any form. You know much; and if I retrace before your eyes even what you know, it is for a purpose. Yet, no;-I cannot speak to you calmly. Surely, I can put you out of my thoughts; that is, what you have been to me, and what you might have been to me; and write as if to a stranger. Indeed, in what do you differ from a stranger, except in the power of crushing my soul? Oh, these words! They seem to me like a tolling-bell,—so meaningless and monotonous, and yet involving in their utterance the beginning, the misery, and the end of a life. most flattering appreciation of the quiet sallies with which I answered Mademoiselle's vehement admonitions; then, as the Frenchwoman grew shriller and shriller, and I more and more imperturbable, (though, but for the desire to maintain my superiority before him, I should probably have been in as great a fury as herself,) he would scat himself at the piano and begin to improvise-phantusiren, as he called it. The first few chords invariably brought me to his side, and Mademoiselle might scold her fill after that: the tongue of Xantippe herself could not have engaged "You know nothing of my childhood and early my attention or provoked my wrath for an instant. youth. Thank God for that! There is a place in Whatever there was of hunger after goodness and remembrance where you are not, but what a chilly, beauty in my undisciplined nature banqueted upon dark, repulsive place! I have no alternative save the this, the only divine aliment suffered to come within fire which consumes, or the ice which freezes. I? its reach. While those notes yet swelled upon the It is not I-not myself-not the proud, joyful, sar-air I was transformed. I became gentle, submissive, castic, resolute, fearless woman. Was I ever so? [There was here a pause, and it appeared that the writer had determined to abandon the agitated and incoherent style in which she had commenced, and to constrain herself to adopt that of narrative; a determination to which she afterwards strictly adhered, with few exceptions.] I was not a happy child. My life was spent between two extremes of restraint and indulgence. In the schoolroom I was made to labour with an earnestness and continuance which must surely have been perilous for the young and tender brain; out of it I was suffered to run wild as an unbroken colt. I do not remember my mother. She died before I was three years old, and there was no vigilant affection about her child to foster a dream till it should grow into a memory, and be believed in as such. My father was proud, but not fond, of me: I never remember to have received a caress from him. His care of my education, such as it was, was entirely directed to developing the genius and beauty which I was supposed to possess, and the heart and temper were left to cultivate themselves. I was indeed utterly unconscious that I had a heart, though I must own I took good care that no one who came near me should long preserve a similar unconsciousness as to my temper. I was naturally violent and overbearing; and had it not been that my quickness enabled me easily to master the tasks appointed me, and in music and some other studies to outstrip the capacity of my masters, I suppose my schoolroom existence would have been one unintermitted course of punishment. As it was, though Mademoiselle Edouard pronounced me to be the "most troubcelsome yong ladie possible," she was content to endure my insolence for the sake of the credit I did her. My second music-master, a German and a genius, engaged when the powerlessness of the first to conduct me any further was honestly confessed by himself, did me vast mischief, but, as I have afterwards thought, no little good also. He spoiled me thoroughly. He would arrive, perhaps, when I was in the midst of a battle, and, holding his sides, would laugh with the spiritual, fervent, devout-but alas! all this was only like the transitory glow which sunset might cast upon the features of a corpse, clothing them for the moment with fictitious life, only to leave them, when it departs, cold, inanimate, and soulless as before. This man I loved, and he is the only human being in the whole of that waste of memory, whom I can recal to myself as having awakened such a feeling in me. And it is in this that I suppose he did me good; for what hope could there have been for me had I grown into womanhood without ever having felt affection? Would not a blindness so long enforced have become habitual and irrevocable? Must I not needs have sunk for ever into that lamentable vacancy of heart, whose only (and far preferable) parallel is idiocy of intellect? My father I saw daily for half an hour. How I dreaded those visits! It is almost impossible to convey an idea of the intense pride of my nature. Even now it is unsubdued, and yet, what a discipline of humiliation has it undergone! To me those half-hours of inspection seemed like prolonged insults. A little physical nervousness-for I had no reverence-alone prevented me from telling him how well I knew my superiority to himself in all those studies into the progress of which he was inquiring; and when he rebuked me, as he would