to us, perhaps, that the dreadful power, which clothed itself with darkness, had not expired, but was only reposing from its labours, all at once the chief jailer of the city was missing. He had been in the habit of taking long rides in the forest, his present situation being much of a sinecure. It was on the 1st of July that he was missed. In riding through the city gates that morning he had mentioned the direction which he meant to pursue; and the last time he was seen alive was in one of the forest avenues about eight miles from the city, leading towards the point he had indicated. This jailer was not a man to be regretted on his own account; his life had been a tissue of cruelty and brutal abuse of his powers, in which he had been too much supported by the magistrates, partly on the plea that it was their duty to back their own officers against all complainers, partly, also, from the necessities created by the turbulent times for a more summary exercise of their magisterial authority. No man, therefore, on his own separate account, could more willingly have been spared than this brutal jailer; and it was a general remark, that, had the murderous band within our walls swept away this man only, they would have merited the public gratitude as purifiers from a public nuisance. But was it certain that the jailer had died by the same hands as had so deeply afflicted the peace of our city during the winter? or, indeed, that he had been murdered at all? The forest was too extensive to be searched; and it was possible that he might have met with some fatal accident. His horse had returned to the city gates in the night, and was found there in the morning. Nobody, however, for months, could give information about his rider; and it seemed probable that he would not be discovered until the autumn and the winter should again carry the sportsman into every thicket and dingle of this silvan tract. One person only seemed to have more knowledge on this subject than others, and that was poor Ferdinand von Harrelstein. He was now a mere ruin of what he had once been, both as to intellect and moral feeling; and I observed him frequently smile when the jailer was mentioned. "Wait," he would say, "till the leaves begin to drop; then you will see what fine fruit our forest bears." I did not repeat these expressions to any body except one friend, who agreed with me that the jailer had probably been hanged in some recess of the forest, which summer veiled with its luxuriant umbrage; and that Ferdinand, constantly wandering in the forest, had discovered the body but we both acquitted him of having been an accomplice in the murder. : Mean-time, the marriage between Margaret Liebenheim and Maximilian was understood to be drawing near, Yet one thing struck every body with astonishment. As far as the young people were concerned, nobody could doubt that all was arranged; for never was happiness more perfect than that which seemed to unite them. Margaret was the impersonation of Maytime and youthful rapture; even Maximilian in her presence seemed to forget his gloom; and the worm which gnawed at his heart was charmed asleep by the music of her voice, and the Paradise of her smiles. But, until the autumn came, Margaret's grandfather had never ceased to frown upon this connexion, and to support the pretensions of Ferdinand. The dislike, indeed, seemed reciprocal between him and Maximilian. Each avoided the other's company; and as to the old man, he went so far as to speak sneeringly of Maximilian. Maximilian despised him too heartily to speak of him at all. When he could not avoid meeting him, he treated him with a stern courtesy, which distressed Margaret as often as she witnessed it. She felt that her grandfather had been the aggressor; and she felt, also, that he did injustice to the merits of her lover. But she had a filial tenderness for the old man, as the father of her sainted mother, and on his own account, continually making more claims on her pity, as the decay of his memory, and a childish fretfulness growing upon him from day to day, marked his increasing imbecility. Equally mysterious it seemed, that, about this time, Miss Liebenheim began to receive anonymous letters, written in the darkest and most menacing terms. Some of them she showed to me; I could not guess at their drift. Evidently they glanced at Maximilian, and bade her beware of a connexion with him; and dreadful things were insinuated about him. Could these letters be written by Ferdinand? Written they were not; but could they be dictated by him? Much I feared that they were; and the more so for one reason. All at once, and most inexplicably, Margaret's grandfather showed a total change of opinion in his views as to her marriage: instead of favouring Harrelstein's pretensions, as he had hitherto done, he now threw the feeble weight of his encouragement into Maximilian's scale; though, from the situation of all the parties, nobody attached any practical importance to the change in Mr Liebenheim's way of thinking. Nobody? Is that true? No; one person did attach the greatest weight to the change; poor ruined Ferdinand ;-he, so long as there was one person to take his part, so long as the grandfather of Margaret showed countenance to himself, had still felt his situation not utterly desperate. Thus were things situated, when in November, all the leaves daily blowing off from the woods, and leaving bare the most secret haunts of the thickets, the body of the jailer was left exposed in the forest; but not, as I and my friend had conjectured, hanged; no; he had died, apparently, by a more horrid death-by that of