grandfather's, my father's! it was my constant friend and companion; my dear pipe is dead ;" and with his rough hand he wiped away a tear. "Alas! I have sold a honest man's name to a madman for ten florins, and this is my punishment; may Heaven forgive me. Bad luck must come of this; may God for give me." On a summer night, when the sky is tinged with rosy hues, like the blush of a maiden cheek, if you enter any of the pretty little villages on the borders of the Rhine beyond Switzerland, you will hear singing at every cottage door, on every threshold; like birds on a branch, silver voices salute your ear in a burst of harmony.. They are generally, it is true, but simple ballads, waltzes, rondeaus, snatches of better things, fragments of great composers, though not unfrequently you will hear good music, well performed by whole families of the peasant race, when their toil is done. I have heard this, and the works of Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, executed by the choicest orchestra; the highly cultivated voice of a prima donna at the operas of Paris, San Carlos, La Scala, or London, have not so many charms, so much unison, such harmony and touching effect, as the simple melody of these native songsters; you are filled with admiration and delight. But you are in Germany, a soil where musical instinct grows, and finds expression on the lips of the humblest votary of harmony, a land where nature has given this divine faculty as a recompense for its rigorous climate. Music, the language of poetic souls, whose thoughts words cannot reflect, whose “charms can soothe the savage breast;" music is the rainbow of Germany, whose varied tints ever please; it is the rose that never dies, but sheds the perfume of poetry on all around. The humble German, ever grave and melancholy, makes to himself a ray of sunshine in the midst of a frozen clime, and music alone solace the daily fatigue of a hard earned living; it gives a peep at the clear blue sky through the thick fogs of earth. Mein Schatz ist ein Reiter, Das Rosstz ist dem Kaiser, Der Reiter is mein. Der Reiter is mein. My loved is a cavalier, A horseman he was forced to be; The horse to the king belongs, The man "Oh! heavens!" exclaimed a pretty girl, as the burden of her song was suddenly interrupted, and her hand seized by a handsome young man. She hastily withdrew it, and, curtseying, blushed deeply. "My lovely blue-eyed girl, my little nightingale, warbling on her nest, is this Frantz Rasmann's house?" "It is, Mien Her, and I am his daughter; walk in, he will soon return. Ah! Gotlieb, my old friend,fhow are you? You do not look well; fatigued with a long journey no doubt; come in, take a cup of beer and smoke your favourite pipe." The postilion sorrowfully shook his head, and heaved a sigh, exclaiming, “My dear pipe." "Well then, friend Rasmann, as I now am perfectly restored to health, through Almighty goodness and your fair daughter's excellent nursing, we will talk of business. Fill our glasses, and listen to my arrangement. Five thousand I shall give as a wedding portion to Beata, though she tells me she will never marry; three thousand is for you; five thousand I shall take with me on my journey; and what remains I shall leave in your care until I either return, or you hear further from me. Should that never be, you are by this writing constituted sole inheritor of that sum at the expiration of three years from this present date. If any legal form is requisite to make this document more formal, I will pay every expence to render it perfectly binding." A low, smoky, ground-floor room-old pictures of saints and devils, coarse red cotton curtains, a crucifix, a table with a rough carpet covering, upon which lay heaps of gold, glittering by the light of a brass oil lamp; a Bible, large enough for a porter's load; a pair of spectacles, a wooden block, four cherry-tree chairs, in one corner; in another stood a blue-eyed, embonpoint fair girl, counting the money, with a handsome dark young man gazing intently upon her; the hour nine o'clock at night, and we have a peep at what was passing in Frantz Rasmann's cottage the day after (our traveller's conversation with him on money matters, and a week after his arrival. "Ninety-nine, one hundred, then comes a thousand, is it not, Mien Her? no no, that's not right; I must begin again. I wish my father had not left me this task to do. You put me out every time in my reckoning, Mien Her. I never had so many to count before; I wish this nasty gold was anywhere else, it turns my head." "How is that, dear Beata? I do not say a word to interrupt your task, and the gold is good gold I assure you." "Well, no, Mien Her; but then you look at me so I forget how the number runs, your eyes make me deceive myself: there, now, I have to begin all over again; how tiresome this long job is. Don't look at me, and I will try to count another hundred." 