breach of etiquette in a German court would not have been more striking than any infraction of the rules of this maiden household.

All went as if by clock-work in the Nunnery. At eight Mrs. St. Eloy rose, and proceeded to a room called the chapel, built on the consecrated ground of the convent church, where Mrs. Dorothy Adams, an ancient spinster, who filled a post in the family between companion and lady's-maid, read prayers to the assembled servants. Then they adjourned to the breakfast-parlour, where, on a small japanned table, and in cups of pea-green china not much larger than thimbles, Mrs. Dorothy made tea. Then Mrs. St. Eloy adjourned to the audit-room, where the housekeeper, butler, and steward were severally favoured with an audience; and here she relieved the sick poor, (for she was a most charitable and excellent person,) partly by certain family medicines of her own compounding, which were for such things exceedingly harmless-that is to say, I never heard of anybody that was actually killed by them; partly by the far more useful donation of money. Here also she received other petitioners and complainants, who were accustomed to resort to her as a sort of female justice of the peace for redress of grievances; an office which she performed-as women, better partisans than arbitrators; are apt to perform such offices-with much zeal but little discretion, so that she got into divers scrapes, out of which her money and her attorney were fain to help her. Then she adjourned to the drawing-room, where Mrs. Dorothy read aloud the newspaper, especially all that related to war and battle, whilst her mistress sighed over her netting. Then, weather permitting, she took a walk in the garden. Then she dressed. Then at three o'clock she dined, sitting down alone (for Mrs. Dorothy did not partake of that meal with her lady) to such a banquet as might have feasted the mayor and corporation of Belford-I had almost said, of London-attended by the old butler, Mr. Gilbert by name, in his powdered pigtail, his silk stockings and flowered satin waistcoat, and three footmen liveried in blue and yellow. Then, fatigued with the labours of the day, she took a gentle nap. Then, at six precisely, she drank tea; after which it was Mrs. Adams's business to lose, if she could, several hits at backgammon. Then, at nine, she supped; at half-past, prayers were read in the chapel; and at ten precisely the whole household went to bed.

tricks as drawing their own water in a little bucket, fetching and carrying a bit of straw, and so forth.

Encouraged by success, she had lately undertaken the more difficult task of communicating musical instruction to a bullfinch, which already piped God save the King' almost as well as the barrel-organ from which it learned, and was now about to enter upon the popular air of Robin Adair', as performed by the same instrument. The bird itself, and the little organ from which it learned, were placed, for the sake of separation from the canaries which filled the drawing-room, in a spacious gallery forming one of the wings of the house and running over the laundry, an airy and beautiful apartment which Mrs. St. Eloy called the museum; and her pleasure in this occupation caused her to infringe more frequently on the long-established rules for the employment of her time than she had been known to do in the whole course of her spinstership. It was also the cause of her acquaintance with Louis Duval.

The little bird, to whom she and Mrs. Dorothy Adams had somehow given the unromantic name of Bobby, was so tame, that they were accustomed to let him out of his cage, and allow him to perch on the barrel-organ during the time of his music lesson. A pretty bird he was, with his grey back, and his red breast, and his fine intelligent eye; a pretty bird, and exceedingly pretty-mannered; he would bow and bend, and turn his glossy black head to one side and the other, and when offered a piece of sugar, (the cate he loved best,) would advance and recede with a very piquant mixture of shyness and confidence, afraid to take it from his lady's fair hand, and yet so nearly taking, that if thrown towards him he would pick it up before it reached the table. A charming bird was Bobby, and such a pet as never bird was before. I will venture to say, that Mrs. St. Eloy would rather have lost a thousand pounds than that bullfinch.

One day, however, that misfortune did befall her. It was on a fine morning towards the end of May, when the windows of the west gallery, which looked to the garden, were open, Mrs. Adams grinding the barrel-organ and Bobby perched upon it practising Robin, Adair,' that the old butler, opening the door with unwonted suddenness, startled the bird, who flew out of the window and was half-way towards the river before the astounded females recovered the use of their tongues. The first use to which they put those members was of course a duett of scolding for the benefit of the butler; but as vituperation would not recover their pet, they intermitted their lecture and ordered a general muster in the garden in chase of the stray favourite.