crucifixion. The tree, a remarkable one, bore upon a part of its trunk this brief but savage inscription :-" T. H., jailer at -; Crucified, July 1, 1816." A great deal of talk went on throughout the city upon this discovery; nobody uttered one word of regret on account of the wretched jailer; on the contrary, the voice of vengeance, rising up in many a cottage, reached my ears in every direction as I walked abroad. The hatred in itself seemed horrid and unchristian, and still more so after the man's death; but, though horrid and fiendish for itself, it was much more impressive, considered as the measure and exponent of the damnable oppression which must have existed to produce it. At first, when the absence of the jailer was a recent occurrence, and the presence of the murderers amongst us was, in consequence, revived to our anxious thoughts, it was an event which few alluded to without fear. But matters were changed now; the jailer had been dead for months, and this interval, during which the murderer's hand had slept, encouraged every body to hope that the storm had passed over our city; that peace had returned to our hearths; and that, henceforth, weakness might sleep in safety, and innocence without anxiety Once more we had peace within our walls, and tranquillity by our firesides. Again the child went to bed in cheer. fulness, and the old man said his pray. ers in serenity. Confidence was restored; peace was re-established; and once again the sanctity of human life became the rule and the principle for all human hands amongst us. Great was the joy; the happiness was universal. Oh, heavens! by what a thunderbolt were we awakened from our security!-On the night of the 27th of December, half an hour, it might be, after twelve o'clock, an alarm was given that all was not right in the house of Mr Liebenheim. Vast was the crowd which soon collected in breathless agitation. In two minutes a man who had gone round by the back of the house was heard unbarring Mr Liebenheim's door: he was incapable of uttering a word; but his ges tures, as he threw the door open and beckoned to the crowd, were quite enough. In the hall, at the further extremity, and as if arrested in the act of making for the back, lay the bodies of old Mr Liebenheim and one of his sisters, an aged widow; on the stair lay another sister, younger, and unmarried, but upwards of sixty. The hall and lower flight of stairs were floating with blood. Where, then, was Miss Liebenheim, the grand-daughter? That was the universal cry; for she was beloved as generally as she was admired. Had the infernal murderers been devilish enough to break into that temple of innocent and happy life? Every one asked the question, and every one held his breath to listen; but for a few moments no one dared to advance; for the silence of the house was ominous. At length some one cried out, that Miss Liebenheim had that day gone upon a visit to a friend, whose house was forty miles distant in the forest. “Ay,” replied another, "she had settled to go ; but I heard that something had stopped her." The suspense was now at its height, and the crowd passed from room to room, but found no traces of Miss Liebenheim. At length they ascended the stair, and in the very first room, a small closet or boudoir, lay Margaret, with her dress soiled hideously with blood. The first impression was that she also had been murdered; but, on a nearer approach, she appeared to be unwounded, and was manifestly alive. Life had not departed, for her breath sent a haze over a mirror, but it was suspended, and she was labouring in some kind of fit. The first act of the crowd was to carry her into the house of a friend on the opposite side of the street, by which time medical assistance had crowded to the spot. Their attentions to Miss Liebenheim had naturally deranged the condition of things in the little room, but not before many people found time to remark that one of the murderers must have carried her with his bloody hands to the sofa on which she lay, for water had been sprinkled profusely over her face and throat, and water was even placed ready to her hand, when she might happen to recover, upon a low footstool by the side of the sofa. On the following morning, Maximilian, who had been upon a huntingparty in the forest, returned to the city, and immediately learned the news. I did not see him for some hours after, but he then appeared to me thoroughly agitated, for the first time I had known him to be so. In the evening another perplexing piece of intelligence transpired with regard to Miss Liebenheim, which at first afflicted every friend of that young lady. It was, that she had been seized with the pains of childbirth, and delivered of a son, who, however, being born prematurely, did not live many hours. Scandal, however, was not allowed long to batten upon this imaginary triumph, for within two hours after the circulation of this first rumour, followed a second, authenticated, announcing that Maximilian had appeared with the confessor of the Liebenheim family, at the residence of the chief magistrate, and there produced satisfactory proofs of his marriage with Miss Liebenheim, which had been duly celebrated, though with great secrecy, nearly eight months before. In our city, as in all the cities of our country, clandestine marriages, witnessed, perhaps, by two friends only of the parties, besides the officiating priest, are exceedingly common. In the mere fact, therefore, taken separately, there was nothing to surprise us, but, taken in connexion with the general position of the parties, it did surprise us all; nor could we conjecture the