me or around me, or on either side, but above ; | gently upon its hinges, and was answered by a yes, above me there was a glorious and cloudless quiet groan. heaven, radiant with moonlight and studded with "Hush," whispered she, as if in addressing the stars, and upon that I could gaze, and wonder, and patient she were drowning the noise of the door; rejoice; gaze on the great glory of Providence;"hush, dear William, are ye in pain?" wonder at the marvelousness of its mystery, and "No, I'm in no pain now, but I hav'nt long to rejoice in those shining emblems of its mercy and live; don't cry now, Ellen, you've been always a its love! I began to speculate, not less upon the kind creature to me, and be sure I'll love ye to the promises and marvels which I fancied I saw re-last." corded in the sky, than upon those bright figures and parables in revelation, each in itself as much a beacon to the human spirit as particular stars are signals to the mariner upon the deep! And I am not the only one who has drawn a moral from the stars within a prison's walls--De Berenger watched them in France, through his grated bars. Ay, and now, reflected I, in the words of the French lyrist, "And now, what other star is that, That shoots, and shoots, and disappears ?" Perhaps it is emblematic of some poor fellow who, even to-day, may have been taken from a bright station in society to be thrust into this gloomy jail or perhaps it is indeed a type of death, and un mortel expire!" 66 It was a quiet autumn night; I had ventured out because I found a greater stillness prevailed than was usual within the walls of the prison; the hour was late, and I must have been perambulating a "weary while" from one end to the other of the racquet-ground and back, when a shooting star called to my mind the fanciful supposition of Berenger's un mortel expire." "If so be that a mortal dies," said I, musingly, "peace follow him to the grave." Several times I continued to pace backwards and forwards, dreaming awake, as it were, of death; its fit preparation and its appalling presence. Men often familiarise with the lips a sentence that has struck suddenly upon the mind, and I, as I strode over the prison ground, in thought kept repeating to myself the words which the shooting star had awakened in my memory, un mortel expire, un mortel expire." "My husband is dying," cried a woman who had approached me unnoticed and laid her hand upon my arm, "for God's sake come; come and administer to him the last consolations of religion!" "Un mortel expire; there is a man dying," said I, almost mechanically, surprised in the very tenor of my thought; "Heaven save his soul." "Holy virgin!" exclaimed the woman, "the clergyman is mad, and my poor husband 'll die widout a sacrament!" and she bounded away from me with the speed of despair. Her words brought me to my senses, and I soon arrested her progress. "Stop, stop," said I, "is your husband really dying?" "I fear so." "Is he a catholic?" I "Papa's not well," lisped a child who lay dreaming on the floor in one corner of the apartment. I tapped gently at the door. "Come in, sir; och, come in for the love of God!" sobbed the distracted wife. I entered; the husband, exhausted with the few words he had spoken, dozed half insensibly, and sat myself down by his bed. "He had better not be disturbed," whispered I. "No, sir, not now," said the wife; "but the docther 'll be here directly, and afther he's done wid him, ye'd better talk to him, sir. Nothing can save him now." I continued sitting by the bed; and in the interval which elapsed before the doctor's arrival, I took note of the interior of the room. Like all the apartments of the prison, it was small in its dimensions, about twelve feet square; the walls were green, here and there darkened with a spot of damp; there was no carpet on the floor, and either the fire was extinguished, or the embers were the wreck of some former day's warmth. A rushlight, twisted round with paper, and stuck in a bottle-there was no candlestick-threw a faint sad flicker over the chamber, like a meteor through mist, shedding mingled light and gloom. The bed on which the patient lay was of French make, but its curtains had long been pledged for food; the counterpane was gone too, and the upper sheet, so that the dingy and worn blankets were the invalid's only coverings. In one corner of the room, upon a mattress on the floor, lay two children-a boy and girl; the girl, about eight years of age, slept soundly; the boy, younger by three years, had just wakened, and seeing a stranger in the room, lay with his bright blue eyes fixed upon my figure in a wide inquisitive stare. The eldest daughter of the dying man, a pretty slim girl, some three years older than either of the other children, nursed an infant by the window, while the mother stood near the foot of the invalid's bed, and watched his pale lips as he lay breathing away the last moments of his life. For about ten minutes after I had sat down by the bed-side, there was a silent stillness in the room. The man continued dozing, and the poor wife, who seemed to fancy that in that short sleep her husband's suffering was lulled, controled her sobs and tears in her intense anxiety that he should rest peacefully. A gentle opening of the door, and a repetition of the same slight creak which I before noticed, announced the arrival of the doctor, but the patient did not move. The medical attendant stood as he had entered, and the wife did not change her earnest listening posture; she stood like a frail vessel between the Scylla and Charybdis of human