"My husband! my husband!" shrieked his bride. him! save him! the father of my babe! save him!" "Save him! save him!" exclaimed the aged priest. mercy!" 66 "Save Mercy! Both attempted to rush to the archbishop's seat-to fall at his knees, to beg the ruthless robber's life; but the powerful grasp of the officials withheld them, and pinioned them immovably to the spot. In the same instant the bright axe of the executioner crashed heavily on the culprit's neck, cutting through flesh, and bone, and beard; and the dissevered head rolled on the sanded floor, convulsed and contorted in the most fearful manner. The aged priest and his niece fainted. The latter lost all consciousness at once; the former only recollected that the lights were on a sudden extinguished, and that the scene, in a single moment, was involved in total darkness. It was noon the next day when the old man awoke from his trance. The occurrences of the past night flitted before his mind, as the remembrance of a dream, or the creations of a fevered fancy. He could not believe in their authenticity. How could he?-he was in his own bed, in his own lonely cottage, in the village of Kommern. He hears an unwonted noise without. "It's but Hans coming home from the field," he said to himself. "Ah! I should not be here!" He hears a voice; it is a voice familiar to his ear, though long unheard. "What may this mean?" he soliloquised aloud. The door of his chamber creaks on its hinges as of yore, and a light foot-fall approaches his bedside. The curtains are gently drawn aside; a pale face, with long dark hair hanging dishevelled on each side of it, bends fondly and gently over him. 66 My child! my child!" he exclaims. "Father-my father !" was the answer. It was his long-lost niece again restored to his arms. The certainty of the past was soon made apparent to him by a journey to Bonn. In the Münster, close by the high altar, on a newly raised monument, he read, within a week after this occurrence, the following inscription To the Memory OF THE FREYHERR VON FEYERMAHL. BY THE VEHM-GERICHTE. A.D. 1250. This monument has been long since destroyed, if ever it existed. Ages agone were all the descendants of this ancient house extinct. Thus ends the story. ST. MARTIN'S CHURCH. ALL SOULS' EVE. The next ecclesiastical edifice in Bonn, in point of antiquity, as well as of legendary importance, is the once noble, but now ruined church of St. Martin, in the immediate vicinity of the Münster. The original structure purported to be coeval with that sacred fane; and local traditions go so far as to assert, that it was built by the pious Empress Helena about the same period. It is now, however, a ruin; having been long since secularised, and some time past demolished. With this ancient church is connected the following legend. It was on the eve of All Souls' Day, in the fifteenth century, when St. Martin's was the pride and the glory of Bonn, that a poor widow woman, who lived in a hovel at some distance from the church, arose, as she deemed, in the early morning, and proceeded thither to hear the holy mass, and pray for the souls of the faithful departed, as is the gentle custom of all those of her class and condition in Catholic countries. The moon shone brightly in the clear, cold sky; the streets were empty of people as she passed along them: but she did not heed that, nor look upon it as any thing worthy of notice; and only thought within herself that she was among the earliest stirring in the town; and that she should have the best place in the church, in reward of her activity. She approached the great gate of the churchyard; it stood wide open; she entered the abode of the dead. As she paced along the pathway which led to the church-door, she could not avoid remarking something unusual in the appearance of the desolate scene which surrounded her. She looked more closely at it: the graves were open-every one of them lay open before her wondering eyes. It was a sight sufficient to appal a stouter heart than hers; and she shuddered to see it: but she felt that she was urged onward against her own will, without the power to recede; that she was, as it were, in a vortex, from which there was no chance of escape, and to whose force she was compelled to submit. The church-door was soon gained. entered. She The interior of the sacred edifice was crowded with human beings, or with those who bore their semblance; but still they all seemed to her to wear an unearthly look: and the reek which arose from every part of the church was like the odour from a recently opened charnel, in which the relics of mortality might have been rotting for ages. She mixed with the crowd; but she felt no pressure, though they were around her— "Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks, She reached a seat-the only vacant one in the body of the church-and knelt on it, as much to rest herself as to pursue her devotions. While thus engaged she looked in every direction, excited by the irrepressible curiosity of her sex, as much as by the dread of impending danger; and sought, by every means in her power, to fathom the mystery which she was conscious hung over the scene, though she could not shape her feeling of it into any definite idea or form. Her first glance was at the altar; for, even in the female nature, the impulse to piety will often predominate over the stimulus of curiosity. But the more she looked the less satisfaction she found. The chief priest was an aged man, whom she barely remembered to have seen in her early girlhood; but if it were the same, she well knew he had been dead for full half a century. The assistant clergy were equally familiar to her eyes; but they, too, had been long dead and buried. She glanced at her neighbours; some wore the faces and forms of persons whom she was acquainted with in their lifetime, but who had long gone to their account in the other world; others, those of dear friends whom the grave had also covered for years. She knew not what to think, or what to say, or what to do. "Shall I leave this horrible place?" she asked herself; 66 or shall I stay? Methinks that the congregation is altogether composed of departed souls, and that I am the only living being among them. What will become of me! what will become of me!" As she soliloquised thus, she felt her sleeve twitched by some one near her. She turned round sharply to see who did it, and her eye encountered the countenance of her deceased husband kneeling beside her. At no great distance she also saw her two children- a son and a daughter-who had died long before in the prime of life. "Thank God," she spake again to herself, for she could not speak aloud, though she tried hard to do so on more than one occasion. "Thank God! they'll not harm me, anyhow." The phantom of her spouse, who had just attracted her attention, placed his skinny finger on his pale lips; and, as if aware of what was passing in her mind, shook his head sorrowfully, and motioned her to silence. The service proceeded. It was a solemn high mass for the dead, performed with all the pomp and ceremony of that imposing service in the Catholic church. The phantom choristers chanted THE SEQUENTIA. "Dies iræ, dies illa Solvet sæclum in favilla: Teste David cum Sibyllâ," sang the high-priest, in a voice like the wail of the wind through a lone sepulchral vault. "Dies iræ, dies illa Solvet seculum in favilla," repeated after him the assistant chorus of priests and the congregation; and their song was even as the hollow rumbling of distant thunder on the mountains, or the melancholy moaning of the wintry storm through the leafless Alpine forests. The psalm and the responsive chorus proceeded : Quantus tremor est futurus, Quando Judex est venturus, "Oh, God! oh, God! what will become of me?" exclaimed the poor, frightened old woman, her hair standing on end with terror, and the cold perspiration oozing from every pore in her body. "Tuba mirum spargens sonum Per sepulchra regionum, The shrill notes of a powerful trumpet-shrill and powerful far beyond the pitch of any earthly instrument-pierced her ear as this verse was chanted; and an audible sound of "weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth," arose from the prostrate congregation, on the floor of the church, as its tones reverberated along the Gothic roofs. "Mors stupebit, et natura, Cum resurget creatura, Judicanti responsura." "Alas! alas! and wo is me!" spake the aged woman to herself; "I may not stay here longer! Oh, God! oh, God! what will become of me?" Another pluck on the sleeve, and another glance at her deceased husband, made her perceive at once the impossibility of departing at that moment, and the necessity of silence and steadiness of deportment while she staid. His finger was on his lip; his dead eye fixed hers to stone like that of the fabled Gorgon. The solemn song for the dead proceeded— "Liber scriptus proferetur, In quo totum continetur, The groans of all around her, at the conclusion of this verse, were soul-harrowing. Indeed it seemed, to her thinking, as |