Autumn stars burn in the dark blue sky. A low, warm wind wanders through the streets of the city, so softly that not a flame of the streetlamp wavers. The faint perfume which floated from the trailing robes of the Summer, as it swept southward to the tropics, still lingers in the solitary and shadowy air. There is no noise, save some lonely footfalls sounding on the pavement, and then dying away in the distance. Quiet in all the thoroughfares of the great city. Quiet in the darkened dwellings, with only a dim lamp burning here and there, from the window of some restful chamber. Quiet in the newspaper offices, where Saturday night has sunk down with Sabbath healing on weary hands and brains, quenched the hot glare of gas-lights, hushed the scratch of the pen, the click of the types, the clashing din of machinery, and sifted a dust of silence over all. Quiet in the shops and stores, where the ghost of traffic is laid till Monday dawn; above whose bolted doors the golden-lettered signs, illegible in dusk, gleam like funeral inscriptions in a forgotten tongue. Quiet in the churches, till the Sabbath morning wakes sectarian bells, and calls to polemics and theologic prayer, from those white spires and belfries which stand so silently against the divine gloom. Quiet on all the mournful tintamars of daily life; quiet in the beating heart and burning brain; on field, and hill, and wood, and on the dark and drifting river that slips smoothly through the city, beneath the wooden bridges, past black wharves, and past the hulls of ships, and widens out into the broad waters of the bay, which also sleeps. Quiet in the grave-yard and the cemetery, where the cold dew gathers on the tombstones, and sparkles on the late flowers and withering grasses of the decaying year. Quiet everywhere. If any stir at all, it is in the bones of Roger Williams, moving in their mouldering coffin, as if dimly conscious that all has not gone right in the old State and City whose foundations he laid with prayer and pride. If any stir beyond this, it is in the heart of the Dark Student.

And, by this time, there is stir enough there; for the heart that, waking or sleeping, has learned to keep Manfred's solemn vigil, is now filled with fever, and the ghosts of madness

are moving in its unhealthy and haunted calm. The sense of stir-the abstract idea of motion-but of a frantic motion, which is noiseless-occupies him. But there is, also, an unearthly consciousness of the deep night-quiet that shrouds all things in its mysterious veil, and a more unearthly sense of quietude within, which seem to be superior to all other emotion. He can hear the throbbing of his own heart, but he cannot know that its furious pulses are beating down with rapid strokes a crowd of minutes which stand between him and the crisis of his life.

Strange that he, whose eyes have been so long introverted to his own being, and whose intellect is so subtile in analysis and divination of whatever elemental shapes enter and take possession there, does not divine what the emotions that now agitate him portend. But he does not. Foresight and memory are both gone from him. The airy troops that do their wild work on his nature, vanish into imperishable darkness. Others succeed them-he knows not how, nor from whence, they are born. He feels a terrible and deadly fear of what, he knows not; and yet he is, outwardly, very calm, and, sitting in the quiet lamp-light, (how quiet it is!) he reads a favorite volume with interest and pleasure. It is a volume of the vague and mystic writings of Jacob Böhmen. He reads

it with a strange, hot mist in his eyes, and a slow whirl in his brain, and finds a newer interest, and a sweeter beauty in its colored metaphors. Yet, while thus absorbed, he is conscious of every object in the shadowy room, and aware of all the outward scenery which slumbers under the night silence and the

stars.

