you to heaven! Blanche, after having prostrated herself before the holy man, did as she was commanded. Fa-haï then pointed with his finger to the white silk, and pronounced aloud the words of the sacred spell. At once the silk was changed into a luminous cloud, which gently embraced Blanche, and raised her up to the ninth heaven, all radiant with brilliancy and glory.

6

"Fa-haï then took a piece of blue silk, and having extended it on the earth, summoned Hán-wen: My wise disciple,' said he, step on this piece of blue silk, that I may raise you to the abode of the gods, to share the happiness of your spouse.' Han-wen having prostrated himself, did as he was commanded; the spell was again spoken, and the blue silk became an azure cloud, which embracing Han-wen raised him majestically through the air. At the same moment brilliant vapours, exhaling balmy odours, were spread over the sky, and the two groups of luminous clouds that bore Hán-wen

and Blanche, floating toward the west, gradually disappeared."

The fate of the remaining personages blue fairy retired to " of the tale may be briefly told. The the grotto of pure air," where she still continues, preparing herself, by the practice of virtue, for eternal happiness. Mongkias married his cousin, and proved, by his eminent wisdom, that he was the incarnation of Wen-sing, (the star of intelligence.) He became the father of a numerous family, and all his descendants, by their virtuous conduct, proved themselves worthy of their celestial origin.

We feel grateful to Professor Julien for having introduced us to a new and interesting class of fictions; and we claim, as a proof of our devotion to the cause of literature, and of our zeal to provide at once instruction and amusement for our readers, that the DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE has been the first periodical to bring the popular literature of China before the British nation.

We know that all belief in supernatural appearances is scouted by the intellect of the age, as a weak and childish superstition, the tales of the ghost and the spectre have been banished even from the nursery; the reign of terror, of goblin and hobgoblin is past; and those spectral appearances, which walked abroad in the gloomy darkness of a benighted age, have fled before the dawning of the day of knowledge. The churchyard yawns no more to send forth the sheeted dead, and the departed repose peaceably in their graves. We do not intend to set ourselves in opposition to the incredulity of the age-we mean to state a narrative of simple facts, and leave every one to form his own conclusion. For the truth of the facts, we think that we can vouch the circumstances are drawn from the letters of parties concerned, which still exist in the possession of their relatives and descendants.

Our tale is of the western frontier of civilized America, where whole days' journeys of waste forest and prarie are scantily relieved by the log huts, scattered at distant intervals. At the period of our narrative, this solitude was far more gloomy and unbroken than at present, the country being more thinly peopled, and the traces of the power of man far more narrowly confined to the line extending down the eastern coast. Many vast tracts of wood and waste were then wholly untracked, and without trace of human foot; for the red man, the native of the wilderness, glides, noiseless as the panther, through the tangled cane brake and cotton wood, leaving no path behind. No wonder then, that to the regiments in the English service, who visited these deserts in the prosecution of a war which all true Englishmen deplore, these woods seemed ancient as night," and filled with the unbroken gloom of primeval solitude.

To keep up communication between the Canada frontier and the line of march to the southward and west, as well as to hold intercourse with friendly tribes of Indians, who assembled at given rallying points, picquets were often pushed far into the woods, for a short time, and then withdrawn to the main army. These outposts soon learned from the people of the country their habit of building temporary log huts, in place of lodging under canvass; and one of those log huts, long deserted by the original framers, sheltered the party who are concerned in our narrative.

At

The melancholy of unbroken solitude may fall upon a solitary mind with deep weight; but if that mind be a strong one, cannot crush nor bend it. There is a fulness of sensation approaching the pleasure derived from devotional ecstacy-the dominion of reverence which is unmingled with the abject crouching of slavish fear. no moment do we feel more forcibly, even in the very holiness of the unbroken stillness, the utter feebleness of man in the hand of Him who made the night; nor can we wish that feeling broken by aught that lives or moves; for in the pride of our strength, and the mad bustle of mankind busied in nothings, these thoughts are rare, and seldom, indeed, comes their power over us. But there are times when the loneliness of night and nature, far from awakening sensations which the heart receives gladly, are merely the heralds of deep and mournful solitude of mind. This solitude is the more insupportably painful from being of mind only, for these times are when we are with those to whom the full voices of nature that pierce our own heart speak not. Perhaps there is no desolation more entire than the neighbourhood, at such times, of created beings who dream not of the glory of the heavens until their cur

