Soon after his settlement in Irishtown he was more than once invited to a neighbour's house; he declined the civility with his usual blandness, but so firmly and gravely as to put an end to future solicitations. He asked no one to his house; and, in fact, from the night it became his, until he was no longer master of it, it never was entered by any one, except by the customers, or chance visiters of his shop. Proposals were made to him to become a member of the charitable club of the parish. He readily consented, and sent in treble the amount of the specified subscription, but never went to the club-room and here it may be mentioned, that to the poor of every description, to the wandering beggar at his door, and to distressed objects in the suburbs, he gave liberally and continually. And thus passed his life, for years; holding no communication with his kind, beyond what a return of mere passing good manners demanded of him; indeed, never speaking, but when spoken to; a true hermit, though not of the desert; a man esteemed and thought well of, though, from year to year, still as much unknown, and as much a mystery to his neighbours, as he had been the first day of his appearance in the street.

It was more than five years after his coming to Irish-town, that, one morning, the Roman Merchant's shop appeared shut at an unusually late hour. People wondered, but supposed he had overslept himself. Hours wore away, and still he was not seen engaged, as usual, in taking down his shutters. They knocked loudly at his door-they thundered at it; no one stirred within. A little alarmed, they began to surmise that he might have gone to purchase goods before day-break; for it was winter time.

To ascertain this point, some went to the cabin of an old woman who took care of his ass and cart. The ass and cart were under their shed, in her yard; of course, he had not left the town, as had been supposed, as he never did so without them. Consternation as to his fate took possession of the minds of his neighbours.

Noon came; night was drawing on; authorities of the borough caused his house to be forcibly entered; he was not in it; he had not slept in his bed the previous night, for it was undisturbed after having been made up. In his little back parlour a humble supper was found laid out, a bottle of water to one hand, his single chair placed to the table, and the ashes of a turfen fire on the

hearth. All his property seemed untouched. Every thing was sealed up, the house again secured, and inquiries set on foot in all directions.

Days elapsed, and he was not heard of. The moment and the circumstances, at and under which he had last been seen, now were carefully established. His street neighbours, the night before his disappearance, had noticed him locking his shop door, and then going towards "the long steps," upon his accustomed walk. Other individuals had met him in the suburbs afterwards; and one had seen him, at a late hour, roaming through the churchyard. No further could he be accounted for.

At about the end of a week, spent in vain searches and conjectures, some youths of the suburbs were amusing themselves, vaulting over the tombstones in the churchyard of the cathedral. It was evening, and the winter's moon began to rise, shining ghastly over a light sheet of snow which for some days had covered the ground. They recollected what description of place they were so merry in, and half serious, half in jest, began to banter each others superstitious misgivings. One, stepping back in mock terror upon his companions, pointed to a far corner, among the stems of two rows of trees, and said that "the sperit of the Roman Marchant was watching them!" All took to flight, in laughing confusion, along the narrow pathway, pushing and jostling each other. Two of them slipt on the snow, and fell to one side among the graves. Their kicking and struggling displaced a loose and carelessly heaped mound, and the hand and arm of a man, gloved and clothed, started up between them, cold and stiff, from the earth. They were the hand and the arm of the Roman Merchant. The fact was established when, by the light of lanterns and torches, a crowd, whom their cries had summoned, disinterred the body.

It was fully dressed. Even the poor man's hat was found in his ill-made grave. Closer investigation showed, that, along with the key of his shop, his purse had been left in his pocket, his old-fashioned but valuable watch in his fob, and a mourning ring, of value too, upon his finger. They touched something hard at his breast-it was the handle of a dagger, which they could not at first pull out; the blade traversed the middle of his heart, and its point appeared at his back. The death-blow had been unerring and vehement, and

Who struck it? That was the question of every tongue, but it remained unanswered. It remains unanswered to the present hour; although the motives of the unknown assassin are darkly imagined and hinted at, whenever this true and unvarnished story is related-and it is still related-in our Irishtown,

The fact of finding his money, watch, and ring, untouched upon his person, removed the first natural suspicion, that the Roman Merchant had been set upon in a thirst of plunder. It then became almost evident that hatred or revenge alone could have done a murder, of which the object was life-poor life, only and of the primitive community whom he had chosen for his last earthly associates, not a heart or mind was found to attribute to its neighbour either of these baleful sentiments against the Roman Merchant. It was known and felt, that, although he had not permitted that close and continual intimacy which produces lively feelings of friendship, all had respected him for his demeanour, admired and esteemed him for his charities, and compassionated him, as well for his hermit life, as for the unexplained misfortunes that must have influenced and shaped it. In what direction, then, was the deadly enemy to be sought? The dagger, when unsheathed from his heart, suggested the first vague elucidation of the mystery. It was at once seen not to be of Irish, or even of English, manufacture; and an old military gentleman of the city, a native,who,after half a life of foreign service, had returned to repose himself among his early friends, unhesitatingly pronounced it to have been made in Spain, by a hand well known to him, and to others who wrought with such tools. But other evidence, much more important, though still not giving a clue to the identity of the murderer, came to light.

