As the youth reached the hall he turned, and then, the source of all these symptoms of transport was revealed.

Bending over the Minstrel Gallery, which traversed at mid-height the upper end of the baron's hall, a beautiful girl bright in all the budding fascination of that stage when the child begins to peer into maidhood, smiled, and waved what might seem a reiterated adieu to the departing page.

Her fair redundant tresses were gracefully pursed up in that charming headtire of the period called a crestine, being a golden net caul, which, imprisoning the whole hair, allowed it to cluster in its glittering cage, with most elegant undulations, round the brow and cheek.

Her kirtle or cyclade was of the rich celestial blue; and its material, termed saracennet, from its Saracenic, or Oriental origin; her inner robe was of the tyretaine, a glowing scarlet, confined by a girdle of goldsmith's work; and that very slender waist, shewed that tightlacing at least did not follow in the wake of intellect's dread march!

There was all of girlish love that could beam from two sunny eyes, and wreathe a roseate cheek and ruby lip, but there was evident constraint mingled with this parting token; for, when those white fingers touched those lips, and tossed a sugared kiss along the air, as you would swing a censer; no sound added music to sweetness; and, in the hurried glance and gesture, if there was affection, that braves all, there was also caution that apprehends all.

The boy stopped, and stood breathless with adoration; all the bold, the haughty, and the fierce in his eye-glance, blending in one intense gaze of love; as various ingredients in the alchemist's crucible mingle in one rose-coloured flame.

Again the bright girl waved her hand, but now it was not so much a farewell as a warning gesture. A hurried, averted glance, and a straining of the swan-like neck towards the arched door at the back of the gallery, indicated an unwelcome approach; and, starting at this admonition, the young Damoiseau hastily waved his embroidered hawk's-glove, and vanished through the hall doorway just in time to avoid seeing another of our dramatis personæ enter the minstrel's gallery.

It was a grave and majestic-looking personage, whose broad front and blue eye wore at this moment an expression of severity, the more terrible from being so dignified and quiet. The features

were large, but admirably chiselled, and the hair, an auburn with not one streak of gray, was suffered to mingle its shining waves with the beard, which curled down from a pair of thick moustachios, crisped with great precision, and gave a stately, as well as a manly grace, to a face which had surely not seen fifty winters.

A cap (not unlike the broad bonnet of Aberdeen), composed of purple cloth of turse, without band or tassel, a dalmatica of yellow silk, damasked, and overlaid with the family blazon, gules on a saltire argent, a rose of the field, a long full-folded mantle of crimson satin, embroidered with black bulls and golden oak-branches, and the then rare luxury, gloves of fragrant leather, fretted with gold and various coloured silkwork, announced the Lord Hubert de Neville, baron of Middleham and Raby.

The expression on his commanding brow darkened from displeasure to fierceness, as Lord Hubert perceived the confused air and hesitating step of his daughter, who was retiring from the front of the gallery as he entered.

Lady Aveline then, for the first time, read that tragic page in a volume which had hitherto always been delightful to her, and a scream of childish terror evinced its effect. Then too, for the first time, did his only child, the heiress of his castles and domains, meet the baron's eye without awakening the most pleasurable sensations.

She made an irresolute movement, as if to fly from his presence, without exactly knowing why; but her father detained her, and with no soft grasp.

Neither the limits of our story nor our own inclination, admit of our accounting for the piece of stage effect with which we have ushered in our principal personations, any farther than thus: -Polydore the page had been (by a deviation from the practice of chivalry, which destined the sons of esquires, knights, and even nobles for that office) taken to the nurture and favour of De Neville, from the hut of a vassal of Middleham, at the early age of seven, merely because he was a child of rare beauty, and because the little motherless Lady of Middleham took great contentment in the childish plays he shewed her,—such as making helmets of rushes, weaving chains of the dandelion, and stringing carkanets of daisies and king-cups. course the widowed baron soon grew fond of his Aveline's favourite, and about eight years of luxurious nurture,―obsequious obedience, and servile flattery

Of

from the domestics, condescension that forgot its dignity from the baron, and somewhat more than the kindness of a sister on the part of young Aveline, served to foster, if not unfold, those charming qualities in which human nature, so circumstanced, never fails to be prolific-viz: selfishness, insolence, and presumption.