briar; now flitting across a yew hedge; now glancing this way, now darting that; now escaping from under the extended hand; now soaring as high again as the house. Footmen, coachman, postilions, housemaids, gardeners, dairy-maids, laundry-women, cook, scullion, housekeeper; the luckless butler, Mrs. Dorothy, and Mrs. St. Eloy,-all joined in the pursuit, which, for some time, owing to the coquetry of Bobby, who really seemed balancing between the joys of liberty and the comforts of home, had the proper mixture of hope and fear, of anxiety and uncertainty, that belong to such a scene; but at last a tremendous squall, uttered from the lungs of a newlyhired cockney housemaid, who had trod on a water-snake and expected nothing less than death to ensue, which squall was reinforced from the mere power of sympathy, by all the females of the party,-produced a species of chorus so loud and discordant, and so unacceptable to the musical taste of our accomplished bullfinch, that the catastrophe which from the first Mrs. St. Eloy had dreaded immediately took place the bird flew across the river, and alighted amongst some fine old hawthorns in the opposite meadow.

The Nunnery boat was (as in such cases always happens) locked up in the boat-house, and the key in the game-keeper's pocket, and the keeper Heaven knew where; the bridge was half a mile off, and not a soul within sight, nor a craft on the river except one little green boat-and that boat empty-moored close to the hawthorns on the opposite side. The recovery of Bobby seemed hopeless. Whilst, however, some were running to the bridge, and others attempting to catch sight of the stray bird, our friend Louis emerged from the May bushes, bullfinch in hand, jumped into his little boat, darted across the river, leaped ashore, and with a smiling courtesy, a gentle grace, which won every female heart in the garden, restored the trembling favourite to its delighted mis

tress.

Louis (now nearly fifteen) had so entirely the air and bearing of a gentleman's son, that Mrs. St. Eloy was treating him as an equal, and was distressed at not being able to find a reward adequate to the service, when Mr. Gilbert, the old butler, to whom he was already advantageously known, and who was enchanted to find his own misdemeanour so comfortably repaired, stepped forward and introduced him to his lady as the excellent lad who had detected the poor Abbé's murderer.

On this hint, Mrs. St. Eloy, after reiterated thanks and the kindest notice both of himself and the little Bijou, who was as usual his companion in the boat, took out her purse, and was about to force upon him a munificent recompense, when she was stopped by Louis, who, with an earnestness not to be overcome, entreated her "not to spoil the pleasure of one of the happiest moments of his life by any pecu

niary offer. If her generosity considered so slight a service as worthy a reward, there was a favour-" And Louis, half repenting that he had said so much, blushed, hesitated, and stopped short.

The lady, however, insisted on his finishing his request; and then Louis confessed" that one of his chief desires was to be permitted to see a picture in her possession, a portrait of Charles the First by Vandyke; and that if he might be allowed that favour, he should consider himself as much her debtor as she was pleased, most erroneously, to profess herself his."

Charmed at once with the petition and the manner, (for the Vandyke portrait was the apple of her eye,) the lady of the Nunnery led the way directly to the west gallery, in one of the compartments of which hung the exquisite painting of which Louis had so often heard.

It is singular that in many portraits of those illustrious persons who have met with a remarkable and untimely death, the expression of the countenance often seems to foreshadow a lamentable end. Lawrence's portrait of Sir John Moore, and almost all of the many pictures of the Princess Charlotte, whose large mysterious eye, with its intensity of sadness, presented such a contrast to her youthful bloom and brilliant fortunes, may serve to illustrate the observation; but its most striking confirmation is undoubtedly to be found in those splendid portraits of Charles by Vandyke, which seem at once to embody the character and the destiny of that mistaken and unhappy monarch. Those portraits, with their chivalrous costume and their matchless grace of air and attitude, are in themselves a history. Amidst the profound melancholy of that remarkable countenance, we recognize at once the despotic, obstinate, suspicious king; the accomplished and elegantly-minded gentleman; the pullerdown of liberty, the setter-up of art; he who with so much taste for the highest literature, that he was known, as recorded by Milton, to make William Shakspeare "the closest companion of his solitudes," yet put his crown and life in jeopardy to suppress that freedom of thought which is the vital breath of poetry; the monarch who was in his own day so faithfully supported, so honestly opposed; and whom in after time his most admiring partisans cannot but blame, and his fiercest opponents must needs pity. The posthumous influence of beauty is not more stongly evinced by the interest which clings round the memory of

has been made by an artist in the neighbourhood of A very fine copy of that most interesting picture Reading some years younger than my "Louis Duval," -a boy-painter who gives promise of no common talent. His name is Edmund Havell; and as his father. himself an excellent drawing-master, belongs to the family of that name who have long held a respectable station in English art, there is no fear but his genius will receive every advantage of cultivation and care.

