villages, and trust to chance for subsistence as they thus pushed onward,) they resolved to have a brush with their old foes, the Roundheads, once more, and to revenge the death of their ally.

'Sir Thomas, accordingly, commending the steward to his place of refuge, put his party instantly in motion, and being well acquainted with every turn in the lane, led them onwards by the way in which the old man had just escaped. Striking then into the main road, they made for the scene of the exploits we have just narrated. Deep did they drive the spur-rowel into the panting sides of the poor jades they bestrode, till they arrived near the entrance of the chase or park in which the Grange is situate. They then proceeded with something more of deliberation and caution; and, having entered its precincts, they drew up their little force, and sent out scouts to ascertain the situation of their foes.

'As Sir Thomas Thornhill's party was small, and the Cromwellians were never to be despised as foes, it was necessary to go warily to work with them, even although they were at the present time something out of their usual state of effective order. The scouts found them with their mishaps in some measure repaired; as, although it had taken them some time to effect, they had succeeded in capturing almost all their stray steeds. Those men who had been dismounted by their own mistake, in consequence of the firing upon the horses as they broke cover, they intended to mount behind some of their comrades, a practice much used in the wars of the time, even by the great Gustavus Adolphus of the North.

'Sir Thomas himself reconnoitred them from the cover at the end of the vista, where he had brought his party up. Rapidly, and with as little noise as possible, he drew out his troop into the open glade before him. They were shadowed in the moonlit space by the trees under which they formed. Putting himself at their head, with one wave of his good weapon, he set spurs to his horse, and led them upon their hated foes.

'The Cromwellian sergeant (who, doubtless, was thinking of the promotion he conceived awaited him in the regiment, by the deathvacancy which had that night been made at the Grange, instead of the promotion he was about to get, and which was most likely equal to a brevet of immortality in the infernal regions,) was just at this moment striding down the front rank of the troop, in order to mount his own steed, and give the order to his men. As he reached their right, he heard a sudden exclamation of alarm, and the thundering sound of the rapid approach of a body of horse. He turned round, and beholding his party charged in flank by a troop of cavalry, roared to his men to mount, and flung himself upon his steed. Before his followers had time to obey the order, the Cavaliers were upon them, and ove went man and horse with the impetuosity of the shock. Sir Thomas gave them small time to repair their confusion, but having them thus at advantage, his party cut them down like cattle in the shambles. Scarcely a trooper of Cromwell escaped to tell the tale of that nightskirmish; almost to a man they were cut to pieces within a few yards of the place in which they had thus unexpectedly been assailed.

'To return to the old steward: he continued his true duty and devoted care towards the child of his murdered master and mistress by carefully tending it whilst in this place of refuge, and where he thought

it safest for some time to remain; performing towards it the office of nurse, and bringing it up by hand with as much tenderness and attention, perhaps, as if it had been thus reared under its own parent's eye. After a while he removed himself and the infant to his beloved old Grange, and there remained in safety, and unmolested for some time. Yet so fearful was the old man of being discovered and interrupted in his retreat, that he seemed to dread intercourse with all mankind; and, in order to scare the curious from attempting to pry into his secret, and the half destroyed mansion, he not unfrequently equipped himself in some of the old armour he found in the apartments of the Grange, and was once or twice seen by the few affrighted peasantry who happened to pass that way at night, stealing about the grounds, and stalking around the banks of the moat, as though the dead corpse of his murdered master, thus, "in complete steel," "revisited at times the glimpses of the moon," and loved to contemplate the surface of those waters, beneath whose waves his carcass lay rotting amid mud and weeds, to fatten the eels and lazy carp with which its depths abounded.

'And thus did the place obtain so dreadful a reputation that at last not a peasant would consent to approach it alone within half a mile, either by night or day; and the old man enjoyed, together with its rightful heir, sole and undisturbed possession of the building.

Meantime the child grew apace under the care of its somewhat eccentric old nurse, who indeed appeared to have taken a fresh lease of his life, for the sole purpose of being its guardian and preserver.