The Roman Merchant's little abode was again entered by competent authority. A more careful and minute search took place in it, after any documents likely to tell who he really was, and who might have been his early friends and connexions in a distant land. In the drawer of his desk was found a sealed packet, with a superscription in a foreign language, which none of the persons then present could translate. An old friar, half hiding in the suburbs, from the enactments of the time, was summoned to their councils; he had

the direction on the back of the packet, as well as the writing in the body of it, to be Spanish; and he supplied the following translation: first convincing all, that the writing was dated only some days before, from the residence of the murdered man.

"To my ruthless and terrible enemy: "You are upon my track again! After more than five years of quiet, gained by successfully eluding you, you are upon my track again! After escaping you seven times, in the four quarters of the globe, you have hunted me into this little nook of earth!-I know it-I am sure of it! Your bloodhound has crossed my path-the subtle devil whom you always sent forth to course after me through deserts and cities, over the most silent places, and into the thickest abodes of men, to mark me, and to fix me for your blow. I have once more seen him! This very day, though he does not think it-ay, beneath all his consummate disguises of feature and of person, I knew his eye!-this very day, among a crowd of humble peasants in my little shop, and at the very moment that he bargained with me for one of the paltry articles, by the sale of which to them I gain the only bread you have left me-this very day, he and I stood face to face. And now he has gone to tell you he has found me, and you will surely come, for the last time! Yes! my relentless enemy !-my fate! -my destruction-cloud!—already you have cast forward your thick shadow upon me!

"You will come for the last time, I say. Ay, for the last time; because I will not try to baffle you now. Heretofore I exerted the utmost skill and energy of man to save your soul from future fire (yes-you will die without regretting it!), and my own life from your hand, because I had injured youbecause you were her blood-because she prayed for you to her God in heaven, and forgave me and because, penetrated with a Christian's sorrow for the past, it was my duty, as well as my heart's great yearning, to preserve my wretched existence from one who had well forewarned me of his thirst to end it. now, if after five years' time for thought, you come-after sending me out, a Cain upon the earth-after taking from me. name and rank, fortune, friends, a country, human-kind-after using your power and your sway to disgrace and beggar me-after trampling me, treading me with your heel, down, down into the dust-if now once more you come,

But

let it be for the last time! I cannot save you-it is doomed! Or, perhaps, notwithstanding my uncharitable fear of the stoniness of your fierce heart, perhaps my life alone stands between you and the capability of feeling forgiveness and remorse perhaps, when you can see me stretched stiff at your feet-perhaps then, and then alone, it is decreed that you may relent-that out of the last of my earthly punishment will grow the first of your earthly repentance. Come, then!

"And yet, have I not already been punished enough? Oh, very hard has been my life since I injured you! That you have sent me out to earn my bread in the sweat of my brow-me, nursed on the very knee of luxury and honour- I count as nothing. So much, at least, I can thank you for. Humility, in all things, became my quick and full sense of my sin, and it has been my only solace. But remember !-your hand has, before now, struck sharp steel into my body; and when you thought I fell to rise no more, whose foot spurned me?

me a hard-minded villain, untouched by the result of my own fearful crime. If so, let these, my last protestations, undeceive you. I am penitent; humbly, crawlingly penitent. Come!-you will not find me raise a hand, an eye, against your hand, your eye.

"Yet why remonstrate with you on this paper?-you can never read the words I write, nor hear them read, till you have shed my blood; and I do write them, only to hint to the Christian people who shall find my lifeless body, some shadowy explanation of the cause of my coming death. Give me no praise for suppressing your name, and all allusions that might lead to a discovery of it. An angel-and your child-your only, only child (alas! alas !-strike home when you strike next!--I merit it !)—she now watches my heart and its workings, and she can feel, if you cannot, why, at more than the hazard of a thousand lives, I refrain from bringing to disgrace a name that I have already tarnished, through my treacherous love of the brightest creature that ever bore it. If they who shall find this paper ever publish it, then you may further reflect that, with a good omen of your coming, I called not on the arm of justice to shield me from you: but still, thank me not, nor on this account alone indulge remorse. may the expressions of sincere sorrow and misery I now give vent to move you to a more lively regret !-and that is a cheering hope. You have never before allowed my voice to reach you; you have stopped short my words with execrations, boisterous as a raging sea; you have interrupted them by outrage on my person; you have sent back my letters unopened; you would have struck down any messenger from me. It is probable, then, that, all along, you have believed

