then tossing her to their surface, bore her rapidly along their raging course of foam and whirlpool.

What followed I know not, until I found myself standing on the brink of the stream, with her senseless body in my arms. In the madness of that moment, all reason was lost, and I had acted from intuitive and unconscious impulse.

I laid her on the grass, and essayed every remedy that art or affection could suggest to restore her to life, but in vain; till, frantic with disappointment, in a paroxysm of grief, I threw myself by her side, and insanely kissed her lips, her eyes, and her forehead. The blood began to dance in my veins like burning alcohol, and the pent-up passion of years burst their unnatural confinement. I

K*

wound my arms around her unresisting form. I clasped her to my heart with the strong pressure of delirium, and yet I felt as though I only grasped a vision, a vacancy; substance itself was not enough substantial, reality not enough real, to glut the insatiate cravings of this fierce transport of blended love and grief. None, but those who may have possessed passions as ungovernable as mine, can picture the savage, the fearful delight which I derived from this clandestine embrace of what I then conceived to be the living and the dead!

There she lay before me; she whom during four long years I had vainly endeavoured even to behold. There she lay; she, the pure, the rigid, the inflexible, without a tone or a gesture to check the wildest expression

of my love. And yet, there was the form, and there was the eye, which had once inspired me with the very intensity of that causeless fear which arises in the excess of passionate affection. "And now," I cried, raising her arm, and then allowing it to drop heavily on the earth, "the ruled has become the ruler, the slave is converted into the despot. I, the trembler, have now but to command, and lo, I am obeyed. I have but to say, Do this, and it dueth it;" and again I raised the arm, and waved it in the air, in awful mockery of the action of life.

But a flood of tears, and bitter agonizing dejection, soon succeeded to this ebullition of all the ferocious and inhuman passions of my nature. I pressed her hand to my face, I

bowed my head to the earth, and I wept like

a child.

While wrapt in the bitterness of my grief, I thought that I felt a convulsive movement in the hand enclosed in mine. I gazed intently on her face, and distinctly discerned a quivering in the lips. In a transport of hope, I raised her in my arms, and bore her to my home. Medical assistance was immediately summoned ; and before two hours had elapsed, she was restored to life. Swayed by the advice of my sister, and by my own dread of the effect which the sight of me might produce on her in her still precarious state, I retired to my room, before she was sufficiently recovered to recognise the objects around her.

In anxiety and agitation, I was revolving

this extraordinary event, speculating on its cause, and endeavouring to surmise its results, when a servant entered, and presented me with a letter, which had just been brought by a messenger from the hall. I started in astonishment, and a thrill of painful expectation ran through my veins, as I gazed on her well-known hand. I observed that it bore the date of the previous day; and then, in doubt and fear, in hope and eagerness, with a trembling hand, and an unsteady eye, proceeded to read that which follows.

"When this last confession of a fated sinner shall be revealed to you, the spirit of her who penned it shall be hovering around you, shall be searching into your heart, shall be striving to commune with you: and if ever