destiny-her own heart vibrating betwixt hope and fear. The patient too dozed in a sort of doubt, whether he should wake to woo the fair | chose from the service a few of those passages spirit of existence, or sleep on till he became unit- which I thought would apply most consolingly. ed with the darker angel of death. So pondered "Godliness is great riches, if a man be content the Lord Thomas of the olden ballad between with that he hath: for we brought nothing into his two brides! the world, neither may we carry any thing out." For about two minutes, this sort of awful quiet-1 Tim. vi. prevailed in the room; it was interrupted, and the prisoner awakened, by the faint cry of the child whom his eldest daughter was nursing. The patient, who had evidently been dreaming, seeing me as he awoke, suddenly started and enquired, "Are you the man?" "What man, William, dear? who do you mean?" said the wife, bending over him; "this is our good clergyman, and as you were ill, I thought you might like to talk to him." "Thank you. Ellen," said the prisoner faintly, I thought it was your"What, William ?" asked the wife gaspingly, as if fearful of what was coming. There were one or two sentences which I avoided, fearful of raising in his mind an angry feeling towards those who had imprisoned him. Such as -"Whoso hath this world's goods, and seeth his brother in need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him ?” -1 St. John, iii. During the time I went through the service, there was not the slightest interruption; from the unsleeping smiling infant by the sufferer's side, to the agonised mother by his bed, all were mute listeners; and when the sacrament was administered, the prisoner took the bread, and drank of the wine, with the fervent earnestness of a Christian, who put all trust in God, and who hoped to be redeemed by his Son! When it was all over, he seemed much comforted, but his serenity was suddenly disturbed, and by an incident the most affecting I ever beheld. His little boy, who had remained kneeling with his hands clasped in most lamb-like innocence at the foot of his bed, as if glad to be released from his cramped position, let fall his arms upon the couch, and crawling over to his father, kissed him on the cheek, and asked, Father, are you going to die?" The poor man pressed the boy to his bosom, and sobbed out "Yes!" "Ah! I forgot; then, sir, I will take it alone," said he, turning to me; "but, Ellen, bring our The effect was electric; the young half-conchildred to my bed-side, and do you sit by me; Iscious child burst into tears-the mother buried would have you all see that I trusted in Christ to the last." The woman turned away her head; the tears rolled rapidly over her cheeks, and she for a moment hid her face in her handkerchief. Then she bent over the mattrass on which her children lay, and the little boy smiled, and asked "What is it, mother ?" The poor woman now uttered a sob, and the girl awoke. She then motioned her to approach with the infant. The girl advanced. The doctor sat himself in her vacant chair. The prisoner watched me as I opened a small pocket prayer book; moved towards the cupboard for the fragment of bread upon its shelf, poured into a glass some wine which had been sent to him medicinally, and consecrated both in the customary solemn man ner. During this time the mother had taken the infant from her daughter's hands, and laid it by the side of its father. She had placed the young boy kneeling at the foot of the bed, (on it,) and the child, as all children are taught, closed together the palms of his little hands, and held them up towards heaven. The wife herself knelt down by the bed, with one daughter on either side of her, and the doctor raised his hat from his head, and held it over his face. With a tone as solemn as I could command, I commenced the sacred duty which I had to perform, with a short, but earnest exhortation to the dying man. I then VOL. XXVII. NOVEMBER, 1835.-66 her face in the bed clothes-the younger girl ran to her mattrass on the floor, and flung herself upon it in hysteric grief. I found my own fortitude failing, and the doctor, unable to control his emotions, ran out of the room. I followed hastily, and called him back. "What can you do for him?" said I. "Nothing! he is dying gradually, and is beyond the reach of medicine. I would help him if I could, but he is your patient now, not mine, and such scenes I cannot stand." The words had scarcely passed his lips, when a clap of thunder, the loudest I ever heard in this country, burst over the prison, and went roaring round the walls with the strange strong echoes which they return to all loud sounds. A shriek followed, and we both ran back into the room. Wild fulfilment of a fearful destiny! Strange closing of a sad career! The prisoner was in loud, strong, screaming hysterics. The wife snatched the children from the bed, and laid them upon the ground, and they all huddled together upon their mattrass, in silent, but deep terror. "Oh, dear! Oh, mercy! It's all me," cried the woman despairingly, as she hurried to the water jug, for the usual remedy for hysterics. The doctor held her back-"Water will not do now," said he, "you must let nature take its course." “Oh, God! oh, God! I fear I have killed my husband. Oh, my poor William!" She turned back to the couch. Meanwhile some dozen prisoners, men and women, alarmed by the shrieks, had gathered in the room, and now stood round the bed. The thunder without continued rolling over the building, growing more appalling as its echoes grew fainter, and its sounds