Gabriel Zoon's aristocratic pleasure-ground, on the other side. The laughing mass of bloom seemed to station itself on the top of the old wall, like a saucy schoolboy deriding the poor prisoners below. Even the cultivated flower-bed sent forth a thousand delicious evening odours. Spicy gillyflowers, savoury basil, pinks rivalling the sachets of a fine lady's boudoir, verbena and heliotrope, outplanted from the greenhouse till they attained unusual sweetness and size, had fortunately their humble place among the scentless and faultless monotus purporting to obtain for the old amateur silver medals from the horticultural society of Mechelen, and all the other flower shows of Western Belgium; and at the close of that fervid summer day, all these united into a "strain of rich-distilled perfumes," deriving an additional charm from the sprinkling of water recently bestowed by the gardeners on the parched mould. As poor Emmanuel rested for a few minutes in his father's favourite arbour, it seemed impossible to enjoy an atmosphere more saturated with the incomparable perfumes of nature!

It was a still evening. Not a sound was audible in that secluded garden, unless when the carol of some happy workman, wending home along the unfrequented quay from his work, disturbed the soft tranquillity of the spot ;-except, indeed, the murmur of the bees among the beds of lavender and mignionette, expressly retained by the old brewer after the example of his predecesors the nuns, to allure thither the only visitants whose murmur appeared in accordance with the dreariness of its fragrant seclusion.

But though, on most occasions, this monotonous quietude was most acceptable to young Zoon, against whom the accusation made by his father of perpetually lounging in that still retreat was only too well founded, on the present occasion the tranquillity around him seemed to increase his irritation.

"Is it to be ever thus ?" cried he. "Am I to be perpetually harassed and thwarted every time I pretend to have a taste or opinion of my own? In manhood as in childhood, am I always to find myself grovelling at my father's feet, simply because I desire to exercise the faculties of a rational being? Certainly not! The ice is now broken; and let the chasm widen as it may, I will stand my ground! Marry little Camella! Drudge through a double apprenticeship in a profession I abhor, to qualify myself only to screw up within limits of the law the tenants of my stingy old aunt! And for what?

that, after all this waiting and wasting of patience, when I am growing gray, and deaf, and blind, I may take a silly school-girl to preside over my household home ;-a thing over which I should exercise the unwelcome control of a father, but from whom I could never expect the impassioned tenderness or holy companionship of a wife! Never, never! In marriage I should require a perfect community of spirita blending of heart with heart-of life with life;-a progress hand-in-hand from the buoyancy of youth to the solemn gravity of age-a union of thought, spirit, responsibility! And to find this, twelve or fourteen years hence, in the society of a girl I have seen whipped by her mother for comfit stealing,-whom I have dandled an infant in my arms-and who, if she turn out but half so wilful a

woman as she is a peevish, wayward child, will secure the misery of her husband, were his temper that of Job, and her dowry that of a governante of the Netherlands !"

Such was the result of the first ten minutes of cogitation. So far from disposing himself for obedience, the more he reflected on his impending misfortunes, the more confirmed grew his spirit of insubordination, till at length he started from his seat in the quiet arbour, and attempted to subdue his irritation by pacing up and down the gravel-walk skirting the blank abutment of the brewery-on a line with the windows pronounced by his father to be of an aspect calculated only for the ripening of his Hamburgh grapes.

Ever and anon as he walked, Emmanuel kept raising his eyes in the direction of those windows, though perfectly aware that, from the depths of the garden, it was out of his power to command the smallest view of anything overlooked by the dwelling-house; and the least sagacious observer might have conjectured that his agitation was in some way or other connected with some object, animate or inanimate, visible from the windows of the little chamber which his father was fond of denominating his fiery furnace, and which, though the brewer's residence contained more than half a dozen spare bedrooms, the heir of the house chose to retain in his maturity as his city of refuge, as obstinately as it had been assigned to him in his childhood by his grudging father.

Because (let us hope that the reader is anxious to learn wHY!)BECAUSE from its pulley-less sash window he had first beheld NETJA ! Again, dear reader, be good enough to exercise your curiosity, and inquire "who is Netja ?" for unless you interest yourself in her destinies, there is an end of my story. And most assuredly you would have become curious concerning the fair neighbour of Gabriel Zoon, had you beheld the wistful looks cast upward towards the wall separating her domicile from his own by poor Emmanuel, as he petulantly traversed the gravel-walk of the Ursuline garden; feeling that neither the horticultural treasures and prodigies it contained, nor the thriving brewery adjoining, nor the hereditary residence of the family, with all its accumulation of curious old furniture and precious pictures, were worthy to be placed in the scale against a single smile of that fairest and most melancholy of human countenances, the face of Netja Van Foere.