A downright love affair (ridiculous enough between a boy not fifteen, and a girl a year younger) had been long watched by the envy he had awakened, and was at last betrayed by the animosity he had provoked.

This morning had proved fatal to poor Polydore. A declaration of everlasting love had been interchanged; and a mutual embrace and kiss were the seal; but, alas! both bond and seal were attested by unwished-for witnesses, and formally laid before the indignant, the thunder-struck Lord Hubert.

The Lady Aveline had scarcely time to turn a look of breathless supplication upon her offended sire, when, in a moment, Polydore's voice was heard from the castle court below.

"Unhand me, villains! Slaves, unhand me, or right dearly shall ye abye it! My Lord Hubert, help! haste, Lady Aveline, they are about to slay me!"

Gasping, and speechless with horror, her slight figure trembling from head to foot, Aveline did not dare so much as to raise up her eyes to her father's face.

"The Baron himself deigned not a look at his daughter, whose arm he grasped, while his head was bent, in the direction of Polydore's outcries.

Resentment kindled his brow, and pride curled his lip, and both broke forth in a cruel laugh.

"Unhand thee?" he said, "By Saint Edward if they do, their own backs shall bear the characters in rubric that I have destined for thine. My Lord Hubert, forsooth! he is no saint to help thee, if he could; and my Lady Aveline, cannot, if she would! And you, minion!" turning a glance of lightning on Aveline, "you to dare decline from your high birth and state, to a base serf. See now, since Aveline Neville hath joined lips to those which, by her very bower-woman, would have been deemed too mean,-see what it hath cost the audacious coxcomb!"

The cries of the Damoiseau had now ceased.

The ireful Baron led Aveline down into the hall, and there compelled her to look forth from one of the arched gothic

windows, whose recess retired to the depth of twelve feet in the solid wall.

Now this magnificent Castle of Middleham consists of a parallelogram, which contains eight noble towers, with numerous stories and suites of chambers; and encloses a court, from the centre of which, isolated, gloomy, and of immense size, soars the donjon keep, flanked with turrets ;-the brackets and architraves of its state apartments are still to be seen. You may also trace the windows and a cornice of heavy flutework in the chapel; and, in the hall, a flat, arched window, eighteen feet wide, and proportionately high, lets in a flood of light upon the battered ruins.

In this window stood Lord Neville with his shrinking child, and compelled her attention to a particular spot, where a broad low arch led from a flight of steps in the yard below to the buttery.

And there the poor girl beheld, with agonies of childish grief and fear, the page Polydore, in the hands of the vassals, half divested of his gay apparel, stretched across the buttery hatch, writhing and bleeding, but without a complaint or moan, under a discipline by no means uncommon in the household government maintained in their baronial mansions by the great of old.

It is very probable that the punishment of young Polydore's presumptuous affaire de cœur would have ended here.

Provoked as the Baron was, and resolved to put a full stop to such folly; still he could consider it only in the light of a boyish freak; and as such, the punishment he awarded, while calculated to tame down the page's aspiring blood, did not, in the opinion of that day, by any means exceed the transgression.

Polydore therefore, on his submission and acknowledgment, would, very likely, have been reinstated, ere nightfall, in all his privileges at Middleham, save the imaginary one of a share in the heart of its beautiful heiress.

As for Lady Aveline, his chance was lost eternally there; for terror, not slightly tinged with shame and contempt, took so large a share in the feelings with which she had witnessed the unlucky Damoiseau's punishment, that love and Polydore were dissevered in her imagination for ever.

Not so the culprit !