tains are parted as a scroll, and the broad lightning bursts from them with death upon its wings. These were nearly Henry Sherwood's feelings when sitting in a lonely log-house, near a pine forest on the Canada frontier: vainly did his friend and sole companion, Captain William Dromond, a gallant Irishman, the most thoughtless of the gay, and in danger foremost amongst the headlong, try to arouse his friend to his own pitch of buoyant cheerfulness. It was a clear moonlight night, and the cabin (one of the deserted picquet log-houses before described) was built so loosely that the bright beams of the moon streamed through a dozen open places between the logs, and clearly shone upon the small table in the outer room, at which these two friends were sitting; a smaller inner chamber was all the further accommodation of this log-hut; and in this they had laid their loose equipments, and made such arrangements for sleeping as the nature of the place rendered practicable. The two officers were bound southward by west from the Canada frontier, to hold a palaver with friendly Indians, from whom they were yet a long day's journey distant, and for the last two days they had bivouacked in the woods, and journeyed on without meeting a single living soul. But this was nothing to two men experienced in camping out and the arts of a woodland life, and who knew these woods thoroughly well; so that the dreariness of solitude, which might, in one less used to it, have accounted for Lieutenant Sherwood's melancholy, was to him an every-day companion. But this dreariness seemed to brood over their night's lodging-place in an uncommon degree, and might almost be seen in the clear, silent moonlight, whilst the howlings of a panther every now and then, scarce heard in the vast distance, merely shewed how great a change the very slightest sound could make in utter stillness.

There was, moreover, something in the officer's mind which aided these impressions, and every sally of the merriment of his frank companion, only drew his thoughts farther back upon the friends he had left in England; those who had been long unheard of, or others dead for years. It is hard, even for a disposition like

Dromond's, long to keep up the ball of merriment against the melancholy of a companion, which only becomes deeper the more he seeks to enliven it; and after half humming a song to himself, he sank gradually into a kind of waking reverie, which was uninterrupted; for Sherwood had long been silent.

No

The door of the smaller room of the hut was exactly opposite to the outer door of the larger room in which they were sitting, which outer door was the only entrance to the cabin. To avoid the blast, which eddied keenly between these doors, the table was drawn as much to one side as possible, close to the remains of the old hearth, on which they had piled a heap of blazing logs. This fire, and the moonbeams streaming in, lighted the whole room, though very unequally. In this position they sat for some minutes in silence, when the outer door opened, and a tall figure, in officer's uniform, entered with steady but noiseless steps, and approached the fire-place. sign of his approach had been heard, though even a hare's foot would have sounded far in the deep stillness. The figure was of a young man, and the countenance pale and wasted as if by long sickness. The features, in health, would have been finely moulded; but they wore an expression which might make even a stout heart shudder. It was the anxious, hopeless distress of madness, mingled with so much of the malignity peculiar to maniacs, that had not their souls felt the chilling certainty, that nothing of material substance stood before them, Sherwood and Dromond would have sprung to their arms; but both of them have often since declared, that they were spell-bound by the look which was rivetted upon them, and which entered their very souls. They have said that the agony which they endured under that glance-freezing utterance, but holding their eyes chained to the unearthly face, exceeded what they could have imagined sensation capable of. After looking thus steadily upon them for some moments, the figure slowly raised some weapon, upon which the moonshine glinimered, gazed on it, laughed inaudibly, with the revolting demoniac joy of insanity, and passed into the inner room.

The instant that they were relieved

from the presence of the apparition, Dromond's presence of mind returned so perfectly that he thought all had been a dream, and starting up, flew into the inner chamber to see if it really contained any one. Nothing was there but bright moonlight and silence, and he would have reasoned the matter away, (for he was a confirmed sceptic in all supernatural appearances, and had held many arguments with his friend on this question,) had he not found Sherwood, upon his return into the outer room, looking upon vacancy with fixed eyes of horror, wholly dead to all around him. With some difficulty he restored him to consciousness; and the strong effort necessary to do so, recalled all his own impressions of

terror.

Lieutenant Sherwood, quivering with horror, (though a man as brave as ever lived,) told his friend that he was sure his elder brother had cut his own throat in a fit of delirium. Dromond had never seen Captain Richard Sherwood, to whom his brother was attached with an affection rare even amongst brothers; and he asked eagerly," Did you know that fearful form, did you see how it departed? The inner room was empty when I reached it." "The form," replied Sherwood, "was my brother, and from that inner room I saw the figure slowly return just after you had entered. The throat was severed, and blood streamed all around. It must have covered the floor."

No further light could be thrown upon this appearance. All was silent, and

bright in the moonlight as before. Far as the eye could reach from the hut door, over a wide plain of many miles around, not a form, not a shadow could be seen on any side.

After a few minutes, the sense of loneliness and terror grew so strong upon the travellers that, though tired with a long day's march, they again set forward and walked all night, nor could they think of halting to rest until the sun was high above the treetops.

On returning, a short time afterwards to the frontier of Canada, they found letters from England; which conveyed the mournful intelligence that Captain Sherwood had destroyed himself at Cheltenham, in the delirium of a brain fever. This intelligence was only what his afflicted brother had expected; nor was he surprised to find the time correspond as nearly as could be ascertained to the visit of the figure to the log hut.

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Long after this occurrence, when Dromond and his friend Sherwood were walking in the park, the former suddenly cried to his companion, By Heaven, Henry, there is the man we saw near Three Rivers that dreadful night!" This is," replied Lieutenant Sherwood, looking, with a sigh, at the officer his friend pointed to, "a most remarkable proof of the truth of that awful apparition. That man is the most striking likeness of my poor brother Richard that ever one man was of another."