of our affections-no jealousies, for there were none to be jealous of. Unmarked it overpowered us both. It swelled upon us like the tide of a breathless summer day, purely and noiselessly.

"A few weeks ago her father took me aside, and prefacing that he had marked with pleasure our growing attachment, asked me if 1 had sufficient confidence in my own constancy to pledge myself to be for life an affectionate and watchful guardian of his child? He went on to say, that means of escaping from the country had been provided, and offers of promotion in the Spanish service made to him. Your own heart will suggest my answer; and I left him, charged to return after nightfall with a clergyman. Our good curate is too much attached to the family to refuse me any thing. To him I revealed my story. At midnight he united me to Ellen, and scarcely was the ceremony over when Sir James tore himself away, leaving his weeping child almost insensible in my arms.

"Two gentlemen, who accompanied Sir James to the coast, were witnesses of the marriage. It was therefore unnecessary to let any of the household into the secret. You may guess their astonishment, therefore, when, having seen the curate and me ride up the solitary glen alone under cloud of night, they saw us return in the course of a few hours with a lady who was introduced to them as their mistress. Great has been their questioning, and great has been the delight of our jolly priest to mystify them with dark hints of ruined towers, hill-sides opening, and such like. The story of the Nixy has been revived too, and Ellen is looked on by many with a superstitious awe. I rather enjoyed the joke at first, but begin to fear, from the deep root the folly seems to have taken, it may one day bear evil fruits for my delicate girl."

His augury of evil was well founded, but the blight fell upon his own heart. As soon as he heard of the rising in the west, he joined the royal forces at the head of his tenantry. During his absence, and while the storm of civil war was raging over the land, his cherished one was seized with the pangs of premature labour. She lay in the same grave with her child, before her husband could reach his home. The remembrance of what she had undergone, her loneliness amid the tempests of winter, her isolation from all friends, had so shaken her frame, that the first attack of illness snapped the thread of life. Her sufferings were comparatively short. But the widower! He sought to efface the remembrance of his loss in active service. Wherever the spirit of insubordination showed, he prayed for employment. The Presbyterians learned at last to consider him as the embodied personification of persecution. The story of his mysterious marriage got wind. He was regarded as one allied to, and acting under, the influence of unholy

powers. He knew it, and, in the bitterness of his heart, he rejoiced to be marked out by their fear and terror, as one who had nothing in common with them. His own misery, and this outcast feeling, made him aspire to he ranked in their minds as a destroying spirit. The young, gallant, and kind-hearted soldier became the most relentless persecutor of the followers of the covenant. Even yet does his memory, and that of his fairy bride, live in the peasant's memory like a thunderstorm, gloomy and desolating, yet not without lambent flashes of more than earthly beauty,

LOCH SKENE.

BY THOMAS TOD STODDART.

LIKE the eye of a sinless child,
That moss-brown tarn is gazing wild

From its heath-fringe, bright with stars of dew,
Up to the voiceless vault of blue.

It seemeth of a violet tinge,

Shaded under its flowery fringe;

For the dark and purple of moss and heather,
Like night and sunset, blend together.

That tarn, it lieth on the hills,

Fed by the thousand infant rills,

Which are ever weeping in very sadness,

Or they smile through their tears, with a gleam of gladness

You may hear them in a summer's hour,

Trickling, like a rainbow shower,

From yon rock, whose rents of snow

Lie shadow'd in the tarn below.

It looketh from the margin bare,
Like a headstone in a churchyard fair ;
But the heavy heron loveth well
Its height, where his own sentinel
He sits, when heaven is almost done
With the slow watch of the sun,

And the quiet day doth fold
His wings in arches of burning gold.

There is a lonesome, aged cairn,

Rising grey through the grass-green fern;

It tells of pale, mysterious bones,
Buried below the crumbling stones;
But the shadow of that pile of slaughter
Lies breasted on the stirless water,
As if no mortal hand had blent
Its old, unearthly lineament.

