"Geraldine !"

"Reginald!" returned the soldier, walking from the shade, and approaching the open window. "Doth the King then go to war so soon?" demanded the lady, earnestly.

"To-morrow morning before the sun, love, we shall be gone, perhaps never to return," he an

swered.

"Say not so, Reginald; God will strike for his annointed. This Dutchman will be conquered, and we shall yet have happy days."

"My lady," said the King, as he gave his horse to a follower, "your ladyship's countrymen can run well."

Even so, lady, the spot where he fell became possessed by the continental troops of the Prince of Orange; and, as for leaving the field at the last charge of young Schomberg, gramercy, the King left "Not quite so well as your Majesty," was the the field, and, albeit, against my will, compelled me to follow him."

reply.

The rebuked monarch made no reply, but slowly entered the castle.

"God grant it may be so," said the cavalier; "but these Hollanders are brave, and the sons of the Roundheads of Ulster are stiff-necked as Satan." "Even so, Reginald! leave me some token of thy love, and to battle with a light heart, for I shall ever pray for thee."

The lady left the window, and, descending the spiral stairs, in another moment she was by his side. The conversation of the lovers was a long one, as they walked to and fro in the moonlight; and they separated, vowing eternal constancy.

When morning broke, the castle-yard presented a scene of preparation and bustle, which told of the anticipated approach of some great event. Troops of horses rode momentarily into the square, and aide-de-camps passed incessantly from the quarters of one officer to those of another. At length a number of staff-officers congregated at the entrance of the Royal apartments, and James and Tirconnell immediately appeared. Every head was uncovered, and a fond cheer reverberated amongst the buildings as the King mounted his horse and rode to the head of the troops. In a moment each commander had given to his men the word to march, and, to a joyous air, the Irish army defiled from the Castle gate, and turned their faces towards the Boyne.

Some days had passed since the departure of the army; when, on an evening of fog and rain, the streets of the city seemed as crowded as though the weather had rivalled the skies of Italy. Groups of people every where appeared in solemn conversation, and many an anxious eye and quick foot was directed towards the bridge, over which, in these days, was the principal way to the North. The trampling of flying steeds was heard; and next moment there appeared three cavaliers, urging on their jaded horses to their utmost pace down the present Capel-street. The people made way for the foremost, and, as he crossed the bridge, he ex

in front of the castle. The moon was shining upon the broad court-yard and reflected from the polished arms of the sentry, as he paced momentarily to and fro, on his guard. She was bending across the rails, and thinking of what might have been the chances of the flight, when her attention was attracted to a figure at the further end of the balcony. It was habited in the armor of the period, but the white plume of his helmet seemed wet with blood and gore. The lady stood for a moment petrified with terror, but at length taking courage, she walked forward and exclaimed :

66

'Reginald, say art thou returned safe!"

No reply was made, but the vision gliding from her sight, disappeared altogether from the balcony. Geraldine stood like one in a dream, and scarcely believing that she was awake, she returned to her apartments. Here she called her page and inquired: Hast thou seen none who can give thee tidings of the fight?"

"Wouldst thou do me a kindness for his sake?" "And for thine own, lady," replied O'Brien, bowing low.

"Then disguise thyself as one of the soldiers of this rebel Dutchman, and let us go to-night in search of the body.

"It shall be done," replied O'Brien.

The moon was rising amid a light drapery of floating and variegated clouds, when a lady, mounted upon a dark steed, and attended by a dragoon, passed out of Dublin and took the way to Drogheda. She spurred her horse ever and anon, and kept him going forward at a quick pace. Her face was bent over the saddlebow, and she did not speak to her companion as they rode along side by side. As they gradually descended along the banks of the Boyne, the tokens of a foughten field" became more and more apparent; horses, some ranging the fields riderless, some lying upon the earth groaning in pain, or altogether dead; corpses of men, with helmet and sabre, in uniforms of scarlet, green, or blue; broken cannon-wheels, spent shot, and blood, were dreadful sights for a lady's eye to witness. At length she came upon the encampments of the soldiers of the Prince of Orange, and making a circuit to avoid them (although the lady's attendant wore a uniform similar to theirs, assumed for the occasion), they arrived at the bridge which had been the scene of the most deadly conflict of the previous day, where the accumulated corpses, and broken accoutrements, with the guard ankle-deep in mud, told how fierce had been the fray. Here the dragoon alighted, and, pointing to a pillar which terminated the bridge wall, said—" Here was the spot upon which he stood when last I saw him, and

"There is a Captain O'Brien, my lady," replied the page, "an officer of the Royal army, who is but this moment returned.” "Then go to him, and inquire of Sir Reginald St. here must he be somewhere lying." Aure."

