stop the pedlar. How lucky that he should come at this time."

CHAPTER XI. THE PEDLAR AT MONASTERLEA.

Two hours after, the parlour was all draped with the contents of the pedlar's pack, while the pedlar himself was being regaled in the kitchen, with Nanny piling his plate upon one hand, and Bridget coquetting with him on the other. Silks of many colours were festooned from the mantelpiece, the table, and a brilliant tabinet had been flung for display round Miss Martha's shoulders; May, meanwhile, leaning with her elbows on the back of an arm-chair, examined these splendours which had been spread out for her choice.

"Now, May, do look at this tartan silk," said Miss Martha, persuasively. "Nothing could be prettier with your dark hair."

"I'd rather have black, Aunt Martha." "But you have nothing else nice except white muslin, child. You will make yourself look like a magpie."

next.

"Not a magpie, Aunt Martha. Only a crow one day, and a gull or a pigeon the I needn't be a parrot, need I?” 'Well, well, have your own way. In my time young girls did not dress themselves in black, except for mourning.'

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"Have the tartan silk yourself, Aunt Martha.'

"No, no, child, my day is over. But at least I am going to pick you a bunch of bright ribbons."

The pedlar was called in to disclose the prices of his wares. He was a well-made, rather gipsy-like young man, with a redbrown skin, bushy black beard, and thick black hair, almost covering his forehead. A pair of bright dark eyes shone from under his heavy brows. He wore a suit of grey frieze and a low-crowned hat, and he blushed under the brownness of his skin when ushered into the presence of the ladies. He shot one keen glance at May, where she stood leaning with her elbows on the back of her chair, and then drooped his eyes and blushed again, so that Miss Martha set him down in her mind at once as a highly appreciative, as well as modest young man. He was a stranger too, and she was curious to know where he had come from.

"Ahem! this is not our own pedlar, my dear ?" she said to May, as if willing to be persuaded that her eyes had deceived her.

"No, aunt. We hope," said May, turning to the stranger, "that nothing has happened to our friend who has been coming here for years?"

"I hope not, madam," said the pedlar, with another delighted look at the young lady. "But to tell plain truth, I niver seen him in my life. I'm started this summer on my own account intirely." "I hope you may have success, I am sure," said Miss Martha, speaking with hesitation, as she adjusted her spectacles on her nose. "But I am a little in doubt as to whether it will be honourable in me to give you my custom or not."

"That's as ye plase, ma'am," said the pedlar, readily. "I wouldn't intherfair for the world wid the business of another honest man. But if it would be suitin' ye at all to take anything I've got for this wanst, I'll give it to ye chape, and not be botherin' ye again.

"Very fair, very honourable, indeed,” said Miss Martha, "and as we are at this moment in need of what you have brought us, we must be forgiven for not waiting for the older friend."

"I have jewellery," said the pedlar, producing a box. "Miss will excuse me, but I have got bright goold crosses, and han'some pearl beads, far gayer nor yon black thing that she has hangin' round her neck.”

"My cross," said May, quickly, and her hand went quickly to Paul's chain round her neck. Thank you, you may put up your jewellery," she added. "This was given me by a friend, and I care for nothing finer."

The pedlar blushed again, no doubt at the severity of the rebuke, but was silenced, and plunged into the recesses of his pack for more treasures.

Oh, my man, my good man," cried Miss Martha, as she looked over the price-list which he had put in her hand, "you will beggar yourself with the lowness of your prices. Silks like these cannot be sold at such a rate, I can tell you. We shall hardly see you coming back again if this is the way you intend to do business."

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'Maybe not, ma'am, indeed," said the pedlar, tossing his head. "But in the mane time them is my prices. To take a penny more would be the ruin o' my conscience.'

Miss Martha put her head on one side, and looked at the salesman with a troubled air. But there was something in his manner that disarmed suspicion.

