A momentary smile played round Lucy's rosy mouth; love and joy were in every dimple. But a moment's reflection changed the glad expression of her lovely face, although its sweetness was indestructible; she shook her head, and paused for an instant at the wicket, which she was opening." No, Annie! you forget that my father will be there also, setting, as he declared, some trap, not for the game, but for the poachers. And even if he were not in that coppice, we ought not to go there. It is not maidenly, dearest Annie, to go without cause to the place where-" and with a blush, sudden and unconscious, which brought back the smiles and the dimples, a blush which rose to her very temples, she suddenly paused. “The time will come, mine own Annie, when you will understand these feelings. We must not go to the coppice! But we may, perhaps, meet with some primroses on the southern side of the Mount. I should like you to find your favorite flower to-day, Annie; we'll walk over the Mount." Now this Mount, as the country people call it, is the very perfect remains of the old Roman amphitheatre. The level space in the middle a direct and most equal oval, with its open entrances for wild beasts at each end, and the graduated seats for the spectators, rising rank over rank, each distinctly traceable, although overgrown with ivy and trailing plants, and mixed with huge trees, the growth of centuries, in which the rooks have formed a large and noisy colony. This amphitheatre, so perfect and yet so changed, the oval space in the middle being all that is now clear of wood, and that is quite as level as a lawn, had been always one of the sisters' favorite haunts. Passing, therefore, the rock-like walls, crowned with old pollard oaks, and tufted with immense bushes of ivy, maple trees, and hoary thorns, with the dark and mirrorlike pool, which reflects so finely the tall elms upon the margin, the white speckled clouds, and the clear blue sky, they reached the amphitheatre, and found, in a southern nook, among the roots of an old beech, a tuft of primroses, in all the variety of blossom, from the full expanded flower, already fading, to the timest bud; and close beside this fresh, fragrant plant, at the sight of which Annie clapped her hands and laughed, insensible to the dignity which a maiden almost in her teens ought to have displayed-close to the "sothe primrose," she had the delight of finding a half-blown violet, dim as Cytheria's eyes, at which treasure brave Annie fairly jumped and shouted with ecstasy; and then proceeding to gather her wild nosegay, together with other stray blossoms which she found scattered in that sheltered nook, she and Luey proceeded to the widow Benham's cottage, which stood beside the Mount, snugly protected from the chill north-east, and doubled the pleasure which the flowers had already given her, by presenting them to her venerable friend, and emerging them in a small cup of delicate old china-a relic of better days, of which the white ground was almost as transparent as an egg-shell, while the raised flowers might vie in delicacy of coloring and arrangement even with these, the first beauties of the spring.

Mrs. Benham took the freedom of age and affection to speak of William Prescott, and lament the squabble of the Horse Shoes, and especially the threat of vengeance of which she had heard: "And yet he is a fine youth, Lucy. A good son has he been to the dead and the living, to her who is gone and to him who remains; and the good son will make the good husband. If my brother Michael could but be reconciled -but we must wait and hope: ye are full young yet, and may have many happy years in store. A blessing will go with you, Lucy, if only for your kindness to a lone widow who has none to care for her now save your gentle heart, my precious child." And the tears fell from the good dame's eyes, while answering drops mingled with the smiles and blushes on Lucy's blooming cheeks.

It was now sunset, for the primrose guest, and the daily cares rendered by both the girls to the sick widow, had caused the time to pass by unheeded. But it became every moment more and more probable that the keeper, always unstable and impatient, might return home for his tea, and Lucy, laying aside her scruples respecting William agreed to return by the shortest path; in the present case, certainly not the quickest; for the woodcutter, whether attracted by the light and graceful figure as the two young maidens passed the style leading into the copice, or whether he was really leaving work, so that the meeting was purely accidental, did yet join the fair sisters just as they were passing rapidly on their way; and the five minutes hurried talk, which ensued, albeit full of fear and consciousnes, a brief and stolen inteaview, was yet inexpressibly soothing and comfortable to both. 2