Few who saw him, when his correction had been inflicted, deliberately arrange his dishevelled raiment, replace his cap upon his disordered locks, and walk coolly out of the castle gateway in

the north-east tower, would have imagined how deeply the stripes of ignominy had eaten into his proud soul! They could see his brow was red, but that might be with pain; they could note the white teeth glaring through his writhen lips; his lurid eye too, they all remarked, whose hectic fire seemed to loathe the light. Still,-less than this none in the castle, who knew his fierce and misproud temper, would have expected from Polydore. One and all regarded it merely as the plunging and rearing of the colt who feels curb and lash for the first time.

Ah! could they have seen his heart! As it was, the Scourged Page gave them good cause to conceive that he had felt his chastisement more acutely than was customary on such occasions, since he absented himself altogether from the Castle of Middleham.

Great was the marvelling among the domestics.

"Did ever lad so play the haggard with his own good fortune? and then to take wing for a few stripes! Why," thus moralized Roger the falconer, "here have I the marks of many a good skin-cutting from old Grimshaw the cook, when I was an overthwart lad, and what of that? Where would have been the head falconer's place, and twenty merk a year, if Roger Teesdale had shewn them a clean pair of heels the first time they bade him untruss? me the doublet, well-faced and lined, that hides all lashes. Let me only have a good store of my lord's beef and ale, and I'd stomach fifty floggings. But this young Eyas of a page, forsooth!touch his silky skin, and he's off like a ruffled bird!

Give

"By'r lady!" said Stephen the pantler, "the younker shewed fight however! I'd have been sworn to hold such a stripling as that with my teeth, untruss him with one hand, and fly-flap him with the other, and, lo ye! he tasked some half dozen of us!"

66

Ay, and fought like a heron on his back, when we had hampered him!"

"Well! 't was a misproud Jackanapes -not that I bore him malice-but h'as had his well-earned wages this blessed day!"

"The lad has surely never been such a fool as to pitch himself into the Ure. I should be loath to hear that."

"Not he 't is far more likely he's ranging Mowbray plain, or snaring rabbits in Gaunless thickets."

“P'shaw! my masters," said Grim

shaw the cook, "you'll have him back, and on his marrowbones, when he remembers that the fat haunch in the kitchen looks fairer than the palmy antlers in the forest."

"Ay! ay!" said the huntsman, "many a lashed hound that hath fled from the thong, is coaxed back by the platter."

And thus the domestics prattled upon Polydore's disappearance from Middle

ham castle.

With the baron Hubert, and his daughter Aveline, Polydore's flight was a subject of higher interest, and a source of more delicate feelings.

Lady Aveline, striking as the revolution had been in her young and ductile mind, from the hitherto inexperienced severity of her father, still could not but participate forcibly in the sensation produced by Polydore's absence. She felt sorrow for his sufferings, and shame for having herself been the cause of them, but in the apprehension she entertained for his safety, love had not the slightest share.

Lord Neville, for his part, being a kind-hearted and placable man, although punctilious in exacting the deference due to rank, began to regret he had been so severe with the lad; his newly-awakened anxiety and pride, however, found such sedulous employment in weeding from Aveline's mind every trace of her childish regard for the offending Polydore, that it diverted much of his melancholy musing on the probable fate of his Damoiseau.

In short, the page seemed resolved to appear no more at Middleham ; and perhaps it was as well he should not; for had he returned within three months' space, he would have had the mortification of finding himself as totally forgotten as if he had never dared to clasp the waist, and kiss the lips of lady Aveline; and never been stript and flogged for his impudence, at the buttery-hatch.

At the expiry of that period however, he was reinstated with horrible circumstance in their remembrance.

One dreary nightfall, towards the close of autumn, just about the hour when a great supper was nearly ready to be dished up for a company of distinguished guests at Middleham castle, who should present himself to the porter, while preparing to close the great gates of the castle, according to the universal manorial custom during meal-timesdrenched and shivering, and, as he said, pinched with hunger, but the longmissing Polydore !