Captain O'Brien, one of the aide-de-camps of the King, receiving from the page the message of the Lady Geraldine, desired the boy to lead the way to her chamber.

"Would to God," he muttered, "that it had fallen to the lot of some other to tell such tidings." A very short time brought them to that part of the building in which the lady's apartments were, and as soon as O'Brien's heavy tread was heard upon

behind us!"

of

The news was received by some, in sadness and silence, and many a muttered "Jesu" told the intensity of their grief; while the lighted eyes others showed that their sympathies were with the Prince of Orange. The second cavalier came on, followed closely by the third, "bloody with spurring, fiery red with speed." His features were haggard and wan, and his dress was soiled and torn. None there recognised him until the exclamation of a quaker, "Friend James, if thou hast lost the battle thou hast won the race," told to the people that it was the hapless King. On he went to the castle,

"What news of Sir Reginald St. Aure," she demanded, bending her eyes searingly upon O'Brien,

as he doffed his helmet."

66

Lady!" he replied, "Reginald St. Aure fell yesterday, at the storming of the bridge across the Boyne, at Oldbridge. He may be slain, or he may be merely wounded."

"Search then, and St. Mary be thy speed," was the lady's answer.

The soldier rolled over many of the bodies of dark haired Irish and whiskered Germans, still "grim in death's cold frown; he at length raised up the body of a cavalier, whose white plume was saturated with blood, and his armor pierced and hewed. It was the lifeless body of Sir Reginald St. Aure. They bore it to a place of sepulture in an angle of a neighboring plantation; and the Lady Geraldine returned to Dublin with an aching heart, which soon

brought her to an early tomb.

COOL RETORT.-Henderson, the actor, was seldom known to be in a passion. When at Oxford he was one day debating with a fellow student, who, not keeping his temper, threw a glass of wine in the actor's face; when Henderson took out his handkerThe lady muttered an inward prayer to the Virgin, chief, wiped his face, and coolly said—“ that, sir, and replied in a firm voicewas a digression; now for the argument"-which "Captain O'Brien, wast thou not the friend of was, as may be supposed, ad boculinum ! Reginald St. Aure?"

HARD TIMES.

BY CHARLES DICKENS.

(Continued.)

"It is merely my respectful compliments," said Mrs. Sparsit, "and I fear I may not trouble her with my society this week; being still a little nervous, and better perhaps by my poor self."

"Oh! If that's all," observed Tom, "it wouldn't

matter much, even if I was to forget it, for Loo's not likely to think of you, unless she sees you."

Having paid for his entertainment with this agreeable compliment, he relapsed into a hang dog silence,

steps of the little station into a stony road, cross it into a green lane, and become hidden in a summergrowth of leaves and branches. One or two late birds sleepily chirping in their nests, and a bat heavily crossing and recrossing her, and the reek of her own tread in the thick dust that felt like velvet, were all Mrs. Sparsit heard or saw until she very softly closed a gate.

She went up to the house, keeping within the shrubbery, and went round it, peeping between the leaves at the lower windows. Most of them were open, as they usually were in such warm weather, She tried the garden with no better effect. She but there were no lights yet, and all was silent.

"Am I to say again, that I must be left to myself here?"

"But we must meet, my dear Louisa. Where shall we meet?"

They both started. The listener started guiltily, too; for she thought there was another listener It was only rain, beginning to among the trees. fall fast, in heavy drops.

"Shall I ride up to the house a few minutes hence, innocently supposing that its master is athome and will be charmed to receive me." "No!"

"Your cruel commands are implicitly to be obeyed; though I am the most unfortunate fellow in the

said,

off.

of long grass and briers of worms, snails, and

women, and to have fallen prostrate at last under

her dark eyes and her hook nose warily in advance

ing, and the most imperious. My dearest Louisa,

Hark!

The smaller birds might have tumbled out of their

dow all day long: looking at the customers coming in and out, watching the postmen, keeping an eye on the general traffic of the street, revolving many things in her mind, but, above all, keeping her atten. tion on her staircase. The evening come, she put on her bonnet and shawl, and went quietly out: hav-nests, fascinated by the glittering of Mrs. Sparsit's ing her reasons for hovering in a furtive way about eyes in the gloom, as she stopped and listened. the station by which a passenger would arrive from Low voices close at hand. His voice, and hers. Yorkshire, and for preferring to peep into it round The appointment was a device to keep the brother pillars and corners, and out of ladies' waiting-room away! There they were yonder, by the felled tree. windows, to appearing in its precincts openly. Bending low among the dewy grass, Mrs. Sparsit advanced closer to them She drew herself up, and

Tom was in attendance, and loitered about until

ambuscade against the savages; so near to them that at a spring, and that no great one, she could

with porters. That done, he strolled away idly, stopping in the street and looking up it and down it, and lifting his hat off aud putting it on again, and yawning, and stretching himself, and exhibiting all the symptoms of mortal weariness to be expected in one who had still to wait until the next train should come in, an hour and forty minutes hence.