"Your step-father (William, who never used ill-words toward any body, proved his distaste toward Michael Parr by the constant addition of that ominous monosyllable; never had he been known to say 'your father,') your step-father, Lucy, will repent his unkindess toward us both before long. Of that I am certain. He shall repent it. Will you go, Lucy? Can't you stay a little longer? Five minutes? One? This is meeting only to part. Well, then, if go you must, good night, my Lucy! Good night, Annie! If you won't let me return with you I must run back to fetch my axe, which I have left in the copse, Annie! One word, Annie! A secret! A great secret! Lucy must not hear-come nearer: Now listen! Do contrive to call upon Mrs. Benham just about this time, and to come back this way! Manage that for me, Annie. Good night, dear Lucy!" said the lover, disappearing over the stile. Annie, charmed to find herself of importance, and making a great mystery of William's whisper, tripped back in the gayest spirits; and such is the buoyancy of youth and so contagious the hilarity of a young and innocent girl, that, unpromising as their prospects appeared, Lucy herself was happy and hopeful in no ordinary measure. Little cause had they for the haste which they had made to gain their home before the return of the cross-grained keeper. They waited tea (the meal which in that sort of life is, perhaps, especially among women, that which they like the best), they kept the tea-kettle on their cleanly swept hearth, until an hour so fashionable that it would not have been credited in Allonby; and when at last they took their own simple meal, they deposited the keeper's nicely made toast, together with the tea-pot, in the chimney corner, to keep it warm for him in case of his returning shivering with cold and fatigue from a night watch of the coverts; for, with these poor girls, Lucy especially, duty was almost as wakeful and careful as love. Midnight came and passed, and still no signs of Michael Parr.

As the night wore on, the placid cheerfulness with which the betrothed maiden had been blessed yielded naturally enough to anxiety and depression. The rain had long been pattering on the eaves, a cold wind moaned among the tall trees, whose huge branches creaked in the rising tempest like the masts of some mighty ship; and the dogs, the keeper's especial charge, howled in a manner which even they who are most accustomed to these sagacious animals cannot, under certain circumstances, help feeling to be ominous, however difficult it might be to convey the impression to any who had not heard that most dismal of living sounds.

"Hark!" interrupted Annie; "I hear steps; they are coming. Can that be Chloe's bark? How wild and strange! Do n't open the door yet, sister. It can't be them!"

And wild and strange was the short, quick, unintermitted bark, which, sharp, piercing, and painful even to agony, rose above the redoubled chorus of howling from the kennel, above the blasts of the tempest, and above the steps and voices of many men, who were now distinctly heard approaching the cottage. They paused in the court, afraid, it may be, to convey to the innocent girls the shock which their dreadful burthen could not fail to impart; but Chloe had no such scruple; she, continuing her wild, shrill cry, flung herself against the door, scratching at it with her slender paws, as if she would have beaten it in, and, when Lucy's trembling hands undid the latch, rushed wildly toward the hearth, pausing for a moment in front of her master's high-backed oaken chair, and then returning restlessly to the group in the court, and endeavoring to search some object in the back ground.

The sight of Chloe had prepared the sisters in some degree for what was to follow. The poor dog's silky coat was dabbled in blood not her own; and when Thomas Leigh, the under-keeper, tried, a strong, rough man as he was-tried in vain-to announce the dreadful tidings to Miss Lucy, she at once relieved and surprised him by inquiring in a low voice, "Is he dead?"

Dead Michael Parr had been for some hours. The body when found was stiff and cold. Marks there were of a severe, though probably a brief struggle, the ground being considerably trodden, and one or two hazel branches broken and torn down. But upon the whole the death had been quick and sudden; a ghastly wound in the head, by some sharp and weighty instrument, having extinguished life at a blow. Beyond this all was mystery. The under-keeper, Thomas Leigh, whose cottage was placed at a considerable distance, to watch other coverts upon this extensive tract of woodland manors, had been roused, just as he was retiring to rest, by the same sharp, shrill cry of distress, I may say of anguish, from poor Chloe, accompanied by beatings apparently much too violent

for her strength against the door of his dwelling. Upon his answering her summons, she instantly seized his coat; and being well acquainted with her sagacity, and her strong affection for her master, he and his brother had followed her to the Fifty Acre Coppice, and there,-"I mean the coppice where the woodcutters are at work," added Thomas, in explanation, "there we found the body;"-what he would have said farther was interrupted by Lucy's falling down in a fainting fit, from which she was with great difficulty recovered-recovered only to hear of fresh horrors.