Oh,

"I am certain you will be minutely informed of my usual haunts abroad, in this little place, that so you may surprise me upon a secret spot. Knowing this, it is my resolve to tempt you to a haunt of mine, the most favourable for your purpose. Every night, henceforward, till the last-my last-I will loiter in lonely corner of the burial-ground of the cathedral, already, or soon to be, well described to you; for thither, I am as sured, your spy must have watched me repair, during my accustomed evening walk! and there among the graves, and perhaps standing upon my own, there, in the dark, I will expect you. Not a cry, not a loud word, shall expose you to de. tection. Come !-could I avoid you still, I would do it no matter what words may have here escaped me; but is there the slightest hope that I can? After all that has passed, what corner of the wide earth is able to hide me from his eye, and your hand? And by walking out in the nights, as is my wont, and in the places I am accustomed to-particularly when you know not that I know-how shall I be accessary to my own death? True, I might await you, trebly armed -but against whom? Her father!unutterable horror is in the thought. Ay, come!-and let the last words I shall hear on earth be even her name ! Hers-growled forth as you will !"

Thus ended the document. Of that anticipated meeting in the silent churchyard nothing but the result is known. The paper was published, and that it produced some of the effects hoped for by the writer is thought by the good and Christian; for, some six months afterwards, a large wooden case came, directed to the mayor of the city, from Dublin, where it had been imported; and upon opening it was found a marble urn, with a pedestal, inscribed to "The Roman Merchant.'

The above tale is indeed honourable to Mr. Banim, the author, who, in graphic writing, is probably, second only to Sir Walter Scott. We do not forget his first Series of the O'Hara Tales, which made their way slowly but steadily into public estimation; and the Editor of the Amulet has shown his good sense and taste in retaining such valuable aid as Mr. Banim's pen.

The Plates of the Amulet are, for the most part, excellent. The Frontispiece, the Countess Gower and her Child, by W. Finden, after Lawrence, is a lovely picture, although the distance might have been somewhat lighter. The figures, the child, the bust of its noble mother, are extremely delicate. The Resurrection, by Wallis, after Martin, is one of those astounding productions of art which it is barely possible to describe. A Plate from Mr. Wood's touching picture of "the Orphans' has the name of C. Rolls as the Engraver; but more truth than pleasantry has passed in some of the newspapers on this matter. The actual Engraver is, we believe, Mr. A Duncan. We have only room to add that Cromwell at Marston Moor, by W. Greatbach, is one of the best plates in the volume: it is by Mr. Cooper, R. A., from a sketch by an unknown artist. There is as much candour in this as appears to have been wanted in the case of the Orphans plate. Preface-writers may take a hint from the Editor's advertisement to the present volume; which is brief, but as grate ful as the Editor of a successful work ought to be.

The Humourist.

THIS is a new enterprise, and on that account we regret being compelled to own it is not a successful one. The whole is written by Mr. W. H. Harrison, author of "Tales of a Physician," who would probably have produced a more agreeable work had he allowed a few contributors to chequer his pages. We confess it no easy task to be humourous throughout a volume. Mr. Hood has succeeded in this way, as Mr. Mathews has in amusing a company for a whole evening; but Hood and Mathews are rare aves in their line. The titles of many of the Tales in the Humourist are promising; but their fun is often flat, and they want variety of subject. We quote a sketch which appears to be

one of the best in the volume:

THE MODERN ULYSSES.

No sooner was the hatchment mounted over the portico of Beechwood Hall, announcing that its late proprietor, Sir John Denyers, was dead, and that his widow had succeeded to the splendid mansion and broad lands, than it was hailed as the signal for attack, by all the unmarried men within a circumference of twenty miles. They flocked to her by scores, arrayed in the mourning cloak of condolence, endeavouring to smuggle

in their love under the disguise of sympathy.

Her lawyer, a hale bachelor of sixty, requested she would do him the honour to consider him less in the light of a professional adviser than a friend zealous for her interests, and would fain have presented her with a title to his services in his shrivelled hand, but he had already given her a surfeit of parchment, and the man of law discovered that, although his suit had frequently been successful in those courts where the presiding goddess is represented to be blind, it was quite another thing to plead his cause before a woman with her eyes open.

In fact, ere she had worn the weeds of widowhood for six weeks, her paths were beset, and her dwelling besieged, and never, certainly, had woman a better chance of mending her luck, for there was not one of the whole five and forty lovers who was not willing to stake his life upon the sincerity and disinterestedness of his affection. She could not open a window in her house, but a myriad of billet-doux came showering into it, like a snow-storm. She could not take a walk in her most private grounds, but a lover started from behind every bush, and flung himself upon his knees in the path before her. Others again, affecting bucolics, would wander forth into the fields, crook in hand, and carve her name upon every tree, to the great endangerment of her timber. Every domestic in her household was bribed by one or other of her suitors. and she was under the consequent necessity of changing her establishment twice a year, from the lady's maid to the stable-boy.