reason for a step apparently so needless. For, that Maximilian could have thought it any point of prudence or necessity to secure the hand of Margaret Liebenheim by a private marriage, against the final opposition of her grandfather, nobody who knew the parties, who knew the perfect love which possessed Miss Liebenheim, the growing imbecility of her grandfather, or the utter contempt with which Maximilian regarded him, could for a moment believe. Altogether, the matter was one of profound mystery. Mean-time, it rejoiced me that poor Margaret's name had been thus rescued from the fangs of the scandalmongers: these harpies bad their prey torn from them at the very moment when they were sitting down to the unhallowed banquet. For this I rejoiced, but else there was little subject for rejoicing in any thing which concerned poor Margaret. Long she lay in deep insensibility, taking no notice of any thing, rarely opening her eyes, and apparently unconscious of the revolutions, as they succeeded, of morning or evening, light or darkness, yesterday or to-day. Great was the agitation which convulsed the heart of Maximilian during this period; he walked up and down in the Cathedral nearly all day long, and the ravages which anxiety was working in his physical system might be read in his face. People felt it an intrusion upon the sanctity of his grief to look at him too narrowly, and the whole town sympathised with his situation. At length a change took place in Margaret, but one which the medical men aunounced to Maximilian as boding ill for her recovery. The wanderings of her mind did not depart, but they altered their character. She became more agitated, she would start up suddenly, and strain her eyesight after some figure which she seemed to see; then she would apostrophise some person in the most piteous terms, beseeching him, with streaming tears, to spare her old grandfather. "Look, look," she would cry out, "look at his grey hairs; oh, sir! he is but a child; he does not know what he says; and he will soon be out of the way and in his grave; and very soon, sir, he will give you no more trouble." Then, again, she would mutter indistinctly for hours together; sometimes, she would cry out frantically, and say things which terrified the bystanders, and which the physicians would solemnly caution them how they repeated; then she would weep, and invoke Maximilian to come and aid her. But seldom, indeed, did that name pass her lips that she did not again begin to strain her eyeballs, and start up in bed to watch some phantom of her poor fevered heart, as if it seemed vanishing into some mighty distance. After nearly seven weeks passed in this agitating state, suddenly, on one morning, the earliest and the loveliest of dawning spring, a change was announced to us all as having taken place in Margaret; but it was a change, alas! that ushered in the last great change of all. The conflict, which had for so long a period raged within her, and overthrown her reason, was at an end; the strife was over; and nature was settling into an everlasting rest. In the course of the night she had recovered her senses; when the morning light penetrated through her curtain, she recognised her attendants, made enquiries as to the month and the day of the month, and then, sensible that she could not outlive the day, she requested that her confessor might be summoned. A motion besides, a fury in his eye. What passed, who could pretend to guess? Something more than two hours had elapsed, during which Margaret had been able to talk occasionally, which was known, because at times the attendants heard the sound of Maximilian's voice evidently in tones of reply to something which she had said. At the end of that time, a little bell, placed near the bedside, was rung hastily; a fainting fit had seized Margaret, but she recovered almost before her women applied the usual remedies. They lingered, however, a little, looking at the youthful couple with an in. terest which no restraints availed to check. Their hands were locked together, and in Margaret's eyes there gleamed a farewell light of love, which settled upon Maximilian, and seemed to indicate that she was becoming speechless. Just at this moment she made a feeble effort to draw Maximilian towards her; he bent forward and kissed About an hour and a half the con- her with an anguish that made the most fessor remained alone with her. At callous weep, and then he whispered the end of that time he came out, something into her ear, upon which and hastily summoned the attendants, the attendants retired, taking this as a for Margaret, he said, was sinking proof that their presence was a hinderinto a fainting fit. The confessor, ance to a free communication. But himself, might have passed through they heard no more talking, and in many a fit, so much was he changed less than ten minutes they returned. by the results of this interview. I Maximilian and Margaret still retained crossed him coming out of the house. their former position. Their hands I spoke to him-I called to him; were fast locked together; the same but he heard me not he saw me not. parting ray of affection, the same fareHe saw nobody. Onwards he strode well light of love, was in the eye of to the Cathedral, where Maximilian Margaret, and still it settled upon was sure to be found, pacing about Maximilian. But her eyes were beupon the graves. Him he seized by ginning to grow dim; mists were the arm, whispered something into his rapidly stealing over them. Maximiear, and then both retired into one of lian, who sat stupified and like one the many sequestered chapels in which not in