not unfrequently do, for an error in French or Italian, carefully explained to him beforehand by my governess, or for an ungraceful gesture observed by himself, I could scarcely restrain the sarcasms which trembled on my lips. Yet, surely, even then I might have been moulded into something better. It was the hollowness of all around me that forced such hardness upon myself; I saw nothing but unreality, and I took refuge in scorn. Yet, intellectually proud and selfsufficient as I was, and unconscious of my own miserable destitution, I believe that I could have loved the veriest simpleton who had loved me and shown himself to me as he was without feigning. That merciful blindness which ever accompanies an extreme state, whether of good or evil, preserving in the one case from presumption, and in the other from despair, seems to me now to be the only thing that saved me from insanity. Had I seen myself and my position then with the eyes with which I now contemplate them, : reason must have given way. But I lived on, self- | substance nor spirit; while some, and those not uncentred and arrogant, and, knowing no other life, guessed not as yet that I needed any other. My father was a merchant, and enormously rich. I grew up amid an extravagance of luxury, which was in itself injurious. He possessed that peculiar kind of pride which is sometimes, though rarely, to be found in his class he was a radical in politics, and the aristocracy of wealth was to him the only nobility. In religion he was a rationalist, more nearly approaching to the Socinian than to any other type. I was taken duly to church once on the Sunday: I even learned my Catechism, and had my stated portion of daily Bible reading—a desecration which now I shudder to think of; but though I was only eight years old when I heard him say, as he pompously instructed Mademoiselle Edouard in her duties, "These things are quite necessary for women "-it was a lesson which I never forgot. The seed sank deep; and bore most bitter fruit. And so I grew up to eighteen, the time fixed for my debut and presentation-a Woman, without faith or love. I was highly accomplished, without shyness, with much conversational talent, carefully formed to elegance of manner and deportment, and (so they told me) strikingly handsome. No murmur of admiration -no compliment implied or expressed, was lost upon me; I felt that my position was triumphant, and I delighted in it. Yet, with all my inexperience, I was quite aware how much influence my reputation as a great heiress had upon those who courted me; and when at the end of my first season I refused my eighth offer, the courteous terms in which the note was of necessity worded, thinly concealed the utter contempt which I felt for the writer. Indeed, I may say, contempt was the ordinary attitude of my mind. But by this time I had become unhappy. I read-I thought -I became dimly conscious of unknown capacities and unsuspected depths in my heart. A mighty craving, a vast want, was awaking within me. It was not the question so natural to the sensitive, "Shall I ever be loved?" that I asked myself-it was one even bitterer, "Shall I can I ever love ?" frequently the meanest and least considered, were To thine own self, thou art faithful too to me!" I threw down the volume, and, as was my wont when anything excited me, went for relief to the piano, and began to "phantasiren." Gradually and almost unconsciously I broke into a song-an old simple melody, the "Coolin" of the Irish bards, so expressive of entire yet gentle devotedness. A low sob disturbed me. I looked round, and saw a young lady, a kind of half-humble friend, who was then staying with me, and who spent her life in worsted-work, quietly weeping over her eternal embroidery-frame. She was an uninteresting person, neither elegant, witty, nor sentimental, and I held her in utter contempt; nevertheless, I was not even then hardhearted enough to behold real sorrow without attempting some kind of sympathy. of myself. I never can hear that tune without crying my poor dear brother, who is in India, used to sing it so beautifully." I remember very well how this thought first came upon me. I had been reading Schiller and Wallenstein, and enjoying (in the shallow unreal manner in which those who know nothing of Nature are able to enjoy Art) that matchless portraiture-indeed, that only "My dear Fanny, what is the matter?" inquired I. portraiture, in any adequate fashion-of the perfect "Oh, nothing at all," she replied, stammering and ideal of human love, pure, passionate, spiritual, iden-abashed; "it is very foolish, and I am quite ashamed tical with virtue, because dependent on virtue as the very condition of its existence. Suddenly it was, so to speak, revealed to me that this creation was not a thing apart, lifeless, unsuggestive, impossible, but the type of a great class of realitics, which were to be judged and tested by their comparative degrees of approach to, or departure from, this their true though invisible standard. The manifold forms of life seemed to group themselves anew before my eyes under the light of this dawn; many, nay, perhaps