The first thing Emmanuel Zoon could recollect in this world of vicissitude, was looking out of that very window, and beholding that very Netja! It was in his early childhood, almost in his infancy, after being corrected by his old nurse for some trifling fault as severely as motherless children are apt to be, that, as he laid his little pouting lip and swelling heart against the window-sill, he caught sight of a grave-looking girl, of twelve or fourteen years of age, who was sitting reading in the adjoining garden, (if garden could be called a narrow strip of court divided into flower-plots by borders of box,) while with her foot she rocked the cradle of a sleeping child. His sobs were still sufficiently audible to attract the notice of his young neighbour, who looked up from her book-nodding to him, and smiling with so sweet and comforting a countenance, that he soon forgot his

grievances while wondering who that kind good girl could be, and who was the child in the cradle happy enough to be cared for by an attendant so scant of years.

From that day dated their friendship. The lonely child of the Ursuline gardens soon managed to discover that his pretty neighbour was called Netja; that her father was the husband of a second wife; and that second wife the mother of the babe in the cradle, a girl named Carolie; and that though Netja was the kindest and fondest of sisters to the little petted stranger, neither its father nor mother were satisfied with her care as a nurse, or her submission as a child. This discovery so far afforded comfort to Emmanuel, that he began to see he might be worse off than in enduring the tyranny of his father and caprices of his nurse ;-that there were such things as stepmothers in the world who were greater evils than aught beside. He thought them so at least, when, little more than a year after the commencement of his nodding and smiling, kissing and coaxing acquaintance with Netja, he found that his kind neighbour had furtively quitted her home, most likely for ever! One of his father's workmen affirmed that Netja had been so severely beaten by her stepmother as to have fled in despair-no one knew whither-perhaps to seek service with some merciful mistress, perhaps to throw herself into the port of Bruges. But certain it was that, if dead, none mourned for her. The house went on as before. A serving girl was hired to wait on little Carolie; and in process of time, the name of Netja ceased to be mentioned by friend or foe. Nobody missed the poor submissive, neglected child of Van Foere the chorister-unless the equally submissive and almost equally neglected child of Zoon the brewer, to whom she had been more than sister, scarcely less than mother, almost a friend, and quite an angel. Months and years after she was lost to Bruges, the departed still appeared to Emmanuel in his dreams, whenever he was feverish or unhappy, breathing words of comfort, and never breathing them in vain.

Even after he grew to a reasonable age, and in pursuance of his father's whims was removed to the college at Louvain, one of his first visits, on his return home for the holidays, was sure to be to his neighbour, Van Foere;-a man little qualified in his own person to attract the goodwill of a boy, being a hard, square, ungainly, lugubriouslooking man, always attired in black, and having something of the look of a sacristan or pall-bearer: whose deep bass voice, when he officiated in the choir, seemed to shake to its foundations the stately church of St. John Nepomucenus. Moreover, it was Van Foere's ambition to pass among his family and neighbours for as morose and surly a man as became the owner of so growling a bass-a bass that superseded all necessity for the acquisition of a serpent in the quoir; and one of the chief reasons which caused him to resign himself so quiescently to the loss of his elder daughter, was his repugnance that Netja, who had so long beheld him supreme under his own roof, should witness the ignominious state of nonentityism to which he was reduced by his second marriage.

It was not, however, to see either Van Foere or his termagant wife that Emmanuel visited the house. He was really fond of little

Carolie, as a thing appurtenant to Netja. He had been accustomed to notice the little girl in her sister's arms, and could not even now look upon her flaxen curls, without remembering the occasions when he had seen them smoothed by the fondling hand of the lost Pleiad. Every time he came home, therefore, he brought a present for little Car, in memory of his first and only friend; and oftentimes made freer than was excusable with the flowers of the old brewer, in order to tie them up into nosegays, and fling them out of his window over the wall into the garden of his poorer neighbour.

All this was well enough so long as Emmanuel was fifteen, and Carolie Van Foere ten years of age. The old brewer, occupied with his business and his investments, his tulips and carnations, scarcely recognized the existence of the humble lay vicar whose abode was divided from his by a party wall; save when occasionally they chanced to jostle in their egress into the street, and Van Foere uncovered himself to the very ground in token of deference to the arrogant neighbour, who paid nearly twenty times as much as himself in the way of taxes and imposts to the municipality of Bruges. What number or what manner of daughters that sable suited basso cantante might have under his roof, appeared to Gabriel Zoon about as important as how many puppies his favourite mastiff might have borne at her last

litter !