his right mind, now, at the lights are continually burning. There gentle request of the women, resigned they had some conversation, but not his seat, for the hand which had clasped very long, for within five minutes his had already relaxed its hold; the Maximilian strode away to the house in farewell gleam of love had departed; which his young wife was dying. One one of the women closed her eyelids ; step seemed to carry him up-stairs; and there fell asleep for ever the lovethe attendants, according to the di- liest flower that our city had reared rections they had received from the for generations. physicians, mustered at the head of the stairs to oppose him. But that was idle before the rights which he held as a lover and a husband, before the still more sacred rights of grief, which he carried in his countenance, all opposition fled like a dream, There was, The funeral took place on the fourth day after her death. In the morning of that day, from strong affection-having known her from an infant-I begged permission to see the corpse. She was in her coffin; snow-drops and crocuses were laid upon her innocent bosom, and roses of that sort which the season allowed, over her person. These and other lovely symbols of youth, of springtime, and of resurrection, caught my eye for the first moment; but in the next it fell upon her face. Mighty God! what a change! what a transfiguration! Still, indeed, there was the same innocent sweetness; still there was something of the same love liness; the expression still remained; but for the features-all trace of flesh seemed to have vanished; mere out line of bony structure remained; mere pencillings and shadowings of what she once had been. This is indeed, I exclaimed, "dust to dust-ashes to ashes!" It Maximilian, to the astonishment of every body, attended the funeral. was celebrated in the Cathedral. All made way for him, and at times he seemed collected; at times, he reeled like one who was drunk. He heard as one who hears not; he saw as one in a dream. The whole ceremony went on by torch-light, and towards the close he stood like a pillar, motionless, torpid, frozen. But the great burst of the choir, and the mighty blare ascending from our vast organ at the closing of the grave, recalled him to himself, and he strode rapidly homewards. Half-an-hour after I returned, I was summoned to his bed-room. He was in bed, calm and collected. What he said to me I remember as if it had been yesterday, and the very tone with which he said it, although more than twenty years have passed since then. He began thus: "I have not long to live ;" and when he saw me start, suddenly awakened into a consciousness that perhaps he had taken poison, and meant to intimate as much, he continued," You fancy I have taken poison;-no matter whether I have or not; if I have, the poison is such that no antidotes will now avail; or, if they would, you well know that some griefs are of a kind which leave no opening to any hope. What difference, therefore, can it make whether I leave this carth to-day, to-morrow, or the next day? Be assured of this-that whatever I have determined to do is past all power of being affected by a human opposition. Occupy yourself not with any fruitless attempts, but calmly listen to me, else I know what to do." Seeing a suppressed fury in his eye, notwithstanding that I saw 66 also some change stealing over his features as if from some subtle poison beginning to work upon his frame, awe struck I consented to listen, and sate still. "It is well that you do so, for my time is short. Here is my will, legally drawn up, and you will see that I have committed an immense property to your discretion. Here, again, is a paper still more important in my eyes; it is also testamentary, and binds you to duties which may not be so easy to execute as the disposal of my property. But now listen to something else which concerns neither of these papers. Promise me, in the first place, solemnly, that whenever I die you will see me buried in the same grave as my wife, from whose funeral we are just returned. Promise." I promised. "Swear." I swore. Finally, promise me that, when you read this second paper which I have put into your hands, whatsoever you may think of it, you will say nothing -publish nothing to the world, until three years shall have passed." I promised. "And now farewell for three hours; come to me again about ten o'clock and take a glass of wine in memory of old times." This he said laughingly; but even then a dark spasm crossed his face. Yet, thinking that this might be the mere working of mental anguish within him, I complied with his desire, and retired. Feeling, however, but little at ease, I devised an excuse for looking in upon him about one hour and a half after I had left him. I knocked gently at his door; there was no answer. I knocked louder; still no answer. I went in. The light of day was gone, and I could see nothing. But I was alarmed by the utter stillness of the room. I listened earnestly, but not a breath could be heard. I rushed back hastily into the hall for a lamp; I returned; I looked in upon this marvel of manly beauty, and the first glance informed me; that he and all his splendid endowments had departed for ever. He had died, probably, soon after I left him, and had dismissed me from some growing instinct which informed him that his last agonies were at hand. I took up his two testamentary documents; both were addressed in the shape of letters to myself. The first was a rapid, though distinct, appropriation of his enormous property. General rules were laid down upon which the property was to be distri |