most, shrank and withered under it-mere shells, having neither I was in a humour to be touched, and I made a few inquiries about this " poor dear brother." The stupid girl became positively eloquent. He was so clever, so good, so charming; they had sung, studied, lived in everything together. All her opinions (and till that moment I never knew she had any) came from him; all her thoughts had reference to him, and were not recognised as having any existence of their own till he had set his scal upon them. He was evidently | personed" elves dancing on the moon-lit grass of the sun of her moral and mental world, and was so in some old park, while the oak-branches wave above more senses than one; for certainly, till that sun shone them. Such oak branches! such green grass! and forth, the aforesaid worlds lay in such thick darkness, such bright moonlight! broader, greener, brighter than that nobody could have guessed their existence. Here were ever seen, except "once upon a time." The air is a discovery, thought I. Here is evidently a true, is animated with beings more beautiful than we may deep, genuine affection, by which a higher nature has ever behold here; there are realms beneath the earth, moulded a lower one into some assimilation with itself. and beneath the water,-under the earth, where the I am curious to know more about this brother. light comes from a burning, blazing carbuncle"Do you know Captain Preston ?" asked I that "The living carbuncle, evening of Mr. Angerstein, a habitual visitor at our house, a quiet, gentlemanlike and satirical person, who was so determined not to see the world through a Claude Lorraine glass, that he always looked at it through slate-coloured crape, and piqued himself on the clearness of his eyesight. Oh, perfectly well," he replied, "he was a brother officer of mine before I sold out." "What sort of person is he?” "Do you wish me to tell you in all sincerity, or am I to condemn that valuable quality to its ordinary civil death ?" Well, then, he is a prig and a simpleton; a tire some little red-faced man, who thinks it the height of literary polish to say inasmuch' and 'moreover,' and the perfection of wit to talk regimental slang to ladies. When, after many hard struggles, he had achieved a proper fit of gloves, and learned to bow without scraping, he reposed upon his laurels ever afterwards, thinking no further qualifications necessary to complete his ideal of a gentleman." Sun of the lofty dome," which throws its beams on silver walls and gardens, where the trees are loaded and glitter with gems instead of leaves,-realms peopled with dark gnomes and the genii of the mines. And who has not travelled under the water with some desperate prince, who, to break a spell, has thrown himself into the tranquil, treacherous waves of some clear fountain in an old black forest, and found himself, after sinking, sinking, fathoms down, not drowned, as he would have been in these days, but standing in an unknown but glorious region, where the sky above was like a polished mirror, where the broad white water-lily crept among the strangely waving trees, and where a spirit fairer than the fairest of earth's daughters came forth to meet him, and led him to a happy home in her dwelling built upon a lake, where "The waters were its floor, And here its walls were water arch'd with fire, But this was all once upon a time." Till those magic "I lifted up my hands and eyes, and felt sorely mortified. This, then, was an illusion. I was given to generalizing. Is all love illusion? asked I of my-words are uttered, that "Open, Sesame,” which unself. I hastily ran over in my mind the names of locks the doors of our dream-land, the world is comrelations, friends, acquaintance: as each presented mon-place as ever; people have no carth but the itself, it was a fault, a foible, or an absurdity which visible one, see only what broadly lies before their stood out in bold relief, enabling me to grasp the idea eyes. If a tale of wonder is to be told of witches and of the person, which, indeed, had no other tangible goblins, ghosts, charms, and philtres, of sorcerers points for me. I began to long for an illusion. and the evil eye, how could you preface it but with once upon a time ?" POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS IN THE WEST ANNABEL C-. "ONCE upon a time!" What words possess such power to carry one away out of the matter-of-fact world around us as these four? They take us into the dream-land of our childhood; we mingle instantly with other beings than the mere men of our degenerate days; we have other skies above us, and beneath our feet a greener earth; in the very air there is a freshness never felt but in that mysterious land that existed once upon a time." We are drawn by dragons instead of steam-engines, and have sevenleagued boots instead of Gutta-percha; and the soft beauty of a summer night is no longer wasted on poachers and housebreakers. We see the "tender "Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? In the dull catalogue of common things: Philosophy will elip an angel's wings, And philosophy, with its practical scepticism, has, |