While, however, there exists not a rebel in the citadel of the heart, the fortress will hold out long against external assaults, and the widow had got some antediluvian notions into her head about "first love," "respect for the memory of the dead," &c. which, although, no doubt, extremely silly, had the effect of disinclining her from a second specu

lation in the hazardous adventure of matrimony.

As the numbers of her suitors increased, their individual chances of success, of course, diminished, and, their audacity being in the exact ratio of their despair, her own mansion was no sanctuary against the intrusion of her unbidden guests.

The matchless impudence of one of her visiters deserves particular record. It happened that, one day, the widow went out, for several hours, to call on a friend at some distance, leaving only two

male domestics, the butler and a footboy in the house. Towards evening, a horseman rode up to the hall door, and applied himself with more than ordinary energy to the knocker. He was a tall, military-looking personage, with a cast of features which might have been termed handsome, but for a certain cynical expression, which much detracted from their pleasing effect. The stranger flung his rein to the boy, desiring him to take his horse to the stable and have it well fed and littered down for the night, and then stalked into the house, and, notwithstanding reiterated announcements from the servants in chorus of "Mistress is not at home, Sir," stopped not until he reached the dining-parlour, when, turning to the butler, who had followed him, he said, "Here, let that valise be taken up into her ladyship's chamber, and let a fire be lit there, for it's rather cool."

"Very cool, indeed," said the domestic, applying the epithet to the speaker and not to the weather, and was meditating some impertinent observation, when the stranger, carelessly, as if it had been his handkerchief, drew a pistol from each pocket, and placed it on the table before him.

The butler, who had a mortal dread of fire-arms, quitted the apartment in haste, as if to do the stranger's bidding, but, in reality, to communicate to his fellow-domestics, the females, his suspicions of the character of the guest. Their conversation was, however, soon interrupted by the violent ringing of the bell, and it was some time before Geoffry could summon courage to

answer it.

"Your pleasure, sir?" said he, reentering the dining-parlour.

"Some dinner!" responded the other. The butler paused, but, at length, said, "Very sorry, sir, but we have not got any thing in the house."

"Then look in the poultry-yard," was the reply, "and let me have a broiled chicken in half an hour."

The other stared, but the stranger's eyes happening to fall upon the pistols, Geoffry seemed to understand the appeal, and, being anxious to go off first, hurried out to counsel the sacrifice of a chicken to their common safety. In the course of the half hour, the dish was smoking before the guest, who, having no notion of glasses being placed on table for the mere purpose of ornament, pronounced the monosyllable "Wine." "If you please, sir," said Geoffry, "we can't get at any, for mistress has got the key of the wine-cellar in her pocket."

"Nonsense!" exclaimed the other, "who ever heard of a wine-cellar with only one key ?-why, keys in a great man's house are like pistols, there are always two of a pattern."

The allusion had its effect; Geoffry vanished in an instant, and shortly reappeared as Ganymede.

In a few minutes afterwards, the noise of wheels announced the return of Lady Denyers, who, on being informed of the stranger's arrival, like a woman of spirit, went straight into the dining-room to demand an explanation. On the next instant, the servants heard a loud scream from their mistress, and, concluding that she was murdered, they, very dutifully, ran out of the house, and set off, at full speed, each in a different direction, for the doctor.

It seemed that no sooner had the lady cast her eyes upon her visiter, than she uttered a piercing shriek, and sank upon the carpet. Now, when a man faints away, the approved method of treatment is to kick and cuff him till he recover, but, with a woman, the case is somewhat different. The stranger raised her in his arms, threw half a glass of water in her face, and poured the remainder down her throat, and, at last, succeeded in restoring the patient.

"And is it really you, Sir John ?" "exclaimed the lady, when she became somewhat tranquil.

"Ay, in very deed, Caroline," was the reply; "ghosts do not drink Madeira and devour chickens."

"Then you were not killed and eaten by those frightful Ashantees ?"

"You greatly wrong that very respectable and much-slandered people," said Sir John; "they have better tastes, and preferred my society to my flesh, insomuch that I had some difficulty in escaping from their hospitalities."

"I hope, my dear," said the lady, you were duly sensible of their attentions?"

"I was very nearly being insensible to them and every thing else, for the worthy gentleman who did me the honour to engross my society, seeing me determined on quitting him, followed me as far as he could, and then fired a parting salute from his musket, into which he had, inadvertently, put a bullet, and left me with half an ounce of lead in my shoulder.”

"O dear!" exclaimed the lady, "how very horrid and did you walk all the way in that state ?"

"I did not walk two hundred yards, my love, for I fell into a bush, exhausted from loss of blood, when I was picked