"Prices may have fallen," she said to May, reflectively. "And now we can have a couple of these dainty chintzes."

"Thank ye, ma'am," said the pedlar, as, the purchases being made, he picked up

the money tendered him; "and now, could ye be guidin' me to the houses of the ginthry in the neighbourhood? I was thinkin' o' payin' a visit to Misther Finiston o' Tobereevil."

I cannot say that I think you need be at the trouble of going there," said Miss Martha.

The pedlar had shouldered his pack, and turned to go away.

"The young man hasn't come back yet, I suppose ?" he asked, pausing in the doorway, hat in hand.

"The young man ?" repeated Miss

Martha.

"Oh, ay! Young Paul Finiston, the nephew."

'Do you know him?" burst eagerly from both women in a breath.

"Know him? Ay!" said the pedlar, and tears rushed into his eyes as he looked from one to the other of the anxious faces before him. "At least I did know himknew him a young boy when I was knockin' about Dublin. He wouldn't look at a guinea before he'd spend it on the pedlar's pack. Not if he had it, the poor gossoon n! But men do change. Think ye, ladies, will he be a miser like his uncle? It's in the blood, so it is, they do say."

"It is not in his blood," said May, stoutly, squeezing her black cross in her hand. "He is our friend, and we do not like to hear such questions."

The pedlar here drooped his head in silence, so that his face could not be seen. "I ax your pardon," he said presently, in a very low voice.

"Oh, I am not angry," said May, heartily, "and he must not go away without some tea, Aunt Martha. Here, Bridget, Bridget, make the pedlar some tea!"

Bridget obeyed readily, and, after the pedlar was gone, appeared in the parlour with triumph on her face.

"Musha, then that's the gintlemanliest pedlar that iver walked these roads yet, ma'am dear! Sure Nannie an' me bought what little we could rache to; an' afther he was gone, what but two fine shawls should come flyin' through the winda! 'Presents for yez each!' says his voice outbye, but when we run to the door sorra sight o' him was to be seen!"

Miss Martha left off measuring the yards upon her fingers, and made a careful examination of the shawls.

"These are worth a guinea each if they are worth a penny. This is something very odd, no doubt," she said to May.

Ir is natural enough that the human heart deemed by poets and philosophers to be the seat of our affections and passions, of our understanding and will, courage and conscience, by some men looked upon as the root of life itself-should have been considered by many of the dying in past times as a votive gift peculiarly sacred. And this feeling has been the cause in many instances of the burial of the heart apart from the place where the ashes of the body might repose.

Among the earliest instances of the separate mode of heart-burial is that of Henry the Second of England. After this luckless monarch expired in a passion of grief, before the altar of the church of Chinon, in 1189, his heart was interred at Fontevrault, but his body, from the nostrils of which tradition alleges blood to have dropped on the approach of his rebellious son Richard, was laid in a separate vault. From Fontevrault his heart, according to a statement in a public print, was brought a few years ago to Edinburgh, by Bishop Gillis, of that city. If so, where is it now?

When Richard Coeur de Lion fell beneath Gourdon's arrow at the siege of Chaluz, the gallant heart, which, in its greatness and mercy, inspired him to forgive, and even to reward the luckless archer, was, after his death, preserved in a casket in the treasury of that splendid cathedral which William the Conqueror built at Rouen; for Richard, by a last will, directed that his body should be interred in Fontevrault, "at the feet of his father, to testify his sorrow for the many uneasinesses he had created him during his lifetime." His bowels he bequeathed to Poictou

(Grafton has it Carlisle), and his heart to Normandy, out of his great love for the people thereof. Above the relic at Rouen there was erected an elaborate little shrine, which was demolished in 1738, but exactly a hundred years later the heart was found in its old place, and reinterred. It was again exhumed, however, cased in glass, and exhibited in the Musée des Antiquités of the city; but December, 1869, saw it once more replaced in the cathedral, with a leaden plate on the cover, bearing the inscription:

Hic jacet cor Ricardi Regis Anglorum.