maidish ways that mingled with her genuine benevolence of temper and her singular simplicity of character; but, grateful and warmhearted, he liked her all the better for her harmless peculiarities, took a sincere interest in the hatching of her canary-birds, and assist ed in the education of Bobby by adding the old French air of "Charmante Gabrielle" to his musical acquirements. Mrs. Dorothy Adams, with whom, as well as with the old butler, the lively lad was a great favourite, (and be it said, par parenthèse, that he who was favoured by one of these worthy personages, would not fail to rank high in the good graces of the other, they having been betrothed lovers for thirty years and odd, but still postponing their nuptials out of deference to the well-known opinions of their lady) - Mrs. Dorothy declared that his whistling was as good as the bird organ; Mrs. St. Eloy was enchanted; and Bobby himself, sharing, as it appeared, the fancy of his mistress, would fly to Louis, and perch upon his finger, and begin piping, the moment he entered the west gallery.

Besides this apartment, which on account of the beloved picture continued to be that which he most frequented, there was another room in the house of great attraction-a large, low, well-filled library, containing a really fine collection of old books, French and English, from Urry's Chaucer, and a black-letter Froissart downwards,-a collection rich especially in Memoirs of the Fronde and the Ligue in the one language, and in choice tracts of the times of the Commonwealth in the other, full, in short, of that most fascinating sort of reading which may he called the materials of history.

Here Louis would sit for hours, poring over the narrative of Sir Thomas Herbert, or the then unpublished memoirs of Lady Fanshaw, or the ponderous but captivating volumes of Clarendon; or those volumes, more ponderous and more captivating still, the matchlessly interesting State Trials, of which the eleven folio volumes are all too little. And then he would lose all sense of time in the fascination of the old French Memoires, from Philip de Commines to the Cardinal de Retz, and wonder whether there were any portrait of Henri Quatre half so fine as Vandyke's Charles the First.

There was another compartment of the library which Louis liked to glance over and laugh at,-a miscellaneous corner where all manner of quaint odd books were gathered together-books that mingled as strangely as the breastplate of Coligni and the horn-book | of King Charles. There lay the Duchess of Newcastle's Plays with the Religious Courtship; Maundrell's Travels from Aleppo to Jerusalem, with Tulwell's Flower of Fame; Quarles's Divine Emblems, with Culpepper's Herbal; and the Divine Fancies digested into

Epigrams, side by side with the Complete Housewife, or Accomplished Gentlewoman's Companion; * which last choice volume was rendered still more valuable by certain MS. recipes, written in a small cramped hand and with a bold originality of orthography, which were curiously pasted on the blank leaves. In a word, Louis loved the Nunnery. His little skiff (for he generally came by water) was so constantly directed thitherward, that, as Mrs. Duval observed, (who, charmed with the notice taken of him, was yet half jealous of his frequent absence,) "there was no doubt but the boat knew the way, and would have floated down the stream and stopped at the terrace-garden of its own accord.' Even on the rarely occurring days that he did not spend with Mrs. St. Eloy, he used to row by the place, especially if he had been painting on the " Charles:" the very sight of the west gallery windows seemed to bring the picture more vividly before him. And now his study was so nearly finished, that, relying on Mrs. St. Eloy's indulgence, he had half resolved to bring the copy and see whether there was any faint and remote resemblance to the original. His mother said that no original could be finer ;-but what would the Vandyke say?

One evening, towards the end of August, he was rowing past the Nunnery garden at an unusually late hour, having been tempted by the weather and the scenery, into a somewhat distant excursion, when, pausing involuntarily and looking towards the house,-long ago, as he well knew, shut up for the night, he was struck by a singular appearance in the lower windows of the west wing, the windows of the laundry. The shutters were closed; but through every crevice appeared a light so brilliant and intense that you might have thought it was some illuminated ball-room. Startled, but still uncertain of the cause, Louis approached the garden and leapt ashore; and in that instant the flames burst forth from the farthest window of the wing,-burst forth with the rushing noise that none who has ever heard it can forget, and with a radiance so bright, so broad, so glaring, that in a moment the cool night air, the dark-blue firmament, and the quiet river were lighted up by the fearful element, and every leaf and flower in the garden became distinctly visible as beneath the noonday sun.

To call "Fire!" to rouse the sleeping inmates, to get Mrs. St. Eloy and her household into the garden, and to collect the neighbourhood, seemed to be the work of a moment to the alert and active boy. The villagers were rapidly called together by the alarum-bell, by the shrieks of frightened women, and, more than all, by the sheets of flame which glared on the water and coloured the sky; and the clergyman of the parish, a man of sense, cou

* Vide note 2, at the end of the article.