men.

that William seems to take as much pains to prevent any friends establishing his innocence as another night do to prevent the proof of guilt. Why, if it were indeed the poachers whom our good vicar suspects-why for them should he throw his life away, since, if he still persists in this silence, the lawyers say that nothing can save him? Well," continued she, in the same calm and resigned tone in which she had hitherto spoken, "I shall not survive him long! Do not cry so, dear Annie; in that certainty is my only comfort."

"Nay, dearest sister," began Annie, when she was interrupted by a rustling on the other side of the bank, accompanied by a renewal of that fearful barking, never heard save on that fearful night, from Chloe, the murdered keeper's favorite dog.

A miserable man, lean, pallid, unwashed, unshaven, ragged, starved, crawled forth, scarcely resisting the attacks of Chloe, whose furious assaults were restrained with difficulty by the trembling girls, and, dragging himself to the feet of Lucy, demanded, in a tone of agony: "As you would save a sinful soul, tell me the truth, and the whole truth-if the murderer be not found, must William die?"

"As surely as I stand here," was the reply.
"Take me to the good vicar, drag me before the magis

Judicial inquiry soon led to the development of some circumstances which were suspicious only to professional acuTracks and foot-marks had been discovered, which suddenly disappeared at the cottage. The elder Prescott had been engaged during the previous day and still remained at some distant woods, selecting and marking, under the direction of an eminent surveyor, the oak timber to be included in this year's fall. He was out of the question. William, be side the worn and harassed appearance of a man who had passed the night in tremendous crime or overwhelming misery, presented the strange mixture of reserve and recklessness so often observed in great criminals. Circumstance upon circumstance combined to fix the guilt upon him and upon him only. The remarkably tipped shoes, which the village shoe-trates, let all the country hear me-bring them hither before I maker and his neighbor, the blacksmith, both identified as or- die "--and he fell back as if already his last hour were come. dered by himself, were actually found upon his feet; a jacket, "This is what I have believed in my inmost heart," said with stains, which, although partially washed out, still bore Lucy, "ever since I have known that William's father had traces of which the surgeon called to examine the body recog- disappeared. Oh, Master Prescott!" said she, as the old nized as the ineffaceable marks of blood, this jacket, still wet, man, upon whose pallid face Annie had sprinkled cold water and known by twenty persons as William Prescott's usual from a bright spring by the way-side, was once more reviving dress, was thrown carelessly in a corner, and underneath it -"oh, Master Prescott, clear, if you can, your innocent son! lay, equally well known, the axe which he was accustomed to I always knew that he was innocent!" use in his labor, and which, beside corresponding exactly with the wound on the head, which had proved Michael Parr's death-blow, retained ghastly evidence of the deed. The grey hairs yet stuck to the heft!' From the moment that the police officer held up the axe, mute but eloquent accomplice of this awful deed, the doubt and pity which had before accompanied the search throughout the cottage disappeared before the natural horror which such a crime awakened. The accused took no means to revive or awaken a more favorable feeling. He sank upon the settle beside the hearth, whose untended embers had been long extinguished, in shivering silence, and when handcuffed to one of the constables, and roughly commanded to follow, he seemed rather to obey the mechanical impulse of the man to whom he was linked than to apprehend the meaning of the words.