66 'Do, dear girl; and that I may not look at you and spoil your reckoning as before, come here and sit upon my knee, I shall not then see your eyes, nor you mine." "That, Mien Her, would be ten times worse; I am ticklish as a kitten, and cannot bear to be touched, even in play. I wish my father would return, he is very late to-night; but as I promised to count the gold for him, I must not be worse than my word. But pray, Mein Her, give me a helping hand, together we can easily complete the task; but, remember, you must not look at me, or speak to me, or tickle me." Ten o'clock struck; eleven seemed to follow like lightning: it was midnight ere Frantz returned, and found his house in darkness, and its inmates at rest. * * * * "Adieu, dearest Beata; farewell, my best beloved, for a few short weeks, I shall then return, never again to quit you, and lead you to other scenes, where you shall reign, the queen of my idolatry, and the mistress of ample wealth.” "Remember! Henri !" was all the sobbing girl could utter, as she closely pressed him to her bosom, kissed his lips with fervour, and tore herself away from his encircling arms. A minute after and Henri was on his road to Paris, from whence a letter announced the dangerous illness of his father. Paris was then as it now is (and perhaps all great capitals are very like it), the best and the worst of cities in the civilized world: it was a burning furnace of vice, a constant ebullition of passions, a pandemonium of human intelligence, filled at the epoch we record with philosophers, politicians, and fanatics, the demolishers of altars and thrones. Paris was at that time Titan crushed to the earth beneath a mighty mountain, but ready to shake the world by his slightest movement. Still the people danced and sung as yet they do, and as they ever will, for it is not a passing cloud that makes man forget the glorious sunshine of summer. 1 There was a grand ball in the Faubourg St. Germain, Rue de Varenne, at the splendid Hotel of a Dowager Baroness, whose only daughter and heiress had that day been married to a young nobleman. She was an innocent, awkward, rather pretty girl of sixteen, just brought from a convent to marry a man she had never before seen, and did not love so well, or know so much of, as the octogenarian convent gardener. He a gentleman, of refined fashion, with more ancestors than money, more vices than virtues, and deeply in love, not with his wife, but her fortune of three hundred thousand francs. He had never studied female character, and valued its worth no more than as it contributed to his own selfish views and feelings. For a woman's heart he cared no more for than an orange; it pleased his palate for a second, and the peel was cast away. He was wont to say, that the good they bestowed was not equal to the mischief they caused; and that love was a losing game to play at; time was lost when a woman loved you from vanity, money lost when it sprung from interest, and everything a man can sacrifice of human comfort when you are chained to a woman by the fool's dream of happiness. Independent of these peculiar notions of his own, the gentleman was a very amiable, very fashionable, very original man, and if he would rather give twenty of his fair countrywomen for one race-horse, and pass a night at cards than an hour in their society, it must be ascribed to the originality of his ideas, and the philosophical temperature of the times in which he lived. Towards midnight the ball terminated; the young bride was fatigued with dancing and glad to seek repose; gradually guest after guest took their leave, and the bridegroom, who had been all night engaged at play, found himself and one antagonist still deeply engaged in that employment. They had been playing with cards, but the run of luck being all one way, these were thrown aside and dice substituted, in order to save time. “Mine is infernal luck to-night, Marquis; I cannot get a single turn in my favour. Come, time grows short, we are only playing a girl's game-five hundred louis on the ten, do you set me?