diminished, until they likened the groaning away of the human spirit. More than one start, and shudder, and scream, did it awaken in the chamber; but none screamed like the dying man. He still remained in convulsive hysterics; his shrieks, shrill and loud at first, seemed to exhaust themselves, growing fainter and fainter, until they died away in a sort of gurgle, which brought the white foam to the sufferer's lips. Then it frothed for a moment, and its bubbles burst and disappeared; and at the same time the pulse stopped in his heart, and the sense left his spirit, and light was extinguished in the prisoner's brain. His wife stood there a lonely widow, while his children were left orphans, to the protection of the Lord. * * * * maiden name) had been, many years back, a clothes salesman, in a respectable way of business, in Dublin; and much of his trade consisted in the outfit of sailors leaving or coming into port. He was a widower, and Ellen being his only child, he did not suffer her to be much away from him. In young girlhood, she used to play about the shop; and when she began to ripen into the woman, it was part of her occupation to wait behind the counter. Old Maurice was doubtless fond of her, so far as his notions of affection went; but he was by nature a fierce harsh man, and his daughter lived more in fear of him than love. But young warm spirits do not long endure loneliness of heart; there is a well of sympathy in the human soul, that in youth does not remain long unstirred; feelings fresh and early spring up in the fervour and loveliness of affection;feelings- "that bind The plain community of guileless hearts When the room was cleared of its idle guests, Ellen Maurice could not love her father as she and the poor woman, who had long been prepared longed to love, but she soon felt that she must for her husband's death, although not for its com- love somebody. She could not endure to live, ing in so awful a form, had in some measure re-and think and feel, in the selfishness of the heart's gained her composure, I enquired of her why she solitude. Moreover, she was not without opporhad charged herself with being the cause of the tunities of choice, if in truth she had not been prisoner's last strong fit. rather fastidious. 66 Oh, sir," she replied, "it was very unfortunate, and quite furtherest from my heart to think he would have been so strangely affected; but you know, sir, he said he had had a dream, and it seemed to hang upon his mind, so when you left the room with the docther, I just asked him what it was, and he told me. Ellen, dear,' said he, 'I dreamt that old Wentworth Stokes was not dead, but that he had come home from over the seas and'-'My own dream, William! My very own dream last night;' said I hastily; and then the loud clap of thunder came; and my poor husband, who was, like all sailors, superstitious, took it, I think, as some fearful confirmation of his vision-for he started, and shrieked, and fell into those wild, dreadful hysterics, which took him out of the world." Many a joyful and jolly tar would buy a jacket or a neckcloth at her father's shop, for the sake of being served and smiled upon by Ellen ;-but then a common sailor was below her in station; and as yet none of them had made what is called "an impression." But by and by her heart had to undergo a regular course of siege from the attacks made upon it, not by a common sailor, but by William Moystyn, the handsome and good tempered mate of one of the government transports in the bay. He was of good courage too, and he reduced the fortress so, that poor Ellen yielded at, or rather without, discretion. And so William Moystyn and Ellen Maurice were now fairly betrothed to each other by their own promises, and in their own hearts; but the poor girl feared her father too much to ask his consent; and their The poor woman's tears flowed afresh; and I innocent wooing was carried on in secret. At left her for a time, telling her that I would return last troops were ordered for embarkation on board in an hour or two; and first biding her pray to the transport, and the vessel herself was put unGod, according to the dictates of her own heart der sailing orders for the West Indies. William and conscience, to calm for her the troubled wa-sailed in her, having first bought his outfit of ters of affliction, and enable her to support her Ellen, and promised to return a captain, and ask her father's consent to their marriage. And in trials! I then sent the nurse from the prison infirmary, this I suppose there would have been no diffito pay the requisite attentions to the dead, direct-culty; old Maurice would have allowed his ing her to leave the room as soon as she should daughter to marry a captain; but he would have have performed her sad duty. I deemed it well been enraged at the thought of her being in love that the sacred sorrows of the widow, and the or- with a mate. Ellen could not see the wisdom of phans' first tears of mourning, should be suffered this. And so Ellen continued in her love-though to flow undisturbed. Still was my curiosity un- somewhat in sorrow-on account of the absence satisfied as to the cause of the prisoner's hysteric of its object; a sort of memory of fondness once shock, and it had been little enlightened by the indulged; flowers of affection which it was the dream that "Old Wentworth Stokes had come duty of constancy to keep in bloom. home from over the seas." The mystery enveloped in this sentence was afterwards cleared up; and I shall unfold it to the reader in the following arrative. "Dai bei rami scendea, Soon