Some among the villagers had observed the previous quarrel, as well as the parting of the lovers, and, more dead than alive, Lucy obeyed a summons to the inquest in trembling silence, and, deaf from excess of nervous irritation, tried to hear and to comprehend the mild and soothing address of the official functionary. Looking up for that purpose, she caught sight of William. The expression of his countenance, his attitude, and the irons with which he was loaded, told her at a glance, the dreadful truth. She listened to no question, she waited for no pause, but, shrieking with fearful rapidity, "He is innocent! he is innocent!-beware how ye, too, commit murder!" she fell upon the floor in strong hysterics. From that hour many weeks of fever and delirium passed away before she was restored to the agonizing consciousness that a verdict of wilful murder had been returned against William Prescott. This tragedy occurred just after the Lent Assizes had been holden at the county town, so that the prisoner had the advantage of a considerable space of time in which to seek such testimony as might counterbalance the strong chain of circumstantial evidence upon which the verdict of the inquest had been founded. And after the immediate and fierce indignation had subsided, the usual reaction had taken place, and many began to balance the virtues of a life against the suspicions of an hour, and offers were conveyed to the jail of whatever money might be needed to trace the real criminal. Calmly and thankfully were they declined. Without confessing the crime, William Prescott seemed resolved to abide the punishment. Even from one, the dearest, he had refused such proffers-refused even to admit her to his cell.

"It is strange, Annie," said she, one evening, as they were walking together on a balmy May evening, when the sun, almost level with the horizon, shone upon a row of weeping birches that crowned a bank covered with gorse and broomthe light, magical in its effect, tinting the silver bark and golden tassels of the lady of the woods with a fairy lustre, that more than realized Turner's daintiest fancies-" it is passing strange

The old man spoke with effort and difficulty: "We met that night in the coppice. I had returned to ascertain the girth of one particular tree. He seized me, pretending to take me for a poacher; knocked me down, spurned me, being down; and, when I rose, maddened by his insults, the axe was in my hand, and in my frenzy-then came thy noble boy: he dragged me away-made me promise not to surrender myself. Oh, Miss Lucy, bring witnesses, bring officers to carry me to prison! Think, if I should die without clearing my boy!

And that night the miserable father did die; but not until, before competent authorities, he had established the innocence of his son.

THE ROUNDHEAD'S DAUGHTER.

BY MARY RUSSELL MITFORD.

'Is this our foeman's face? Ah, no! no! no!' Shakspere. A fairer damsel never graced the pinched coif and demure kerchief of the puritans than Mabel Goodwin, as she stood one sultry afternoon in the merry month of June, wreathing a straggling honeysuckle round a mossy sundial in the deserted pleasaunce of Temple Laleham. The scene and its accessories were not unworthy of the blooming maiden, a very rosebud for beauty and youthfulness, whose swift and airy motions seemed to throw light and sunshine over the picture; and yet there was a strange contrast between her bright and beaming loveliness and the neglect and desolation of all around. The magnificent mansion, one of the spacious and picturesque manor-houses of Elizabeth's days, erected, as the name would import, upon the site of a still more extensive residence or preceptory of the proud order of St. John of Jerusalem, had been shut up since the establishment of the commonwealth; its former possessor, Sir Philip Montresor, a staunch old cavalier, having been in exile since the star of Cromwell had been in the ascendant; and Colonel Goodwin, in virtue of a decree of the committe of sequestration, its present owner, a plain soldier and a zealous roundhead, rigid, self-denying, and averse from luxury as the Protector himself, preferring the humble dwelling of his forefathers, the home of his boyhood, to the splendid abode of the royal favorite. Desolate it was, with its barred windows, its silent courts, the grass growing on its noble terraces, the statues and urns that crowned the marble balustrade broken and overthrown, nettles and briars forcing their way between the broad flights of steps, wall-flowcarved stone mullions. ers and snap-dragons flourishing in every nook of the richly Desolation triumphed over all; and yet so pituresque was the building, with its elaborate variety of outline, its pointed roofs and gable ends and clustered chimneys, its turrets and porches and pinnacles, its deep bay windows and projecting oriels, the play of light and shadow, and the mellow tinting of the weather-stained walls, that it is

doubtful if a painter's eye would not have found more gratification in contemplating the mansion, silent and deserted as it was, a model of the poetical architecture of an age when that grandest of the arts had not yet subsided into dull prose, than to have gazed on its spacious courts, crowded with knight and squire, groom and page, with stately dames and mincing damsels, on that day for ever memorable in the annals of the Montressors, when the Virgin Queen, in one of her progresses, deigned not only to sleep a night at Temple Laleham, but even to dance a coranto with its master.