He had always been a favourite with Lambert Norris, the porter; and, in fact, had paid him more court than he usually deigned to the other domestics, as being a convenient friend in case of his requiring greater liberty of egress and ingress than the strict regulations of the castle permitted.

Former kindly feelings thus re-awakened, enhanced by the piteous appearance of the youth, and backed by the conviction that his return would be gladly hailed by all at Middleham, ensured from Lambert the porter, not only a hearty welcome to the returning prodigal, but also a prompt acquiescence in his request of secresy, until Polydore should be enabled, by the aid of his old friend the chaplain, to make his peace with his offended lord.

The Damoiseau, however, casting a shivering look on the bare walls and scanty fire of the gloomy porter's lodge, declared his intention of seeking warmth at the kitchen fire-place, which as he well knew flamed the brightest at that hour, as well as of obtaining refreshment from the viands it was preparing for the baron's hall.

So saying, Polydore quitted the heavily machicolated gateway, and traversing the court, soon reached the bulky pile in its centre, generally termed Fitzranulf's Tower.

In its lowest range stood the castle kitchen. Ah! who that sees now the witchelm in the open arch of that immense chimney, hanging in the evening sky, all coloured over with a warm sunset of gorgeous golden haze, airless, and sweet, and still, could imagine the scene that presented itself to the eyes of the wet, and shivering, and famished Polydore?

A vaulted apartment, nearly fifty feet high, was illuminated by the Phlegethoutic blazes of two stupendous fireplaces, each more than twenty feet wide, and at right angles with each other, whose volcanoes of flame were eclipsed by huge cauldrons, black pots and pans of every size and shape, each seething, simmering, and sputtering, with their savoury ingredients of boil, fry, and stew; while their fowl.

red grates were blockaded by unweildy joints of meat, and spits of trussed wild Ever and anon would the flaring stove of some oven expand its fiery jaws, while from the tormented flood, bubbling and billowing in the crater of that great furnace, a vapour as of hecatombs arose. Fumes of precious odour, gleams of Pandemonial light, and voices in various keys

struck various senses at once in this vast

room.

Viands either ready for the fire, or freshly removed from it, argued the immediate approach of the banquet.

Dimly distinguishable, amidst this culinary chaos, the master cook, the demogorgon of the scene, commanded and countermanded, tasted, stirred, examined, and where all were busy, seemed himself the busiest.

During all this turmoil, it is not to be supposed that Polydore's sudden and unexpected apparition would excite the attention it might otherwise have done.

Some effect it certainly did produce, to wit, that Master Grimshaw suffered a stew, on which he peculiarly prided himself, to burn to the silver pan; and that sundry of the deputy coquinarii did pitch into each other's aprons the sauces destined for the palates of the baron's guests; kettles boiled over; spits forgot to turn; and, in short, the magnum opus of cookery was in imminent peril of perishing in its very projection.

Polydore, notwithstanding, glided quietly to the vast glowing vaults of the fireplaces, and bidding the fellows postpone their wonder till the supper was served, promised that he would then content them to the full.

And the mighty operation soon proceeded as if nothing strange had happened.

Polydore took his station under the red and sooty pavilion of the fireplace, apparently not only indifferent but totally unobservant of all that was going on; his only occupation being the very natural action, in his condition, of stretching and turning his chilled limbs before the blaze.

To the short interrogatories occasionally addressed to him by the master cook or his assistants, as their business drew them to the fireplaces, the page listened with apathy, or replied with brevity.

At length all things were prepared. Grimshaw gave the signal by rapping with his cleaver on the dresser; the castle bell tolled quick and loud; and the lid of the great cauldron was lifted off.

As the rich ambergris steam of pheasants, partridges, and hares, blended into a stew, with other delicate meats and herbs, arose in clouds from the mighty vessel, the hungry page seemed suddenly awakened to a joyful anticipation of his share in the good things it contained. A strange gleam of delight shot forth from his hollow eye, as he turned to the huge

kettle, and passed his hands rapidly over it three or four times, till two of the under cooks returned to carry it from the fire.