A wizard tarn is grey Loch Skene!
There are two islands sown within;
Both are like, as like the other,
As brother to his own twin-brother;
Only a birch bends o'er the one,
Where the kindred isle hath none.
The tresses of that weeping tree
Hang down in their humility.

'Tis whisper'd of an eyrie there,
Where a lonely eagle pair
In the silver moonlight came,

To feed their young by the holy flame ;
And at morn they mounted far and far,
Towards the last surviving star.
Only the forsaken nest

Sighs to the sea-winds from the west,
As if they told in their wandering by,
How the rightful lord of its sanctuary
Mourneth his fallen mate alone
On a foamy Atlantic stone.

Never hath the quiet shore

Echoed the fall of silver oar,
Nor the waters of that tarn recoil'd
From the light skiff gliding wild;
But the spiritual cloud that lifted
The quiet moon, and dimly drifted
Away in tracery of snow,

Threw its image on the pool below,
Till it glided to the shaded shore,
Like a bark beneath the moveless oar.

Out at the nethermost brink there gushes A playful stream from its ark of rushes, It leaps like a wild fawn from the mountains, Nursing its life with a thousand fountains, It kisses the heath-flower's trembling bell, And the mosses that love its margin well.

Fairy beings, one might dream,

Look from the breast of that silver stream,
Fearless, holy, and blissful things,
Flashing the dew-foam from their wings,

As they glide away, away for ever,
Borne sea-ward on some stately river.

That silver brook, it windeth on Over slabs of fretted stone,

Till it cometh to the forehead vast

Of those gorgon rocks, that cast
Their features many a fathom under,

And, like a launch through surge of thunder,
From the trembling ledge it flings

The treasures of a thousand springs;
As if to end their blissful play,
And throw the spell of its life away.

Like a pillar of Parian stone That in some old temple shone, Or a slender shaft of living star, Gleams that foam-fall from afar ;

But the column is melted down below

Into a gulf of seething snow,

And the stream steals away from its whirl of hoar,

As bright and as lovely as before.

For the sadness of a fallen throne Reigns when the golden sun hath gone, And the tarn, and the hills, and the misted stream Are shaded away to a mournful dream.

GRANDMOTHER ASLEEP.

"Sleeps the sleep that knows no waking.”

Scott.

THE Sympathy that exists between old age and childhood is one of the most beautiful and touching traits of humanity. Here "extremes meet" and mingle in blessed harmony. The old man, who has exhausted life in all its stages, seeks at last, with hoary head and bended back, the society of children, and joins in their prattle and gambols! The child, again, who is but beginning the mysterious round of life, turns, with corresponding sympathy, to "the world's gray fathers," and seeks support and protection rather from the palsied hand of eld than the strong arm of manhood! Tottering infancy clings to tottering age-and age finds in infancy a boon companion!

There can be no earthly affection more pure than that of a grandmother to her grandchildren. A mother's affection may often be nothing more than animal instinct, and like all instincts have its source in selfishness; but a grandmother's love must be the perfection of disinterested attachment. It is the noblest of all passions. There is no grandmotherism among beasts. It is the farthest removed from self and the senses that we can conceive. It can count on no equivalent return, for long before the child has reached manhood, the grandmother must be beyond his assistance. It cannot even promise itself the hope of living to witness the result of all its tender assiduities. It can never see the little twig, which it nurses so carefully, become a full grown tree, far less can it ever reap the fruit of its labours. It plants and waters for other ages than its

own.

We knew or have heard of an old woman who was left, at an advanced age, to protect and support the orphaned boy and girl of her only son. The story is a mere anecdote, but it may be worth telling, as it contains a good moral. This old woman, though born to considerable affluence, was, by the mysterious hand of Providence, fated to spend her life and her treasure in the service of others and never did human being perform the will of her Master with more divine sweetness! Her husband turned out a profligate; and, after having exhausted her fortune and his own constitution, died of a lingering disease in her arms. Her son-an only child-was reared with the fondest care; but he followed the footsteps of his father-married young-broke his wife's heart-and finally died, leaving his two little children, a boy and girl, in the hands of his aged and impoverished mother. A life annuity of