So there finally lies the heart of him who, in chivalry, was the rival of Saladin and Philip Augustus, the hero of the historian and the novelist, and who was the idol of the English people for many a generation. When this great crusader's nephew, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and King of the Romans, died, after a stirring life-during which he formed a conspiracy against the king his father, then, like all the wild, pious, and bankrupt lords of those days, took a turn of service in the Holy Land, and next drew his sword in the battle fought at Lewes between Henry the Third and the confederate barons-his body was interred at Hayles, in Gloucestershire, but his heart was deposited at Rewley Abbey, near Oxford, while the heart of his son, who died before him, and for whose tragical fate he died of grief, was laid in Westminster Abbey in 1271.

Two successive holders of the see of Durham made votive offerings of their hearts to two different churches. The first of these was Richard Poore, previously Dean of Salisbury, Bishop of Chichester, and then of Durham, from 1228 to 1237. He was buried in the cathedral of his diocese, but his heart was sent to Tarrant, in Dorsetshire. A successor in the episcopate, Robert de Stitchell, who had formerly been Prior of Finchale, dying on his way home from the Council of Lyons, in 1274, was buried in Durham, but, at his own request, his heart was left behind, as a gift to the Benedictine convent near Arbepellis, in France. At Henley, in Yorkshire, in the old burial vault of the noble family of Bolton, there lies the leaden coffin of a female member of the house, who had died in France, and been brought from thence embalmed, and cased in lead. On the top of the coffin is deposited her heart in a kind of urn. The heart of Agnes Sorel was interred in the abbey of Jumieges.

In Scotland there have been several instances of the separate burial of the human heart. The earliest known is that connected with the founding and erection of Newabbey, or the abbey of Dulce Cor, in the stewartry of Kirkcudbright, by Derorgilla, daughter of Alan the Celtic Lord of Galloway, and wife of John Baliol, of Barnard Castle, father of the unpopular competitor for the Scottish crown. Baliol, to whom she was deeply attached, died an exile in France in 1269; but Derorgilla had his heart embalmed, and as the Scotichronicon records, "lokyt and bunden with sylver brycht;" and this relic so sad and grim she always carried about with her. In 1289, as death approached, when she was in her eightieth year, she directed that "this silent and daily companion in life for twenty years should be laid upon her bosom when she was buried in the abbey she had founded;" the beautiful old church, the secluded ruins of which now moulder by the bank of the Nith. For five centuries and more, in memory of her untiring affection, the place has been named locally the Abbey of Sweet-heart.

History and song have alike made us familiar with the last wish of Robert Bruce, the heroic King of Scotland, when, after two years of peace and contemplation, he died in the north, at Cardross. He desired that in part fulfilment of a vow he had made to march to Jerusalem, a purpose which the incessant war with England baffled, his heart should be laid in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and on his death-bed he besought his old friend and faithful brother soldier, the good Sir James Douglas, to undertake that which was then a most arduous journey, and be the bearer of the relic. And it is my command," he added, to quote Froissart," that you do use that royal state and maintenance in your journey, both for yourself and your companions, that into whatever lands or cities you may come, all may know that ye have in charge, to bear beyond the seas, the heart of King Robert of Scotland."

Then all who stood around his bed began to weep, and Douglas replied:

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Assuredly, my liege, I do promise, by the faith which I owe to God and to the order of knighthood."

"Now praise be to God," said the king, "I shall die in peace."