'It was some few years, then, after the transactions we have narrated, and during the Protectorate of Cromwell, that a wild and haggardlooking individual, with hair and beard white as the snow-flake, and descending below his waist, his whole appearance more like some spotted and livid corpse just disinterred from the earth, and his emaciated limbs only half covered by the tattered remains of an old embroidered suit, which, apparently, from its remains of rich lacing, had belonged to a person of condition, appeared one evening at the portal of Falcon Hall, on the borders of Derbyshire. He demanded to be admitted on important matters into the presence of Sir Thomas Thornhill, the proprietor of the domain. In his hand he led a well-grown boy, of about ten years of age. The child, like himself, was ill clad, in rude and uncouth-fashioned clothes, coarsely sewn together, and in look was as wild as his companion, staring with surprise at all around him, as if he had been but newly caught in the woods, and clinging to the tattered cloak of his aged protector as though he feared to find an enemy in every face he looked on.

The old man was admitted into the presence of Sir Thomas, who, together with his family, were seated in one of those oak-pannelled apartments we now very rarely meet with (unprofaned by over-civilized taste and barbarian hands,) in the buildings of that period. The wildness of his appearance and the singularity of his address somewhat startled and surprised the inmates. Almost blind with age, he walked up to the table beside which the baronet was seated, discussing the merits of a flagon of Rhenish, or some such liquor, and after staring him hard and anxiously in the face for some little time, thus addressed him,

"Art thou-tell me truly-art thou Sir Thomas Thornhill, of Falcon Hall."

"I have reason to believe myself such person, old man," replied Sir Thomas, and smiling at the look of surprised alarm with which the children who had collected around stared upon this apparition. "What am I to consider has procured me a visit from so peremptory and unceremonious a querist ?"

"Alas! then, it is not the man I sought," muttered the insane looking old man, falling back, and clasping the little boy to his breast. "Woe is me! this is not the man I hoped to find here. It must be his son, though," he exclaimed aloud. "Sir Thomas Thornhill, how long ago is it since your father died?"

"Seven years ago he died in the field of ——, in Flanders,” answered Sir Thomas, willing to humour the eccentricity of the stranger, whose manner interested him.

"Did you ever hear him speak of meeting with Stephen Gurney, the steward of the Moated Grange, one night in Knaresborough Forest, as he was escaping from Cromwell's power; and on which night he and his party encountered and cut to pieces a detachment of the Parliamentarian horse in Berrywell Chase ?"

"Often have I heard him tell of that meeting and skirmish, old man ; and also how the faithful Gurney had saved the only child of Sir Walter Coleville on that night of horrors, and was making for Newbold Cottage, in order to conceal himself and charge. Since my return to this part of the world, at his urgent request many times repeated to me, that if ever I reached my native country I would seek for that old man and child, I have accordingly visited those parts, but I found the cottage in ruins; and after spending some time in searching the neighbourhood around, I could hear no tidings of any such persons ever having been seen there. Indeed I had almost forgotten the whole matter till you thus have brought it again to my remembrance."

"That was a fault," said the old man abruptly: "you should have searched far and near, sea and land, to find out the fate of one so left and uncared for in those wild times; and whose father had fought side by side with your own sire against the fiends in human form who desolated their mother country, and murdered their lawful King."

"I tell you, old man," said Sir Thomas, "that I did make inquiry for some time. I sought the child in the neighbourhood of the Grange, and was told that no such infant had ever been heard of since the night on which Sir Walter Coleville was murdered, and that the old butler was dead. The Grange itself, and the whole domain around, was then, and is now, in the hands of the Lords Commissioners, and I therefore felt satisfied no such infant remained within it. I conclude the child perished on that night, or soon afterwards, for it was unlikely, although I understood the steward had been seen hovering about, that an infant could have survived in the charge of so unskilful a nurse, and in times so unsettled."

"The domain," continued the steward, “was, and is, sure enough, in the hands of those miscreants, whom God will doubtless at his own season utterly confound and destroy; but the ruinous Grange," and the throat of the old man rattled with a kind of chuckle as he said it, "I held for its rightful lord and owner, as it was considered by the consciencestricken cowards into whose hands the lands have fallen not safe to risk their precious carcases in a residence which was wont ever and anon to fly piecemeal into the air, and was also assuredly, they hesitated not to