"This is a device to keep him out of the way," said Mrs. Sparsit, starting from the dull office window whence she had watched him last. "Hart

house is with his sister now!"

and had not shown himself at the house. He had come on horseback, and must have passed through the neighbouring fields; for his horse was tied to the meadow side of the fence, within a few paces.

"My dearest love," said he, “what could I do? Knowing you were alone, was it possible that I could stay away?"

"You may hang your head, to make yourself the more attractive; I don't know what they see in you when you hold it up," thought Mrs. Sparsit; "but you little think, my dearest love, whose eyes are on you!"

It was the conception of an inspired moment, and she shot off with her utmost swiftness to work him to go away-she commanded him to go away; That she hung her head, was certain. She urged it out. The station for the country house was at the but she neither turned her face to him, nor raised opposite end of the town, the time was short, the it. Yet it was remarkable that she sat as still, as road not easy; but she was so quick in pouncing on a disengaged coach, so quick in darting out of it, producing her money, seizing her ticket, and diving into the train, that she was borne along the arches spanning the land of coalpits, past and present, as if she had been caught up in a cloud and whirled

away.

All the journey, immovable in the air though never left behind; plain to the dark eyes of her mind, as the electric wires which ruled a colossal strip of music-paper out of the evening sky, were plain to the dark eyes of her body; Mrs. Sparsit saw her staircase, with the figure coming down. Very near the bottom now. Upon the brink of the abyss.

ever the amiable woman in ambuscade had seen her sit, at any period in her life. Her hands rested in one another, like the hands of a statue; and even her manner of speaking was not hurried.

'My dear child," said Harthouse; Mrs. Sparsit saw with delight that his arm embraced her; "will you not bear with my society for a little while?" "Not here."

An overcast September evening, just at nightfall, saw beneath its drooping eyelid Mrs. Sparsit glide out of her carriage, pass down the wooden is heart-rending."

Mrs. Sparsit saw him detain her with his encircling arm, and heard him then and there, within her (Mrs. Sparsit's) greedy hearing, tell her how he loved her, and how she was the stake for which he ardently desired to play away all that he had in life. The objects he had lately pursued, turned worthless beside her; such success as was almost in his grasp, he flung away from him like the dirt it was, compared with her. Its pursuit, nevertheless, if it kept him near her, or its renunciation if it took him from her, or flight if she shared it, or secresy if she alike to him, so that she was true to him, the man who had seen how cast away she was, whom she tion and interest of which he had thought himself incapable, whom she had received into her confidence, who was devoted to her and adored her. All this, and more, in his hurry, and in hers, in the whirl of her own gratified malice, in the dread of being discovered, in the rapidly increasing noise of heavy rain among the leaves, and a thunder-storm rolling up-Mrs. Sparsit received into her mind; set off with such an unavoidable halo of confusion and indistinctness, that when at length he climbed the fence and led his horse away, she was not sure where they were to meet, or when, except that they had said it was to be that night.

before her; and while she tracked that one, she But one of them yet remained in the darkness must be right. Oh, my dearest love," thought Mrs. Sparsit, "you little think how well attended

you are."

Mrs. Sparsit saw her out of the wood, and saw her enter the house What to do next? It rained

now, in a sheet of water. Mrs. Sparsit's white stockings were of many colors, green predominating; prickly things were in her shoes; caterpillars slung themselves, in hammocks of their own making, from various parts of her dress; rills ran from her bonnet, and her Roman nose. In such condition Mrs. Sparsit stood hidden in the density of the shrubbery, considering what next?

Lo, Louisa coming out of the house! Hastily cloaked and muffled, and stealing away. She elopes! She falls from the lowermost stair, and is swallowed up in the gulf!

Indifferent to the rain, and moving with a quick determined step, she struck into a side-path parallel with the ride. Mrs. Sparsit followed in the shadow of the trees, at but a short distance; for, it was not easy to keep a figure in view going quickly through the umbrageous darkness.

When she stopped to close the side-gate without noise, Mrs. Sparsit stopped. When she went on, Mrs. Sparsit went on. She went by the way Mrs. Sparsit had come, emerged from the green lane, crossed the stony road, and ascended the wooden steps to the railroad. A train for Coketown would come through presently, Mrs. Sparsit knew; so, she understood Coketown to be her first place of destination.