after Moystyn's departure, an accession The father of Ellen Maurice (the widow's of fortune accrued to Ellen and her parent. A Once in London, old Maurice set himself down in peace, as he said, to enjoy his prosperity; and, having nothing else to do, he thought of busying himself in finding a husband for Ellen, whom he now considered an heiress. The first requisite for his daughter's spouse, in his idea, would be money, the next, a sociable power of companionship; in short, a person who had wherewith to pay for his grog,-the will to drink, -and the wit to relish it in evening conversations with old Maurice. relative in England had died and left between | destiny. Poor Ellen was now alone in the world; father and daughter a neat independent income; left as no other young and attractive child of whereupon the pride of old Maurice became nature was ever, perhaps, forsaken in her inexmightily raised, and he sold off his old clothes, perience before. She felt no grief for her huspacked up his traps, and, with characteristic pa- band's absence; her heart was too often artlessly triotism, left his country the moment he found and, as she believed, almost innocently-wanhimself in a condition to live comfortably in it. dering after her early love: but she found herself Away he started in the first steamer, without desolate, a flower with no shelter from the storm, bothering himself to bid good-b'ye to his friends; -a reed that might be shaken in the wind. and having passed the ordeal of a rough sea and For the first few days after her husband's dea longish journey through Holyhead, &c., (every parture, she whiled away her time in watching, Irishman knows the route,) he found himself, one from the window of her apartment, the vessels fine evening, just in time to dine with his daugh- that were continually passing the bay. It was an ter at the Swan-with-two-Necks in Lad-lane. occupation that more than any other filled her mind with thoughts in which she ought not to have indulged, but it seemed thrown in her way, and she could not resist. Often it awakened tears for the love and memory of a being for whom they should no longer have dared to flow. One morning, after a fitful night, in which poor Ellen's dreams had been hardly less stormy than the bellowing waves that ever and anon wakened her as they dashed under the windows, the lonely and unhappy girl approached her casement and gazed upon the ocean before her raging like an angry Maurice had brought with him an introduction to lion, with a sudden and mysterious foreboding a person who was to him described as "a respect- that those turbulent billows had been working able merchant," residing in the borough of South-out a passage in her destiny, and were by some wark, and by name Mr. Wentworth Stokes. This wild agency commingled with her future fate. Mr. Wentworth Stokes was a gentleman who As she cast her eye over the waters, all unstilled might have said to his forty-ninth year what Ken- as they tossed, and ever bristling with the white nedy the poet said to the year 1833foam, she saw numerous vestiges of wreck, and knew that more than one noble fabric of human industry had been shattered, and that many lives must have been lost. One vessel had been within It was near Christmas, and Mr. Stokes was fifty! sight totally wrecked, and boats of such as dared So much for his age: in other respects he was venture were now putting off with a view of rensuch a man as Maurice wanted for his daughter. dering assistance while there was yet a chance. He said he had money; he proved he had a plea- But, with the exception of one person who had sant, plausible tongue; and all that Christmas he been brought on shore, all the crew of that vessel drank gin and water with old Maurice during the had perished. Ellen's curiosity now prompted long evenings. Poor Ellen! as her heart was her to enquire the name of the ship that had been not much engaged in these proceedings, I have so totally destroyed. The answer was, it was the not forced her to make a frequent personal ap-"ELLEN;" all the crew were drowned along with pearance; but when new year's day came, she was united in the bands of matrimony to Mr. Wentworth Stokes, in St. George's church in the borough first, and afterwards by a priest of her own religion. "Thou art gone, old year, to thy fathers, Almost immediately after her marriage, her father died; and Mr. Wentworth Stokes, having at his disposal the property both of parent and child, and being, as before described, "a respectable merchant," immediately applied it to the purpose of freighting a ship to the West Indies, of which he determined to be supercargo himself. Either there must have been something wrong in Mr. Stokes' character, or else a merchant of fifty feels less compunction in leaving a newly-married bride than would a young high-born gentleman. Certain it is, that, as soon as he had engaged an active and intelligent captain to take charge of his vessel, he conveyed Mrs. Stokes to Herne Bay, and having procured her a first floor in a row of houses facing the sea, bade her farewell, and proceeded to Gravesend, there to embark on board his own ship for a tropic clime. Strangely indeed runs the current of human the owner; the captain was the only person saved, he was at the. But Ellen did not hear the rest: her wild delirious sensations overpowered her, and she had fainted away. Her presentiment was surely fulfilled-" She was a widow!" As soon as they had recovered her, she sent for the captain of her husband's ship, who was at the neighbouring inn, and who, on learning that she