holding her fair head so as to shade her eyes from the glare, glazed to somewhat more purpose upon the bright sun, whose course in the heavens no neglect of man could stay or change; after three several vain attempts to ascertain the hour, she turned rapidly round as a slight sound caught her quick ear, and was aware of a young man, whose simple garb could not conceal the air of high birth and high breeding visible in every motion, who had approached by one path as she was watching for him by another, and now stood at her side.

"Soh! Master Arthur Montresor," exclaimed the fair damsel, with the little air of sauciness and coquetry which formed so piquant a contrast with her puritanic attire; "soh! this is the way you over-sea gallants keep tryst with a simple country maiden! Here have I been for longer than I can tell; and but that I despatched old Jonathan to the hay-folk in the lily-mead with a weighty bottle of double ale, and mentioned something about seeking marsh-mallows to make a salve for Daniel's leg, which he cut half off yester-eve, poor fellow, with his own scythe, while he was at one and the same time mowing a heavy swathe and listening to a word in season from Ebenezer Crump herbs for my father's pottage, how I could have wandered here none can tell; and to find you absent! one should have thought that the prospect of a dinner would have made you punctual. Take it, can't you? continued Mabel, as she hastily flung the herbs she spoke of, mallows, sweet-majoram, marigolds, and thyme, from a basket which lay on the turf, half-hidden by a great rose-bush, and handed to her companion with rather more care a large packet wrapped in a napkin, which the large bundle of mallows had covered most effectually.

If the hall were still fair to the sight, the park, or rather chase in which it stood, presented a scene of unrivaled beauty. Clumps of oaks and becches, old enough to have witnessed the stern and warlike exercises, and to have listened to the coral hymns of the Knights Templars; an avenue of elms, above a mile in length, pillared and arched like the aisle of some mighty cathedral; thickets of old thorns covered with pearly blossoms, mingled with the paler foliage of the feathery birch, rising from an undergrowth of fern, among which the deer were lying in scattered groups, while large herds were grazing upon the rich herbage, approaching close to the-but for the excuse of seeking these mallows, and the sweet mansion, as conscious that they had little to fear from the intrusion of man; a piece of water that might almost be called a lake, piercing the depth of the woods, and giving back in its bright mirror the rich and varied forest scenery, and the light and fleecy cloudlets of the summer sky; a ruined tower on an eminence upon the other side of the mere, whose walls, covered with ivy, were said to have belonged to a watch tower in the days of the preceptory; and, nearer the house, some broken ground, part of which had been fish-ponds, now filled up with a growth of alders and other moisture-loving trees, while under a steep declivity appeared the low arch of a deserted grotto, half covered with the pendent plants; all this, set off by the strong light and shadow of a sunny day in June, formed a picture of no common interest and beauty.

The pleasaunce, too, with its rose-bushes and other flowering shrubs, turned into actual trees, bending under the weight of their blossoms, and the formal parterres-thanks to Mabel's love of gardening, bright with pinks and sweet-williams, larkheels (so Fletcher hath it), marigolds and gillistocks-the pleasaunce exhibited a strange mixture of gayety and desolation. The sparkling fountains, whose waters, shimmering in the sunshine, glittered like showers of diamonds, no longer cooled and refreshed the noontide air. That light was extinguished; those streams had ceased to flow. Even the quaint basin, carved like a huge cockle-shell, such as a few centuries before might have been seen among the followers of the Knights of the Temple, denoting the pilgrims from the Holy Landthat shell-like basin, whose small reservoir at once supplied and received the slender jets of water which dropped into the shallow pool witha und so lulling and so musical, was broken now and dry. Eve...hose twin hedges of holly and yew, the living walls as smooth as masonry, surmounted at regular distances by figures bearing remote resemblances to phoenixes or peacocks, dragons or bears, or other birds and animals, existent or non-existent-those hedges, pride of the old gardener's art, which sheltered at once the flower-plots from the bleak north-east, and the chaste dames of the hall from intrusion or observation, had now, escaped from the shears, breken into a wild luxuriance of vegetation; so that the spreading branches and projecting tops had not merely obliterated all traces of their former trim and painful clippings, but had by their irreg ular and disproportioned growth thrown the crowning monsters into inextricable confusion. The closely shaven turf was overrun with moss; the gravel paths were covered with grass and weeds; in short, at Temple Laleham Nature was every where triumphing over Art.