The room is very still. The wind lifts the long trailing curtains of the windows, and waves the dusky shadows on ceiling, and floor, and wall. It hardly moves the steady flame of the brass lamp on the table by which he sits and reads. Near him, on a pedestal, stands the lovely bust of the Greek Clytie. The hushed and mournful face is turned towards him, and seems to muse on his mystery. He is conscious of all this. He thinks of it as a picture-himself reading, and the beauteous head watching him-the two central objects in the room. The room

is large, high, and square, and full of

soft, shifting lights and shades. It is richly furnished. There is a fire in the grate, which spreads a fan of crimson glow over the warm-colored carpet. On the gray wall opposite, it has cast a dappled radiance which is like a halo on the colder light around it. There is a portrait-his own-set in a deep, burnished gilt frame, which gleams from the dappled dusk of the wall. Couches, cushioned chairs, screens, hanging shelves crowded with books and pamphlets, a mirror, and, either side of the room, two fanciful brackets supporting marble statuettes, from which long, straight shadows point up the lighted wall, complete the general appointments of the chamber.

on

The Dark Student shuts his book, and looks around the room. His own wild mood does not, as usual, color and inform the scene. The chamber appears sweetly sombre. A faint, rich perfume softens the air. The shadows take no unnatural shapes, as they have sometimes done. The furniture does not seem alive, and watching him, nor does he see to-night, in every hole or cranny, searching eyes that look him through and through. Nothing is wrong, save this dead, unnatural quiet. Even that seems to be rather in the solitude of his own being, than in the night. It is in his own soul that this unearthly lethargy has spread itself. There, too, the fierce sense of motion, without noise continues. He has visions of gigantic figures whose faces he cannot discover, though they watch him-and who rave in unknown tongues but noiselessly-noiselessly! He has visions of smooth, enormous spheres that spin with horrible velocity, but with no sound. Both spheres and figures sometimes diminish to mere specks and pigmies, and then rush out rapidly into their former colossal proportions. The slow whirl that goes on within his brain, seems to be enlarging his head. Already it is the head of a giant. When he puts his hands to it, they feel like the hands of a child. His teeth alone retain their former size. He feels them foolishly small, and disproportioned to the Titanic space they now occupy. Although oppressed by a deadly and motiveless fear, he yet feels that this is droll, and therefore smiles-not because his mirth is really quickened into life, but because he feels that it would be oural not

to smile, at what his intellect perceives is amusing.

He rises from his chair, and, holding the lamp above his head, looks in the mirror. The face he sees there does not occur to him to be his own, and he regards it with a sad and alien interest! There is a cold sweat on the pallid countenance. The eyes are very bright and large under the brows. The black curling locks droop heavily, damp with perspiration. One blue vein is swollen and unusually visible in the forehead. He thinks this strange, and finds himself wondering why it is so. Then he smiles, and remembers, like a disconnected memory, that he is somewhat excited. Then he laughs silently. He gazes in the mirror for long minutes. The sense of his own personality abandons him. The face he sees, still less than ever, if that could be, seems his He finds a stronger, a more absorbing interest in the contemplation of its mournful beauty. How bright and calm are those eyes! How sternly sweet is the mouth, and the full rounded chin! How graceful the drooping locks around the forehead! He watches the fine tremble in the dilated nostrils. Then he finds himself touched with pity for the pallor and mortal sadness of the face. Gradually, an awful consciousness returns and mingles with that lunacy of pity, and, as he gazes, he sees the eyes grow humid, and overflow with tears. God!

own.

The exclamation, bursting from his lips, startles the silence of the room, and seems the charm which calls forth the solemn clang of a bell. He hears it, from the belfry of a neighboring church, strike the hour of eleven. Every stroke vibrates on the night, and seems to shake the stars. The tears are his own. He dashes them from his eyes, and clenches his lips till they are suffused with a stain of blood, in the effort to keep down the stormy sobs that rise in his bosom. The agony remains until the last vibration dies on the shadowy air. Then he is calmer, and more proud and stern. But the whirl in his brain continues, and the terrific spectres thicken in his haunted mind. In that dense, inward lethargy, there is now a mingled sense of despair and exultation rising with a mighty and thundering stir. The hot blood leaps in his veins like lightning, and his heart throbs with the pulse of a Titan. Yet,

outwardly, he is calm, but it is the calmness of a marble statue possessed by a fury.