In Mrs. Sparsit's limp and streaming state, no extensive precautions were necessary to change her usual appearance; but, she stopped under the lee of the station wall, tumbled her shawl into a new shape, and put it on over her bonnet. So disguised, she had no fear of being recognised when she followed up the railroad steps. and paid her money in the small office. Louisa sat waiting in a corner. Mrs. Sparsit sat waiting in another corner. Both listened to the thunder which was loud, and to the rain, as it washed off the roof, and pattered on the parapets of the arches. Two or three lamps were rained and blown out; so both saw the lightning to advantage as it quivered and zigzaged on the iron tracks.

The seizure of the station with a fit of trembling, gradually deepening to a complaint of the heart, announced the train. Fire and steam, and smoke, and

red light; a hiss, a crash, a bell and a shriek; Louisa put into one carriage, Mrs. Sparsit put into another; the little station a desert speck in the thunder

storm.

Though her teeth chattered in her head from wet and cold, Mrs. Sparsit exulted hugely. The figure had plunged down the precipice, and she felt herself, as it were, attending on the body. Could she, who had been so active in the getting up of the funeral triumph, do less than exult? "She will be at Coketown long before him," thought Mrs. Sparsit, though his horse is never so good. Where will she wait for him? And where will they go together? Patience. We shall see."

The tremendous rain occasioned infinite confusion, when the train stopped at its destination. Gutters and pipes had burst, drains had overflowed, and the streets were under water. In the first instant of alighting, Mrs. Sparsit turned her distracted eyes toward the waiting coaches, which were in great request.

"She will get into one," she considered, "and will be away before I can follow in another. At all risks of being run over, I must see the number, and hear the order given to the coachman."

HE national dustmen, after entertaining one an

THE

6. Louisa!"

Father, I want to speak to you." "What is the matter?

And good Heaven," said Mr. Gradgrind, wondering How strange you look! more and more, "have you come here exposed to this storm?"

He had been so wholly unprepared for what he heard now, that it was with difficulty he answered, “ Yes, Louisa.'

"What has risen to my lips now, would have risen to my lips then, if you had given me a moment's help. I don't reproach you, father. What you have never nurtured in me, you have never nurtured in yourself; but O! if you had only done so long ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a much better and much happier creature I should have been this day."

On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand and groaned aloud.

66

Father, if you had known, when we were last

together here, what even I feared while I strove against it-as it has been my task from infancy to strive against every natural prompting that has arisen in my heart; if you had known that there lingered in my breast sensibilities, affections, weaknesses capable of being cherished into strength, defying all the calculations ever made by man, and no more known have given me to the husband whom I am now sure to his arithmetic than his Creator is-would you that I hate ?"

He said, "No. No, my poor child."

"Would you have doomed me, at any time, to the frost and blight that have hardened and spoiled me? Would you have robbed me for no one's enrichment only for the greater desolation of this world—of the immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my refuge from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my school in which I should have learned to be more humble and more trusting with them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them better?"

"O no, no. No, Louisa."

"Yet father, if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my sense of touch, and had been She put her hands to her dress as if she hardly free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces of things,

knew.

"Yes."

to exercise my fancy somewhat, in regard to them; I should have been a million times wiser, happier, Then she uncovered her head, and letting her more loving, more contented, more innocent and cloak and hood fall where they might, stood looking human in all good respects, than I am with the eyes at him: so colorless, so dishevelled, so defiant and I have. Now, hear what I have come to say.” despairing that he was afraid of her. He moved, to support her with his arm. She ris"What is it? I conjure you, Louisa, tell me ing as he did so, they stood close together: she with what is the matter?" a hand upon his shoulder, looking fixedly in his "With a hunger and thirst upon me, father, which Father, you have trained me from my cradle." have never been for a moment appeased; with an Yes, Louisa." ardent impulse towards some region where rules, and "I curse the hour in which I was born to such a figures, and definitions were not quite absolute: I destiny." have grown up, battling every inch of my way." "I never knew you were unhappy, my child."

She dropped into a chair before him, and put her face. cold hand on his arm.

He looked at her in doubt and dread, vacantly, repeating,

"Curse the hour? Curse the hour?"

"How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O father what have you done with the garden that should have bloomed in this great wilderness here?"

Father, I always knew it. In this strife I have almost repulsed and crushed my better angel into a demon. What I have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving, despising, regretting, what I have not learned; and my dismal resource has been to think that life would soon go by, and that nothing in it could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest."

"And you so young, Louisa!" he said with

"And I so young. In this condition, father-for I show you now, without fear or favor, the ordinary deadened state of my mind as I know it-you proposed my husband to me. I took him. I never made a pretence to him or you that I loved him. I