It is a matter of history how Douglas departed on this errand with a train of knights, and, choosing to land on the Spanish coast, heard that Alphonso of

Leon and Castile was at war with Osman, the Moorish king of Granada. In the true spirit of the age, he could not resist the temptation of striking a blow for the Christian faith, and so joined the Spaniards. He led their van upon the plain of Theba, near the Andalusian frontier. In a silver casket at his neck he bore the heart of Bruce, which rashly and repeatedly he cast before him amid the Moors, crying: "Now pass on as ye were wont, and Douglas, as of old, will follow thee or die." And there he fell, together with Sir William Sinclair, of Roslin, Sir Robert and Walter Logan, of Restalrig, and others. Bruce's heart, instead of being taken to Jerusalem, was brought home by Sir Simon of Lee, and deposited in Melrose Abbey. Douglas was laid among his kindred in Liddesdale, and from thence forward "the bloody heart," surmounted by a crown, became the cognisance of all the Douglases in Scotland. Bruce was interred at Dunfermline; and when his skeleton was discovered in 1818, the breast-bone was found to have been sawn across to permit the removal of the heart, in accordance with the terms of his last will.

But of all the treasured hearts of the heroic or illustrious dead, none perhaps ever underwent so many marvellous adventures as that of James, Marquis of Montrose, who was executed by the Scottish Puritans in 1650.

On his body being interred among those of common criminals, by the side of a road leading southward from Edinburgh, his niece, the Lady Napier, whose castle of Merchiston still stands near the place, had the deal box in which the trunk of the corpse lay (the head and limbs had been sent to different towns in Scotland) opened in the night, and his heart," which he had always promised at his death to leave her, as a mark of the affection she had ever felt towards him," was taken forth. It was secretly embalmed and enclosed in a little case of steel, made from the blade of that sword which Montrose had drawn for King Charles at the battles of Auldearn, Tippermuir, and Kilsythe. This case she placed in a gold filigree box that had been presented by the Doge of Venice to John Napier, of Merchiston, and she enclosed the whole in a silver urn which had been given to her husband by the great cavalier marquis before the Civil War. She sent this carefully guarded relic to the second marquis, afterwards first Duke of Montrose, who was then in exile with her hus

band; but it never reached either of them, being unfortunately lost by the bearer on the journey.

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Years after all these actors in the drama of life had passed away, a gentleman of Gueldres, a friend of Francis, fifth Lord Napier (who died in 1773), recognised, in the collection of a Flemish virtuoso, by the coat-armorial and other engravings upon it, the identical gold filigree box belonging to the Napiers of Merchiston. The steel case was within it; but the silver urn was gone. The former was the size and shape of an egg. It was opened by pressing down a little knob, as is done in opening a watchcase. Inside was a little parcel containing all that remained of Montrose's heart, wrapped in a piece of coarse cloth, and done over with a substance like glue." Restored by this friend to the Napiers, it was presented to Miss Hester Napier, by her father, Lord Francis, when his speculations in the Caledonian Canal and elsewhere led him to fear the sale of his patrimonial castle of Merchiston, and that he would lose all, even to this relic, on which he set so much store. Miss Napier took it with her on her marriage with Johnstone of Carnsalloch, and it accompanied her when she sailed for India with her husband. Off the Cape de Verd Isles their ship was attacked by Admiral de Suffrien, who was also bound for the East with five French sail of the line. In the engagement which ensued, Mrs. Johnstone, who refused to quit her husband's side on the quarter-deck, was wounded by a splinter in the arm, while carrying in her hand a reticule in which she had placed all her most valuable trinkets, and, among these, the heart of Montrose, as it was feared that the Indiaman would be taken by boarding Suffrien, however, was beaten off.

At Madura in India she had an urn made. like the old one to contain the heart, and on it was engraved, in Tamil and Telegu, a legend telling what it held. Her constant anxiety concerning its safety naturally caused a story to be spread concerning it among the Madrassees, who deemed it a powerful talisman. Thus it was stolen, and became the property of a chief; so the loyal heart that had beat proudly in so many Scottish battles, hung as an amulet at the neck of a Hindoo warrior. latter, however, on hearing what it really was, generously restored it to its owner, and it was brought to Europe by the Johnstones on their return in 1792. In that year they were in France, when an edict

The

of the revolutionary government required all persons to surrender their plate and ornaments for the service of the sovereign people. Mrs. Johnstone intrusted the heart of Montrose to one of her English attendants named Knowles, that it might be secretly and safely conveyed to England; but the custodian died by the way; the relic was again lost, and heard of no more.