He sits like one dead, while this inte. rior tumult rises in breast and brain, and grows wilder and stronger as the slow minutes drag by. It does not abate nor pause. Yet now, sweet fancies and sad, tranquil thoughts, like soft rays of heavenly light, fall and fade upon the stormy midnight of his mind. He thinks how quietly the sleeping multitudes lie beneath the dark and silent sea of sleep which floods the town. He sees, as in a dream, the numerous strange faces of the sleepers, young and old, beautiful and ugly-faces that are brown and wrinkled, or fair and smooth -holy, evil, sensual, delicate, sullen, queer, lovely, and mournful faces-all in the one horizontal position, all with closed eyes, all shadowed, smoothed, and softened by sleep. He thinks of the bright, living faces that looked into his own that day with smiles and greetings-all composed, changed, and quiet in their slumber. He remembers his mother, who sleeps in the home beyond the evening hills. He sees her grave and placid countenance, with all its reverend wrinkles smoothed with rest. He sees his young brothers and sisters in their childish, innocent repose. While the fury and madness eddy in his brain like a whirlpool, his wandering fancy floats away to the distant grave of his father, and sheds a weird light upon the withering herbs and grass which fringe the lettered head-stone, and spire from the narrow mound, all crusted with a thin hoar frost, and gemmed with cold dew which glitters in the pale light of the stars. The weird light he has imagined rests still, and shows the inscription on the stone, and every blade and leaf of the crisp herbage on the grave. Then it sinks, slowly, down into the dark earth, making it transparent as crystal, and shows small pebbles and shards interspersed throughout the clay, and the tufted roots and jagged fibres of the vegetation above; and the fat, red worms lying in small coils and spirals, or wriggling through the earth, and vacant wormholes pierced in the yellow loam; and then, the slimy coffin-lid, with mouldy stains and smears upon its silver plate. It sinks lower, and illuminates the quiet skeleton reposing in the dry, gray dust within the mouldering coffin. The

skull stares up to him with a mocking and mournful grin. Then all the light dies out in darkness, and he is alone, with that sense of a dreadful roar in his mind, and yet no audible sound!

To

Some vague feeling that a shadow has fallen, softly and suddenly, upon him, and then a thought. Death! What is it? Only to cease, and be borne by a sad procession of black figures to an oblong cavity-the only hole in the wide natural landscape, and the smooth, unbroken blue above-and to be laid therein. To have the earth heaped over him, and covered with a layer of the sward. To lie there, slowly mouldering away to a yellow skeleton, with which the undetectable and sentient soul still lingers. To look up at night, filled with an abiding sense of rest, and be conscious of the gentle weight of earth reposing on the coffin-lid. watch the worms, the mystic roots and fibres of the herbage, the gem-like dew glittering on their tops, and above them all, the broad and hollow dark. To look up, as the mocking and mournful skull has looked, into the pallid faces of those who bend above the grave. To lie there till the bones are dust, and the moveless dust shut in by the confining clay, goes slowly around with the gigantic revolutions of the whirling globe-while stars and suns wax and wane, and the great ages waste away; full of rest, and without change, while the roaring mob of life, and all the solemn joys and miseries of earth, sink and swell unheard forever. Around and around with the big world-a little heap of wise and happy dust, lying movelessly beneath the grass-grown surface!

Was it a clap of thunder, was it a still, scornful voice, that spoke from its roar-Obey? Of course; it only needs a steady hand and calm courage. His hand is steady; his courage is calm. Calm?-Yes, calm-somewhat giddy— somewhat excited-but calm. Will the motion of the spinning world be unpleasant to the sentient bones? This awful whirling in his brain is not pleasant; but it will be different then. He will lie still-it is only the great globe that will whirl. Hush! He will not think of them-but the faces of his mother, brothers, and sisters, and every face he knows, crowds his memory. Farewell, then, all-and now, no more! The sleeping image of Mabel rises in his mind. Her soft, gray eyes are

