ing pale. “Oh, Alphonso! you have fought and conquered in a dozen; and you will not quit me, now that we can be so often together? Besides -" And here her breath began already to fail her.

But Alphonso showed her, or tried to show her, how he must inevitably attend the bull-fight. "Honor demanded it; custom; everything that was expected of him;" his mistress herself, who would "otherwise despise him."

His mistress fainted away. She fell, a death-like burden, into his arms.

When she came to herself, she wept, entreated, implored, tried even with pathetic gayety to rally and be pleasant; then again wept; then argued, and for the first time in her life was a logician, pressing his hand, and saying with a sudden force of conviction, "But hear me;" then begged again; then kissed him like a bride; reposed on him like a wife; did everything that was becoming and beautiful, and said everything but an angry word; nay, would have dared perhaps to pretend to say even that, had she thought of it; but she was not of an angry kind, or of any kind but the loving, and how was the thought to enter her head? Entire love is a worship, and cannot be angry.

The heart of the lover openly and fondly sympathized with that of his poor mistress; and, secretly, it felt more even than it showed. Not that Don Alphonso feared for consequences, though he had not been without pangs and thoughts of possibilities, even in regard to those; for to say nothing of the danger of the sport in ordinary, the chief reason of his being unpersuadable in the present instance was a report that the animals to be encountered were of more than ordinary ferocity; so that the cavalleros who were expected to be foremost in the lists in general, now felt themselves to be particularly called on to make

their appearance, at the hazard of an alternative too dreadful for the greatest valor to risk.

The final argument which he used with his mistress was, the very excess of that love, and the very position in which it stood at that bridal moment, to which he in vain appealed. He showed how it had ever and irremediably been the custom to estimate the fighter's love by the measure of his courage; the more "apparent" the risk (for he pretended to laugh at any real danger), the greater the evidence of passion and the honor done to the lady; and so, after many more words and tears, the honor was to be done accordingly, grievously against her will, and custom triumphed. Custom! That "little thing," as the people` called it to the philosopher. "That great and terrible thing," as the philosopher justly thought it. To show how secure he was, and how securer still it would render him, he made her promise to be there; and she required little asking for a thought came into her head, which made her pray with secret and sudden earnestness to the Virgin; and the same thought enabled her to give him final looks, not only of resigned lovingness, but of a sort of cheered composure; for, now that she saw there was no remedy, she would not make the worst of his resolve, and so they parted.

How differently from when they met! and how dreadfully to be again brought together!

The day has arrived; the great square has been duly set out; the sand, to receive the blood, is spread over it; the barricadoes and balconies (the boxes) are all right; the king and his nobles are there; Don Alphonso and his Lucinda are there also; he, in his place on the square, on horseback, with his attendants behind him, and the door out of

which the bull is to come, in front; she, where he will behold her before long, though not in the box to which he has been raising his eyes. All the gentlemen who are to fight the bulls, each in his turn, and who, like Alphonso, are dressed in black, with plumes of white feathers on their heads, and scarfs of different colors round the body, have ridden round the lists a quarter of an hour ago, to salute the ladies of their acquaintance; and all is still and waiting. The whole scene is gorgeous with tapestries, and gold, and jewels. It is a theatre in which pomp and pleasure are sitting in a thousand human shapes to behold a cruel spectacle.

The trumpets sound; crashes of other music succeed; the door of the stable opens; and the noble creature, the bull, makes his appearance, standing still awhile, and looking as it were with a confused composure before him. Sometimes when the animal first comes forth, it rushes after the horseman who has opened the door, and who has rushed away from the mood in which it has shown itself. But the bull on this occasion was one that, from the very perfection of his strength, awaited provoking. He soon has it. Light, agile footmen, who are there on purpose, vex him with darts and arrows, garnished with paper set on fire. He begins by pursuing them hither and thither, they escaping by all the arts of cloaks and hats thrown on the ground, and deceiving figures of pasteboard. Soon he is irritated extremely; he stoops his sullen head to toss; he raises it, with his eyes on fire, to kick and trample; he bellows; he rages; he grows mad. His breath gathers like a thick mist about his head. He gallops, amidst cries of men and women, franticly around the square, like a racer, following and followed by his tormentors; he tears the horses with his horns; he disem

bowels them; he tosses the howling dogs that are let loose on him; he leaps and shivers in the air like a very stag or goat. His huge body is nothing to him in the rage and might of his agony.

For Alphonso, who had purposely got in his way to shorten his Lucinda's misery (knowing her surely to be there, though he has never seen her), has gashed the bull across the eyes with his sword, and pierced him twice with the javelins furnished him by his attendants. Half blinded with the blood, and yet rushing at him, it should seem, with sure and final aim of his dreadful head, the creature is just upon him, when a blow from a negro who is helping one of the pages, turns him distractedly in that new direction, and he strikes down, not the negro, but the youthful, and in truth wholly frightened and helpless, page. The page, in falling, loses his cap, from which there flows a profusion of woman's hair, and Alphonso knows it on the instant. He leaps off his horse, and would have shrieked, would have roared out with horror; but something which seemed to wrench and twist round his very being within him, prevented it, and in a sort of stifled and almost meek voice, he could only sobbingly articulate the word, "Lucinda!" But in an instant he rose out of that selfpity into frenzy; he hacked wildly at the bull, which was now spinning as wildly round; and though the assembly rose, crying out, and the king bade the brute be dispatched, which was done by a thrust in the spine by those who knew the trick, (ah! why did they not do it before ?) the poor youth has fallen, not far from his Lucinda, gored alike with herself to death, though neither of them yet expiring.

As recovery was pronounced hopeless, and the deaths of the lovers close at hand, they were both carried into

the nearest house, and laid, as the nature of the place required, on the same bed. And, indeed, as it turned out, nothing could be more fitting. Great and sorrowful was the throng in the room: some of the greatest nobles were there, and a sorrowing message was brought from the king. Had the lovers been princes, their poor insensible faces could not have been watched with greater pity and respect.

At length they opened their eyes, one after the other, to wonder- to suffer to discover each other where they lay and to weep from abundance of wretchedness, and from the difficulty of speaking. They attemped to make a movement towards each other, but could not even raise an arm. Lucinda tried to speak, but could only sigh and attempt to smile. Don Alphonso said at last, half sobbing, looking with his languid eyes on her kind and patient face- "She does not reproach me, even now."

They both wept afresh at this, but his mistress looked at him with such unutterable love and fondness, making, at the same time, some little ineffectual movements of her hand, that the good old Duke de Linares said, “She wishes to put her arm over him; and he too -see-his arm over her." Tenderly, and with the softest caution, were their arms put accordingly; and then, in spite of their anguish, the good Duke said, "Marry them yet." And the priest opened his book, and well as he could speak for sympathy, or they seem to answer to his words, he married them; and thus in a few moments, from excess of mingled agony and joy, with their arms on one another, and smiling as they shut their eyes—their spirits passed away from them, and they died.