affirm, tenanted by a legion of devils. The only time they ever attempted to take possession, I fired a barrel of gunpowder in the apart ment beneath the one which the men they sent had appropriated as their sleeping-room, and, much as I respect every stone in the walls of the Grange, I that night spoiled the wrought ceilings, and brought down more than one stack of chimneys in the wing of the building, which had been till then undemolished, about their accursed ears. Those who escaped this reception so intimidated their employers with the horrors they pretended to have seen, that they have not since found others willing to undergo a second night's occupation. My stewardship is now over," he continued, looking upward; "laud be to God that he hath allowed me to retain my office thus long! Here, Sir Thomas Thornhill, is the rightful heir of the Moated Grange; I consign him to your charge. I thought, in bringing my aged limbs thus far to your gates, to have delivered him into the hands of your father; but I am content as it is. For many years beyond my date of life I have held death resolutely at bay for this child's sake, but I find him near me at last, and for some days I have turned over in my mind where safely to bestow him. Putting resolution into my limbs, I have succeeded in bringing him here. Sir Thomas Thornhill, I am about to die. Pledge me your word that you will receive him and protect him till the time comes (and it will be here now soon,) when God shall restore this land to happiness, and this boy to his own."

"The aged man was correct in his prognosis; the spirit that had possessed him (now he saw his darling charge received by the family to whom he thus intrusted him,) rapidly failed, and his life seemed in a flickering state, like a burnt-out candle. He placed in the hands of Sir Thomas a parchment, on which he had written the account of the transactions from which this story has been taken; and he then asked to be conveyed to bed. The child, who could not understand half of what had taken place, would not be persuaded that he was about to change his dearly-beloved old attendant for the uncertain kindness of strangers, and refused to be removed. Sir Thomas himself never left them during that night; and before day broke, with the child clasped to his skeleton breast, the faithful steward had breathed his last.

O good old man! how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world!

'It was long before they could persuade the poor child to leave the body of the only companion almost he ever remembered, and who be refused to believe would never awake again. When at length (during an interval of his violence and grief,) the child slept by the skeleton corpse, and they carefully removed him, and buried it, his distraction was so great at being unable to discover whither it had been conveyed, as to endanger his life for some weeks. Ultimately he consented to associate with the daughter of his new protector, Sir Thomas Thornhill, (a beautiful little girl about his own age,) and transferred his regards to her. We find him afterwards a great favourite, and fighting bravely with Montrose during his splendid campaigns in the North. He afterwards married Miss Thornhill, and recovering his property, lived to a good old age, and died at the Grange, leaving several children behind him.'

THE AUTO DA-FE.

A LEGEND OF SPAIN.

BY THOMAS INGOLDSBY, ESQ.

CANTO II.

THERE is not a nation in Europe but labours
To toady itself, and to humbug its neighbours-
'Earth has no such folks--no folks such a city,
So great or so grand, or so fine, or so pretty,'
Said Louis Quatorze,

'As this Paris of ours!'

Mr. Daniel O'Connell exclaims, 'By the Pow'rs,
Ould Ireland's on all hands admitted to be

The first flow'r of the earth, and first Gim of the sea!'-
Mr. Bull will inform you that Neptune,-a lad he,
With more of affection than rev'rence, styles 'Daddy,'-—
Did not scruple to 'say
To Freedom, one day,'

That if ever he changed his aquatics for dry land,
His home should be Mr. B's' Tight little Island.'-
He adds, too, that he,

The said Mr. B.,

Of all possible Frenchmen can fight any three;

That with no greater odds, he knows well how to treat them, To meet them, defeat them, and beat them, and eat them.In Italy, too, 'tis the same to the letter,

There each Lazzarone

Will cry to his crony,

'See Naples, then die !* and the sooner the better!'— The Portuguese say, as a well understood thing,

'Who has not seen Lisbont has not seen a good thing!'While an old Spanish proverb runs glibly as under,

QUIEN NO HA VISTO SEVILLA

NO HA VISTO MARAVILLA!'

'He who ne'er has view'd Seville has ne'er view'd a Wonder!' And from all I can learn this is no such great blunder,

In fact, from the river,

The fam'd Guadalquivir,

Where many a knight's had cold steel through his liver,‡

Rio verde, Rio verde, &c.'

'Glassy water, glassy water,

Down whose current clear and strong,

Chiefs, confused in mutual slaughter,

Moor and Christian, roll along.'-Old Spanish Romance.