But when Emmanuel came to be twenty and a right handsome young man, and Carolie to be fifteen and a remarkably pretty girl, affairs assumed a different aspect: more particularly when, the old brewer having missed from his greenhouse some fine camellia or branch of scented azalea, it was suggested to him by his gardener that the flowers had most likely been presented by his son to the chorister's daughter. Old Zoon was startled by the information-so startled, that he said not a word on the subject to Emmanuel, as he would have done had the young man stood accused of purloining his flowers for any other view or purpose. But he thought the more; and the result of his cogitations was the resolution he had recently expressed, to article his son to Vermaeghe the lawyer, instead of suffering him to follow his own calling at home.

For the brewer perfectly recollected having had occasion to call one day, a couple of years before, on Julius Van Foere, concerning certain parish business with the authorities of St. John Nepomucenus, and being struck, on entering the quiet humble dwelling of his poor neighbour, with its low ceilings, brick floor, and dingy walnut wood furniture, by the extreme beauty of the young girl who sat bending over her lace-pillow near one of the casement windows, the rays of sunshine falling like gold upon her fair hair and transparent skin, till she looked like some ineffable creation in one of the allegories of Rubens so as to dwell upon old Gabriel's memory for the remainder of the week, in rivalship with the beauty of Blanche Fleur and the Duchess of Brabant.

It was, consequently, only justice to the future peace of mind of little Camella Williams, to place her cousin out of the reach of such dangerous neighbourship; and now that Emmanuel dared to manifest opposition to his projects, he had no hesitation in attributing the May 1843.-VOL. XXXVII.-NO. CXLV.

D

young man's disobedience to the attraction of the lovely face still inclining over the lace-pillow in the adjoining house, which he knew his son was in the habit of frequenting at least seven days in the week. Humble as was her father's condition, Carolie was generally known in Bruges as one of its prettiest maidens; and henceforward she was marked in the abhorrent mind of old Gabriel as a smiling mischief, the origin of all his domestic inquietudes, and sole bar to a marriage which was to secure eight hundred thousand florins to the enjoyment of his son.

So accurate in most instances is the judgment of parents concerning the love-affairs of their offspring! In point of fact, Carolie Van Foere, though only five years younger than himself, was regarded by Emmanuel as a child,-almost as mere a child with reference to himself as when he had first beheld her slumbering in the cradle, rocked by the foot of her sister; and though it was perfectly true that the young man visited daily the chorister's house, and that he laid violent hands on the finest of his father's flowers whenever occasion offered, with the view of tendering them as of old to the daughter of Van Foere, the object of all this devotion, and the passionate attachment by which it was suggested, was no other than Netja,—his own dear Netja of aforetime,-who had never ceased to treat him as a child, and who now almost loved him as her own.

It was on his last return from the college of Louvain, that, on entering Van Foere's house as usual, instead of finding Carolie bound towards him to welcome him home, Emmanuel perceived by her saddened aspect that the deep mourning she wore was dedicated to the memory of her overbearing mother, (whose disagreeable company had been the only drawback to his pleasure in frequenting the house.) While preparing to offer his condolence to his little pet, he noticed also that the place usually filled by the defunct, was occupied by another grave-looking woman in black; whose chair and low pillow seemed already as well established in the place as though they had abided there from the beginning of time.

There was nothing in the aspect of the stranger particularly to attract his notice; yet it was irresistibly attracted! Her sable garments were of coarse materials, and the humblest make ;-her countenance was as sad and humble as her garments. Yet he could not take his eyes off her; there was something in the expression of her dark gray eye,-something in the graceful turn of her head, something of a sound of coming tears in her tremulous voice, that reminded him, as in a dream, of days of old. At length, the word,— the name, the dearly-treasured name,-burst from his lips.

"NETJA!" cried he, "dearest, dearest Netja!" and in a moment (her start and blush having at once verified his suspicions) he was by her side,-pressing her hands in his,-congratulating himself and her, almost frantic,-almost weeping for joy, as he called upon her to remember her plaything,-her protégé,-her child,- her own Emmanuel. Thus apostrophized, the grave woman passed her hand a moment over the pale forehead visible between the two dark bands of her parted hair;-not as if trying to recall her imperfect recollection, but either to subdue the painful thoughts struggling there for