closed in slumber, but her countenance is surpassingly fair, and sweet with a happy dream. Farewell, Mabel; and now, no more! What will she say ? Hush!-What will Murdock say? Who cares! Curse him! he had his rent to-day, and may attend to his business, just as if nothing had happened. Let him wonder why he did it. Let every one wonder, if they like. When a man is weary of the world, he has a right to die: his life is his own. But why not? Yes, certainly; it will settle conjecture. He takes a sheet of paper, and writes, in large, black lettersWeary of the world. This he puts in a conspicuous place on the table, and then breaks the pen, and flings the fragments away.

Rising, he crosses the room with slow footsteps. The lamplight shines softly on the bust. The dark, deep shadows lend a tenderer grace to the pure features. He puts his arm around the graceful neck, and gazes in the hushed, sad face. Then he murmurs gently,

66

Farewell, dear Clytie," and presses his lips to the sweet and quiet forehead. He has left a stain there! Blood! How came his lips bloody? They are stiff, and slightly pained. Going to the mirror, he wipes them with his handkerchief, and then scans his face. It is slightly flushed now. How bright his eyes are! No matter: they will be dim soon.

Now comes a pause in which the blood seems to creep away from his heart, and all madness dissolves, leaving him sensible, cold, resolute, and desperate. He has something in his hand, something that gleams in the shadow by his side, like steel. He stops and thinks. Who will come up first to his room in the morning? His neighbor the dentist, probably, as usual. How he will start when he sees him lying there! Then he will rush over, and touch him. Will he drop the hand when he finds it cold? Will he hurry from the chamber, and bring up a crowd of other people? Hush! What low whispering-what frightened faces-what unusual tumult in the bright morning sunlight of the room! Hush! How strange it will be -how ghastly-how awful! The white, rigid face of the corpse, its distorted features staring from the black, bedabbled hair, up, at the ceiling-with one dark gash on the throat, and the linen stained with frightful scarlet! On the carpet beside it, a dark, wet stain, which

whoever touches will take away his hand -red! Will it horrify him? Will he start away, and get water to wash the smear from his hand? Will it be some weak man, who will faint, and sink down, deadly white, beside him? Or will it be some strong-nerved man, who will merely turn a little paler, and not mind it more? How everything in the room will be tainted with the general horror of that ghastly group gathered around the prone, relaxed body! How livid the light will be! How glaring the sunshine! Listen! The low note in the colored throats of the pigeons, sitting as usual on the eaves of the building near the back windows, heard distinctly in the hush of the chamber! The statues will feel what has been done, and will declare it in their stillness. Every object in the room will be seen by strangers' eyes, and be remembered with the deed for

ever.

He looks at the razor in his hand. The steel blade shines bluely in the quiet light. There will be a thin, red stain upon it then! How they will shudder when they look at it! A ghastly smile starts out upon his face as he thinks-which of them will dare to use their own the next morning! The fancy brings a more ludicrous one in its train. He imagines them all wearing their beards; he imagines them with long beards on their breasts like Jews. How droll Murdock would look so! Then his mind rebounds to its deadly purpose, and, with a sudden motion, he puts the blade to his throat. Supposing he should fail! He pauses and thinks. After all, it is not safe to trust the chance-he might fail.

Therefore, he flings down the instrument, and, going to his bedroom, brings thence a vial and a glass. This will be better-strange he had forgotten it! Is there enough? Yes; enough! He empties the liquid in the wineglass, and puts down the vial. The rapid fumes of the laudanum have tainted the air of the room. Well, it is not like the famous Aqua Tofana--the subtile poison of Italian vengeance, and fatal wine of the Borgias-whose mere odor withered the breather's life away, as the Autumn withers leaves. But it will suffice, and there is romance in the death that it brings. Let the thought which has flowered around the draught be to it a garland of night-shade and funeral rue. Farewell, earth! Stay-what is the

