of affection, she soon became familiarized with objects and occupations very different from every thing about her father's house, and in a few years the murmur of the sylvan Jed visited her ear only in some Sabbath-dream. The working-days were exclusively filled with delights and duties, joys and griefs, born and dying, within the room where her husband and her children slept. Her parents had both died since she left Scotland; and though Mary Atherton and a few distant relations still mutually lived in each other's memory, yet in time and separation the living are almost like the dead, and, as they sometimes rise from oblivion, are but pleasant phantoms. But seldom as Mary Atherton perhaps now thought of Scotland, her simple and heartfelt voice spoke of her birth beyond the border, and now and then a wanderer from the "North Countrie," directed by neighbours to her house, repaid her charities by telling her that he had been in her native parish,—had seen the spire of the kirk, and the plaided shepherds on the hill.

The evil of poverty is not in the suffering with which it wrings the heart, but in the poison which it too often mingles with the affections. Bread steeped in tears it is difficult to eat in thankfulness; and there is no blessing in the prayer in which there is no present hope. When earth stops its bounty, we despair of help from Heaven; and the piety which worship

ped God by the warm hearth, faints over the dead embers. The change on our whole moral nature may be slow, but it is sure;-each successive day is darkened and disturbed to the sullen or angry heart ;— beloved objects lose their charm ;-and things formerly abhorrent to our nature possess a spell over us which, loathsome though it be, we cannot break, and under whose infatuation we hurry on to guilt, despair, and death. For three months Miles Atherton was poor-miserably poor, and in other three, just as winter came, with all its severities, he was also profligate―miserably profligate. His pretty children -a boy and a girl-were taken from school ;-their mother's face had undergone a change like that of many years sickness ;—and their house, so long the pride of the suburban village, looked as if it were uninhabited.

Mary Atherton, before the neighbours, endeavoured to look cheerful, and an honest pride sometimes supported her when better feelings had worked themselves out; but that strength was of avail only in the open daylight. When the door was shut, she often sat for hours without moving, in a sort of blind resignation; for the little work she could get, or was able to do, could procure so small a portion of the very necessaries of life, that she took it up only in hurried snatches, and would lay it down again in despair, when her eyes met those of her pining and sickly children. Misery had made her husband hard-hearted-almost brutal; so that often at midnight she trembled to unlatch the door for him, and dared not, till he slept, approach his bosom. Yet the poor creature loved him as well-better than ever; and kisses

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