And among the fairest of Nature's works might be reckoned the blooming rose-bud, Mabel Goodwin. She had finished her task of twisting the straggling honeysuckle round the old sundial, already garlanded with the pink and purple flowers of the sweet-pea; and after gazing earnestly from side to side of that flowery prison, the pleasaunce, enclosed as it was by its high walls of yew and holly, and peeping cautiously, in an attitude compounded of looking and listening, through an arch cut in the thick hedge, which led into the chase; after glancing somewhat impatiently up at the old clock tower, which still held its stately place among the gilded vanes and richly carved pinnacles of the mansion, although the machinery had ceased to perform its office, and the deep solemn tongue which seemed to convey a warning upon the flight of time, as it told the hours, had long been mute-and casting another fruitless and pettish look at the old sun-dial, which had lost its gnomon-and then,

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Take the packet and off with it to your hiding place, Master Arthur," resumed she. "You have small cause for thanks, I trow, since the pasty was made of your own deer, that's certain; and 'tis odds but the flask of canary may, in bygone days, have inhabited the spacious cellerage of Temple Laleham. Leave kissing my hand, good Arthur, and away! Nay, nay! rest here a moment, fair cousin," resumed the pretty damsel, whose experience of the 'over-sea gallant's' delight in her society had been such as to occasion no small suprise at the ready obedience to the command of leaving her which he testified upon the present occasion. "You may as well stay just for one moment, just to tell me in the first place the cause why you are so silent and so sad, and in the next, to have an opportunity of profiting by the perusal of a billet which I have received this very morning from my 'unworthy suitor,' as he calls himself; Amindab, eldest son and heir of Amindab Holdfast, the elder, scrivener of Newport."

"A billet from Aminadab, Mabel! and you allow him""Hear the story out, beau cousin! Many a long year back, before the worst of these bad times, when your dear mother, Lady Montressor, profited of the very distant kindred that subsisted between our houses to show all manner of kindness in my father's absence to his motherless girls, and to me, the youngest, more especially-for, somehow, my sister Kesiah shrank away from her notice as if anticipating the sad division that was to come: Well, you may remember in those days when you, a tall youth, and I, a small damsel"

6

"When I used to call you my little wife,' Mabel, and my dear mother smiled at the word. Oh, I remember those days well-too well, perhaps, for a pennyless exile!" and the beau cousin sighed. "Let me get

"Fie, Arthur!" resumed the fair maiden. on with my story. Well, in those days there arrived from foreign parts-sent, by Sir Philip, from Italy, was it not?-a certain instrument which, if laid in an open window, and swept by the wind, would discourse a music as strange as the means by which it was produced; so wild, and sweet, and sad, were the sounds."

"I remember as if it were yesterday my poor mother's delight in those long melancholy cadences, and the fears of the domestics, who, even after the simple machinery was shown, and explained to them, continued to believe it something ominous, if not supernatural. But what can the Æolian harp possibly have to do with Aminadab and his billet!"

"You shall hear. Some fortnight since, after in one of my half-stolen visits to the Temple Laleham library and the dear pleasaunce I had discovered you, fair cousin, and your hiding place, old Judith, discoursing of signs and omens, spoke of the wind music' up at the mansion, and Kesiah's curiosity was much excited; so, to prevent a visit, which might have endangered your secret, I ran here the next morning at daybreak, and having after a long search discovered the lost treasure, carried it home forthwith."