the journey. When at length he did set out, two farming men, and four Indians, belonging to the village, that had sprung up in his valley, accompanied him, having errands of their own to Quebec. They travelled partly in the night as well as through the day, the Pastor being extremely anxious to reach the city some days before the execution. The forest of St. Antony divided that gloomy swamp in the midst, along which Clinton had been journeying the fatal night of his death. The Pastor and his humble friends had to cross this forest. It was early in the morning and still dark. Their torches. alone illumined the tangled path whose track they were pursuing. To beguile the dreariness of the hour and the way they conversed upon sacred subjects, and the peace and confidence these topics instilled into their minds rendered them proof against all fears.

When nearly through the forest they were startled by a gipsy, who earnestly requested that the Pastor would follow him to a great tree which stood a little off the path, telling him a shocking deed had been done, and as a magistrate, which he knew Pastor Wilson was, he called upon him to investigate it.

The Pastor turned off from the path accordingly, followed close by his friends, and, to his utter dismay, saw in the hollow of the vast tree a dead body, which he presently discovered to be that of his grandson, Clinton.

The gipsy then pointed out the Settler, who stood in the grey darkness leaning against the stem of a cedar close by.

"That is the murderer," said he, "secure him!" which was done, but not without great difficulty.

While the Pastor and his grandchildren are conversing, the Settler is carried forwards to prison amid the groans, hootings, and threats of the people, whom the gipsy informed of the particulars of his guilt.

"I saw him drag the gentleman from his horse after he had fired at him once; when he had him down he shot him twice, as deliberately as if he had been putting a mere animal of the woods out of its dying torments."

The uproar was very great in the streets. The prisoner was unbound from his ragged pony at the prison door, where he returned the eager gaze of curiosity that was bent on him with a savage glare that made the beholders shrink, and then, assuming an aspect of dogged indifference, entered the gloomy barriers which had been a living tomb to thousands.

It was upon this same day that the fisherman Jacques, who had rescued Jane from the deep in the early part of this story, and whose wife first prompted her to seek shelter in the settlements over which Pastor Wilson presided as magistrate, hearing of the doom of the Pirate, his old captain, came to see him in the prison. Afterwards he sought out Madame Barry, and gave her such an account of the manner in which Anderson had been trepanned into joining the mutineers of her husband's ship, and of his total guiltlessness of a participation in the plunder and murder of Barry, that she became convinced she had wronged him in her mind, and immediately visited him, assuring him of her entire forgiveness; not content with this, she immediately set about endeavouring to obtain a commutation of his panishment.

The next morning the Settler is conducted to another part of the city to be examined; on the way he makes a desperate effort to escape. He is a fleet runner and strong lunged, he cannot be easily put out of breath. This way and that he flies, doubling, turning, circling across the open country according as he is pressed by his pursuers. At length he is surrounded, and climbs a tree with the agility of a squirrel, hiding among the thickest branches.

The first man who follows him falls throttled to the ground; the second shares the same fate. Both drop dead at their companions feet. Shots are then levelled at the tree, but the Settler loudly laughs them to scorn as if he were some supernatural being whom bullets cannot touch.

"Cut the tree down," suggests one. A dozen hatchets are instantly at work, and the Settler sees himself bereft of his last resource. The tree groans and quakes; its branches quiver with every deadly stroke; now it majestically bends ready to fall; it sinks slowly at first

the Settler leaps to the ground-and the crash of the oak of two centuries shakes the neighbourhood like an earthquake.

A halter was now knotted round the neck of the murderer, one end being fastened to a strong and lofty branch, and he was placed on an untamed colt, with his arms tied firmly behind his back. In this condition they left him, and in a moment the colt had darted off, leaving him pendant from the creaking branch, which bore his weight stoutly. A ghastly struggle then took place between the fighting soul and the tortured body. Red globes of fire appeared before the wretch's eyes; they

paled, and paled, and presently grew black-the Settler had then expiated his crime-he was dead! The body swung round and round in the midnight breeze; there was no more motion in its members; passion raged no more in the brooding spirit, which had dwelt too much on its wrongs, and had avenged them with fiend-like malice, but which, nevertheless, had not been without its noble sparks of feeling.

Few murderers have ever had so plausible an excuse for their hellish deeds as he. He had suffered a grievous injustice from Clinton, and, according to his rude notions of natural rights, thought himself justified in taking vengeance for it with his own hands.

"Life for life" was his motto, and on this he acted, regarding no other tribunal than his own mind. However, he hath followed his victim to eternity—

"And how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven?”

It was rather a curious circumstance that the gipsy who brought him to his end should be the vagrant king who had fled from the vengeance of his band for the murder of his wife. This guilty man now wandered restlessly about the spot where the Settler hung, haunted with such visions of his slaughtered Nina, such apprehensions of a meeting with the gipsies, and such longing desire for the society of his children, mingled with more fierce and reckless passions, that he was tempted to wish himself in the Settler's place.

At last, worn out with long fatigue and disquietude, he threw himself down on the ground and fell into a deep sleep. On awaking, his hair bristled up with terror-the well known camps of his tribe were pitched within twenty yards of him. He rose cautiously, and

crept behind the tree trunk. The night was far advanced. By certain sounds he heard, and by the closing of the hangings of the tents, he judged that the gipsies were preparing for rest. Shortly no noise was distinguishable, saving only the buzzing of the musquito, and the shrill, discordant shriek of the owl in the distant groves. The moon had left the sky, and the stars were growing pale. A thick dew was falling like a shower; the grasshopper chirped on the ground; the fire-fly blazed its parting gleams; the mocking-bird tuned its wondrous imitative strains far over hill and dale.

The wandering monarch approached the tents, walked round them stealthily, and listened at every second step he took. The voice of his children all at once thrilled through his heart. He retired behind a hedge, and returned again to the camp with a lighted stick. This he applied to the edges of the curtains in twenty different places, and presently the whole was in a blaze. At the first alarm the gipsies rushed out upon the plain, each mother with her own infant children, and, in the confusion that took place, the incendiary king easily contrived to seize and carry off his own boy and girl.

The next morning he engaged a passage in a vessel bound to England, his native country, paying for it with money given him by Pastor Wilson; and from this time he resumed the habits and the occupation of his early days, as a member of civilised society, bringing up his children to the same. But his son hated him, and never ceased to reproach him with the fact of having killed his mother. In the end the young man deserted his father to dwell in the camps wherein he was born. The gipsies received him joyfully, and he presided over