time of exit? The hands of his watch point to a quarter of twelve. So: and

now

The liquid has already wet his lips, when one long, thrilling shriek shivers the quiet! It streams through his madness, and blows it away like a wind! One wild leap of his heart, which drives the blood through every artery, and then, stricken with a paralysis of fright, he listens in the curdling silence! The glass has fallen from his hand, and lies broken on the carpet. For a moment he thinks the cry sounded within the room, and stares to see some one whom he imagines has hidden there, and watched him. Then he is suddenly sensible that it came from without, and, recovering himself, he rushes to the window.

The shriek evidently came from a range of dark and dirty houses huddled together in a narrow alley beneath him, on the tops of which, leaning from the window, with all present memory of what he had been about to do banished from his thought, he now gazes. There are no lights, and everything is still. For a moment he asks himself whether he was deceived-whether that long, thrilling shriek, like the voice of a woman, was the work of his own fancy. It could not have been, and yet-there is no sound-no disturbance among the Irish families in the houses beneath him. Seemingly, every one is asleep. Darting from the window, he seizes his hat and cloak, and leaving the chamber, rushes down, gains the front street, runs quickly around to the rear of the building, and stands in the fetid alley.

He

walks through the place, peering up at the dark windows, and into the dismal door-ways, mostly open, and voiding into the cool air the filthy miasmas of the wretchedness and poverty within. But there is nothing to be seen or heard.

He fancies it was the cry of some one asleep. He leaves the alley, and walks listlessly down the street. His excitement, like his interest, has sunk down to a dull, lethargic, wearied calm. He does not think of returning to his room, nor does he-so little self-consciousness have the events of the last few minutes left him-think of the dread verge on which his spirit had been tottering, when the shriek dissolved the cloud of madness on which he had floated thither, and blew him over and beyond it into the natural world. Drowsed to utter apathy, he wanders down the street

to the deserted square. Water street, dark and still, stretches beyond the bridge to the southward. A few slender masts stand upright at the adjacent wharf. The sachems' heads, on the architrave of the What Cheer building, are dim in the darkness. He can but faintly trace the letters of the legend. What Cheer? No Cheer! None for you, grim ghosts of redbrowed braves, who, centuries ago, with the sole kindly English words ye knew, welcomed Roger Williams to the strand where Miantonomah was king! None for you in your unlegended graves, from Canonicus to the least of you! None for the White Man after you! None for the Dark Student!

None? For him, and the public generally, there is, in one sense at least, Cheer, and very good cheer too, in the cellar of the low wooden house, a few paces on, where a gleam of light from below shows the sign over the entrance -J. GINN, RESTAURANT. Toward this sign he wanders. He is now in the mood when one goes anywhere for the sight of another human face beside his own, and freely accepts any chance for converse, with even the lowest human being; so he goes down the stairs of the cellar to the interior. Its further end is lighted by a sconce on the low wall, in the full glare of which stands a bright mulatto boy, his brightness somewhat clouded just now by the darkened aspect of Mr. Ginn, in which he cowers sulkily his round head set in opposition to his hunched shoulder, which has ceased to propel the arm in the interrupted operation of cleaning knives. Mr. Ginn stands with his back to the entrance, poising his clenched fist in a manner peculiarly his own, as if calculating how much it weighs, and whether it is heavy enough to drop upon the black bullet-head of his small scullion. boy, meanwhile, with the corner of his white apron gathered in his left hand, which he swings slowly to and fro, and his right heel slowly rubbing the calf of his left leg, eyes Mr. Ginn, askance, with a queer expression of sulky humor on his bright, dogged face.

The

"Well, Guinea," remarks the Dark Student, adopting, with an attempt at jocosity, the customary amplification of Mr. Ginn's name, invented by the boys of Brown University, from whom the cellar derives some patronage—“so you're maltreating Charley, again?”