Polydore's departure, which took place immediately upon this, was totally unnoticed and indeed, on the occurrence that followed, all averred that it was a spirit.

At that supper all who partook of the stew were most miserably affected.

The Lord Hubert himself, with whom it was a favourite dish, together with two of his guests, died suddenly; and the rest who chanced to eat of it never recovered the effects to the day of their death.

In vain was the marvellous story of Polydore's apparition related, it was universally repudiated as absurd; and Lambert Norris the porter, who alone could have thrown light upon this horribly mysterious transaction, was SO panic-stricken at the wholesale vengeance which justice (miscalled) was driving forward at the castle, that he had not courage to reveal what he knew of the matter; and by this culpable silence saved his place, if not his life.

Well indeed might Justice be painted blind, for, on this dreadful occasion, Grimshaw, the master cook, and his two assistants, were sacrificed to the manes of Lord de Neville and his murdered friends. Indeed they only escaped the appalling punishment of boiling alive, decreed by law to their imaginary crime, at the weeping intercession of the Baroness Aveline; and they were executed on the gallows at Middleham, protesting their innocence to the last.

A quarter of a century had elapsed since these events, and it was about the hour of the Complin, one radiant day in August, 13, that a horseman of a lofty presence reined in his white battle horse just on the summit of the hill by which you enter the town of Richmond from the Catterick road.

A delicious breeze, most grateful during the oppressive sultriness of that season, gushed soft and low at intervals around, transporting luxurious odours from the new hayricks in the savannahs below, by the river side, and from the flower beds whose colours lay hid among the trelliced alleys and hornbeam hedges, on the town banks.

Great was the refreshment it seemed to afford the traveller, who wiped his moist and swarthy brow, with a fine broidered kerchief, and inhaled eagerly the faint reluctant summer winds :

* This law was in force till 1547.

while the expanded nostrils and dewy flanks of his charger seemed fully to sympathise in his gratification.

But, even if fatigue had not induced him to halt, that traveller might have been well contented to stay his route, were it only to gaze on the magnificent landscape that saluted his eyes.

A luxuriant extent of lawny meadows, studded with large trees, and braided with woodland, lay below, and stretched away in parks and groves to the misty horizon. Far in the vale Saint Martin's Chapel arose darkly graceful from its sunny turf. On every side were to be discovered castles and towers, hooded with branching trees. Lurking behind its dark rookery, Saint Agatha's Abbey at Eastby was betrayed by a white pinnacle, a transparent window, or a gay weathercock glittering here and there; while its many-gabled mill stood basking in the sun, boldly relieved against the shadowy foliage that over-arched its chimneys. Swift through the fertile valley, blue as the sky he reflected, and lively as the sun that danced on his cur rent, rolled the rejoicing Swale. Soft pale slopes, fresh plundered of their juicy grass, swept upwards from his margin.

Then gleamed the gardens, steaming with summer heat, where the wimpled fair

"steal into the pleached bower, Where honeysuckles ripened by the sun Forbid the sun to enter; like favourites Made prond by princes, that advance their pride Against the power that bred it."

Still higher up, the orchards whose verdure was already diversified with red and yellow fruitage, stretched, like brocaded scarfs, around the hill, crested and crowned by tall extensive mansions, stately in aspect and redundant in de vice. And further back, the sun-clad steeples of the Holy Trinity, the Grey Friars, and Saint Mary's, stood challenging each other with their jangling chimes; while, paramount over all, the Castle Keep marshalled his phalanx of turret, battlement and portal, along the ridge, beneath a blaze of light that parched up the hilly streets, sheeted the steep roofs in yellow, or leapt from vane to vane in living gold, as the lazy noontide winds sleepfully shifted them to and fro.

Whatever might be the feelings of the horseman while his eye wandered over this delightful prospect, he did not express them aloud; and indeed, supposing he had, we have very good reasons for not communicating them to our readers.

It is a well-established rule in the jurisprudence of romance, that no hero