was the owner's wife, immediately attended her summons. A few minutes and his knock was heard at the door: a strange foreboding tremor pervaded her frame as he ascended the stairs. The door opened,-Ellen raised her eyes and started to see before her the figure of WILLIAM MOYSTYN! * William Moystyn and Ellen had been married some years, meeting with occasional reverses, but industriously working their way through the world. William was religiously inclined, and a man of much faith in the mercy of his Redeemer: what he suffered, he endured patiently; when he was blessed, he returned his blessing unto God. He lived happily, though sometimes hardly, with citement, and surprise. It was broken by the fall of one of the jury from his chair in a fit of paralysis. He was an old man, and had attended from the rules. "He had better be taken home," said the coroner. "Who knows where he lives?" "I know who he is," said one of the turnkeys; "but I must look in the books to see where he lives." He turned into the lobby and brought the book back. "John Miller, alias Wentworth Stokes, Melina-place." his wife; and he rejoiced in the affections of a parent for his children. He was of that very numerous English class of "poor but honest." Ellen's property was all gone,-gone with her former worthless husband (for it turned out that he was worthless) and his ship,-and Moystyn had nothing but what he earned. One day at the end of a hard quarter, he was arrested, he could not tell for what; he did not even know by whom. On the back of the writ upon which he was taken, was the name of Miller, but he knew nobody of that name. The attorney who had issued the writ was not to be found, and, as far as Wentworth Stokes!" cried the whole room in that action went, Moystyn to the day of his death astonishment. "Wentworth Stokes!" shrieked never discovered who was the plaintiff. It took Ellen, (who had been dismissed after her evihim, however, in the first instance, to Horsemon-dence, but was then standing in the lobby,) ger-lane jail, and as soon as he could get money "where, where ?-let me see." And, as they enough he moved upon it to the King's Bench pointed to the door, she rushed in, and identified prison through the form of a habeas. When the body of her first husband! there, one or two fresh suits were commenced against him by real creditors; detainers were sent down, and he became sadly embarrassed. Long time he tried to battle against misfortune; but, after his furniture was sold, and his wife and family turned into the streets, he almost despaired in his penniless condition, and gave himself up for lost. Ellen-fate-persecuted as she wasjoined him with her children in his jail, and there they subsisted upon a sum of five shillings per week, allowed Moystyn from some seaman's society, three and sixpence of county money, and whatever little pittance his wife and his eldest daughter could earn by their needle. The family, however, suffered a great deal from illness: the prison at one time became full, and they had to pay five shillings per week to a chum ; and at last their indigence and destitution became excessive and miserable. Moystyn could never raise money enough to go through the Insolvent Court, and his imprisonment dragged on year after year, wasting his constitution and consuming his frame, so that Ellen, who nursed him with affection to the last, might truly be said to have joined him in a prison like an angel of kind comfort to tend him on his journey to the grave. How he died it was my fate sorrowfully to witness; but the denouement to Ellen's history did not transpire till the next day. The day after my last visit to him, Moystyn was carried out in a coffin. Poor fellow! death had released him from his creditors. An inquest was held upon his body, as is customary when men die in prison. The jury in such cases invariably consists of prisoners, some of them taken from inside the walls, others chosen from the rules. On the melancholy occasion in question, I was called in to give evidence, and to witness, as it turned out, one of the strangest and most terrorstriking events that ever occurred, perhaps, within the charmed pale of coincidence. In the course of the enquiry, I detailed to the jury the leading features of the story I have just narrated, and it commanded the most earnest attention from all present. When I had concluded it, with the sad portrayal of the scene in the deceased's room where I administered the sacrament to him the evening before, there was a momentary silence,a stillness, the effect of mingled sympathy, ex "Poor William! then,” exclaimed she, "our dreams are both fulfilled. He had, indeed, come home from over the seas!" But how he had come-or whence-or in what manner he had escaped from the wreck of his vessel, still remains untold, for Wentworth Stokes never spoke again. It appeared that he had been for some years a prisoner in the rules under his right name of John Miller, living upon a small income which he had preferred remaining in prison to giving up; and this (when the facts were stated) his creditors, instead of dividing amongst themselves, generously consented to assign to the hapless Ellen and orphan family. It will keep them from a recurrence of the poverty they have so long patiently endured. From the London Metropolitan. DRYBURGH ABBEY BY MOONLIGHT. The Muse of Scotland leaning over the tomb of Scott, her head crowned with cypress, and a harp lying at her feet, solemn music is heard in the distance, after which the Muse repeats the following INVOCATION. Ye splendid visions of the shadowy night, |