In the wall of an aisle of the old ruined church of Culross, there was found, not long ago, enclosed in a silver case of oval form, chased and engraved, the heart of Edward Bruce, second Lord Kinloss (ancestor of the Earls of Elgin), in his day a fiery and gallant young noble, who fought the famous duel with a kindred spirit, Sir Edward Sackville, afterwards Earl of Dorset, a conflict which is detailed at such length, and so quaintly, in No. 133 of the Guardian. Bruce was the challenger, and after a long and careful prearrangement, attended by their seconds and surgeons, they encountered each other, with the sword, minus their doublets, and in their shirt-sleeves, under the walls of Antwerp, in August, 1613. Sackville had a finger hewn off, and received three thrusts in his body, yet he contrived to pass his rapier twice, mortally, through the breast of his Scottish antagonist, who fell on his back, dying and choking with blood.

"I re-demanded of him," wrote Sir Edward, "if he would request his life; but it seemed he prized it not at so dear a rate to be beholden for it, bravely replying that 'he scorned it,' which answer of his was so noble and worthy, as I protest I could not find in my heart to offer him any more violence."

As Sackville was borne away fainting, he escaped, as he relates," a great danger. Lord Bruce's surgeon, when nobody dreamt of it, came full at me with his lordship's sword, and had not mine, with my sword, interposed, I had been slain, although my Lord Bruce, weltering in his blood, and past all expectation of life, conformable to all his former carriage, which was undoubtedly noble, cried out Rascal, hold thy hand!'

of the Forth; and a brass plate in the wall, with a detail of the catastrophe engraved upon it, still indicates its locality to the visitor.

Still more recently there was supposed to be found in the vault of the Maitlands, at St. Mary's Church, in Haddington, an urn containing the heart of the great but terrible duke, John of Lauderdale, the scourge of the Covenanters, a truculent peer, who, for his services to the powers that were, was created Baron Petersham and Earl of Guildford, and who died at Tunbridge Wells in 1682. He was buried in the family aisle, amid the execrations of the peasantry, to whom his character rendered him odious, and his coffin on tressels was long an object of grotesque terror to the truant urchin who peeped through the narrow slit that lighted the vault where the lords of Thirlstane lie. The heart of the unhappy king, James the Second of England, which was taken from his body, and interred separately in an urn, in the church of Sainte Marie de Chaillot, near Paris, was lost at the Revolution, in 1792, while the heart of his queen, Mary d'Este, of Modena, and that of their faithful friend and adherent, Mary Gordon, daughter of Lewis, Marquis of Huntley, and wife of James, Duke of Perth (whilom Lord Justice-General, and High Chancellor of Scotland), were long kept where the ashes of the latter still repose, in the pretty little chapel of the Scottish College, at Paris, in the Rue des Fossés St. Victoire, one of the oldest portions of the city.

When the body of the Emperor Napoleon was prepared for interment at St. Helena, in May, 1821, the heart was removed by a medical officer, to be soldered up in a separate case. Madame Bertrand, in her grief and enthusiasm, had made some vow, or expressed a vehement desire, to obtain possession of this as a precious relic, and the doctor, fearing that some trick might be played him, and his commission be thereby imperilled, kept it all night in his own room, and under his own eye, in a wine-glass. The noise of crystal breaking roused him, if not from sleep, at least from a waking doze, and he started forward, only in time to rescue the heart of the emperor from a huge brown rat, which was dragging it across the floor to its hole.

It was rescued by the doctor, soldered up in a silver urn, filled with spirits, by Sergeant Abraham Millington, of the St. Helena Artillery, and placed