-five and three, eight loses; double or quits on ten still say I-seven and two, nine loses; double or quits again on that cursed ten-two and four, six loses. Hell is in the dice to-night; one more cast, I have set my life upon the throw; ten thousand louis on the ten, it must come up at last-three and two, five loses. Damnation! I am entirely ruined, every shilling gone of my baby wife's fortune; I am a beggar, and she may return to her convent or her mother, as they like best. Marquis, you have been fortunate to-night at my expense, but mind that infernal jilt Fortune does not lead you to ruin as she has now done me. Adieu, we shall not meet again." "Indeed, Count! are you then so completely ruined? what a pity! Just give me your I.O.U. for the amount I win, and believe me, my dear Count, I shall wish you a bon voyage very sincerely, whichever way you may travel for the future. Adieu! dear Count; I am indeed very sorry for you, upon my soul I am." The Count remained petrified, and sank back exhausted in his chair, his hands clasped to his head, his whole frame convulsed with agony. "I am totally, irretrievably ruined,” at length he groaned in stifled accents of despair and repentance. "Whither can I fly? I dare not face the world, I dare not see my wife or meet her family's reproaches. Oh, Heaven? and this is my wedding day! Cursed infatuation of play! the devil's net for souls. After a man is ruined at play there are only two things left for him to do, either to drown himself or to go to bed; the latter is the wiser plan, as the former may not produce much rest, and at any rate may always be postponed until the senses are somewhat refreshed. But the Count could not sleep, molten lead seemed to flow through his veins, iron pincers to tear his flesh; he rushed from the deserted room into the silent street, and ran he knew not whither, until, sinking under complicated feelings, he sat on the step of an obscure door-way. His eyes were inflamed, his whole frame convulsed with internal anguish. "Oh! for a drop of water to moisten my parched throat; there is not even a drop in the gutter, or I could kneel to drink it in humble gratitude. Death, merciful death, where art thou?" The church clock of the Holy Trinity chimed four; the Count sprung up as if it spoke some word of comfort to him. It was still summer, and the sun blazoned the sky with white and yellow bars of light; a refreshing breeze cooled the Count's burning brow. He started up; a sudden resolution prompted some change of thought and action: "It shall be so," he exclaimed, and again resumed his course towards the Barrier de l'Etvile. * * * * Time, with all its misery to the many, yet steals so rapidly away, that the past is soon forgotten in the prospects of the future. The Count never returned to his home. What arrangements he made ultimately were never known; what became of his wife he never knew. Autumn came and passed away. The end of autumn has always something sorrowful in it. Nature, who does so much good in spring and summer, who lightens your heart with so many choice gifts, and sends a smile in every opening flower, then seems tired of kindness, and November comes to remind us that nothing can be ever-green; the heavens are overcast and lowering; the leaves turn yellow, fall, and perish, blended with the dust of centuries. It is cold, and the body imparts a chill to the soul; everything around you seems to proclaim death's ascendancy, and man's littleness. It is at this season we need bustle and movement to prove we live and breathe; and especially in those thinly populated mountainous countries, which the decline of the year most deeply leaves in gloomy solitude; there everything contributes to mournful feelings; black masses of rock, clothed in murky garb, like tombs of death and silence, forbidding even the sun's rays to penetrate their damp recesses; the limpid stream that sparkled in the beams of summer light as it danced along the shining bed of pebbles, now is arrested in its youthful pranks, and presents a hoary head of age; the birds sit silent on their nests, the mountain goat seeks the shepherd's hut, the shepherd stirs his ember fire and tells some legend of hair breadth escapes as he blesses heaven for being safe in the bosom of his loved family, while everything around them presents a frightful solitude. It was then at the end of autumn that a little wicker chaise, drawn by the skeleton of a once noble horse, slowly rolled along the road from Spa to Malmédy. The interior of this humble vehicle was occupied by the conductor, who was also its owner, two passengers sat behind him; the one was a fat loyal German, smoking and singing all the way, the other a man enveloped in an ample cloak, his face concealed beneath a flapping hat, and almost lost to sight in his companion's copious clouds of smoke, sufficient to stifle any but a smoke-dried German fumigator. The driver luxuriously sniffed the fragrant odour, as he |