Hardness of heart is not the vice of the truly happy. The bridegroom accompanied him a few steps beyond the threshold, and laughingly told him, in a key sufficiently loud to ensure his being overheard by his wife, that the beauteous Anna, the flower and envy of the night, was the best tender of flocks in the district; that she had a good fortune, excellent hands for the spindle and a voice for singing that charmed all who heard her; that he therefore advised him to cultivate the good graces of the mother, for that he well knew the girl would think herself fortunate to be able to warble her youth away with such an accompaniment : "O life of my life! Who can show me your fellow At fiddle or fife On the mountain Estrella?" And with this he bade him farewell, but not before he had further explained what Baptist had already known above two hours-that the house was situate at the top of a winding steep, between hills; that by day two great oak trees, standing close together on the right of the road, would show that he was near the place, and that at night he would be led to it by the bleating of numerous goats folded in the pen, so that there could be no risk of going astray among those wilds. The night was still dark. Baptist at first, though his mind was all abroad, took the melancholy road that led to his home. But what was he to do there? Sleep? Who ever slept on the first night of a new lovefever? To lie awake and sigh? That is better and more poetically done on the open stage of nature. To transcribe from the tablets of his heart an account of his sensations and wishes in a letter? Anna probably cannot read, and he himself, satisfied with his talent as a musical artist, never felt any ambition to accumulate knowledge. Baptist does not know how to write. All such of my readers as have passed through the paradise of youth will readily divine, without my telling them, whither the steps of Baptist led him against the bent of his wiser intention. As full of wine and passion as an elegy of Propertius, with his fiddle under his arm and his Anna in his heart, and with as good speed as the obscurity of the hour and the ruggedness and strangeness of the way permit, there he goes, entreating the solitude to favor his blind search of the temple of his divinity, and already in spirit making the tour of those walls which he fancies he discovers in every white stone. that he discerns before him. And what a wretched gratification is he seeking! He will not see her; no, he will not hear her voice. At such an untimely season of the night he will not even, through some compassionate crack in the door, have his eyes fascinated by the flickering gleam of a lamp lighted by that very hand which so lately trembled in his own. She herself will not know to-morrow that he has been keeping watch near her and surrounding her dreams with his love. No sign will remain to reveal to her the devotion with which he will have been kissing, as a pilgrim kisses a reliquary, the insensible walls that enclose the talisman of his existence. When she shall arise and go forth with Aurora, placid and rosy like her, and like her hailed with delight by everything that beholds her, not a vestige of his kisses will be left on the stones of her house, on the threshold of her door; not one of all the sighs that night shall have gathered in its lap will be felt with the morn ing breezes as they sigh among the foliage. No, but he will have enjoyed, in three or four hours of careful vigil, whole ages of felicity. It is even possible that something of reality may be mingled with his delicious reveries; it may chance that while, with ear applied to a casement and breath suspended, he interrogates the silence of the sleeping house, some audible sound, some word addressed by the daughter to her moth er, some rustling of a mattress stuffed with the straw of Indian corn, will aid his fancy to picture the interior of that Eden, and to perceive, as it were through his ears, the position, the attitude, the expression, the thoughts, of the most beautiful of slumberers. He will at least hear the bleating of her goats hard by; and if the stars be not utterly hostile to his hopes, he may in the morning, hiding himself where he cannot be discovered, watch her as she passes with her flock, blithely treading the dew in her little slippers of orange-tree wood, her distaff stuck in her girdle, a shade of soft anxiety setting off the sweetest smile that ever dawned from under the broad flap of a large black hat; and perhaps he might hear that chant of the mountain, and now more than ever the song for him, sent forth to the echoes by the most bewitching voice of the Beiraalta: "O life of my life! Who can show me your fellow At fiddle or fife On the mountain Estrella?" As these fancies thickened upon him, Baptist, who was absolutely carried away with | them, and was every moment quickening his pace, less attentive to the road than to the stars, with which true lovers have always an indefinable sympathy, suffered himself to be hurried on, he hardly knew whither, till he suddenly remembered what none but a lover would have forgotten for a moment-that he ought to examine, by the notices which he had been warned to take heed of, whether he was on his right course or not. He stopped, he doubted, he was about to turn back, when, lo! he observed on the side of the path certain trees which might very possibly be the two oak trees. He flies toward them. They are the very same, and that is the exact site-a site as familiar to him, now that he views it for the first time, as if he had been born there. He accelerates his speed; his heart leaps as if it wished to get there before him; the sandy and barren soil of the steep seems to him a gentle declivity matted with rose-leaves; and, to crown his success, he hears the bleat of a lamb close by he who hears the lamb cannot be far off from the shepherdess. He rushes toward the spot where so tender a greeting invited him. He already discovers the withies of the fold; he almost touches them. All at once the ground gives way under him, and he finds himself at the bottom of a pitfall. Astounded with the shock, though he had lighted on his feet with his fiddle safe under his arm, he at first imagined that some evil witch had laid this wicked trap for him; and he now called to mind that an old woman at the wedding had very constantly eyed him with an expression of countenance of no good auBut after his first confusion was a litgury. tle allayed he perceived that he was in one of those deep holes which it is the custom to excavate on the mountain to catch wolves. | midable tusks-a sight sufficient to disconThese holes are made wider at bottom than cert not only one fiddler, but a whole philat top, so as to make it impossible for the harmonical society. prisoner to escape; the mouth is lightly covered with a few slender boughs, which, yielding to the pressure of any weight, let it fall through, and, being elastic, resume their deceitful appearance. As a lure to the beast prey at night it is usual to place behind this masked abyss, and within a strong fence of hurdles, a kid or a lamb, whose cries for the dam entice its enemy to certain destruction. of The hopelessness of evasion from such a den for the rest of the night was evident to poor Baptist. He tried to accommodate himself to his situation. He had not room to console himself, as men incarcerated are wont to do, by pacing to and fro to give life to his imprecations. He laid himself down in the pit to meditate on the abode of his love, which he had left above him in the land of the living. Nature makes but little difference between dreams and the visionary cogitations of lovers. Baptist was now half musing, half sleeping, when he heard the treacherous roof of his den giving way again, and immediately afterward down plumped some heavy sub stance. He jumped up in consternation: "Who is there?" No answer. With hair on end, head dripping with cold sweat and tongue tied with terror, he crouched hard against a side of the pit, and endeavored, with eyes fixed in stupid amazement, to make out the companion of his misfortune, and, lo! a wolf—a great wolf, an immense wolf! He sees his eyes glaring like lamps, and that ferocious light shows, or seems to show, two rows of perfectly white teeth, with the for Without defence or means of flight or chance of succor, and watching the steady and gradually emboldened attention with which his adversary measured him, he was attempting in his agony to shrink into the very earth that immured him, when an involuntary touch of one of the strings of his fiddle caused it to sound. The animal was startled and recoiled two steps, which he had at last slowly and with a long pause between each made toward the musician. Baptist, therefore, suspecting that there may be some occult centrifugal virtue in the art of Orpheus, draws his fiddlestick with a tremulous hand across the bow. It is now the wolf's turn to shrink; he cowers as if he would bury himself in the ground; the rage in his eyes is subdued; he turns away his head; he manifests his fears by a thousand signs. Baptist, gathering courage from his enemy's cowardice, without further preparatory tuning flings him off a waltz, and, observing that the first effect of his instrument is in nowise diminished, overpowers him with an inundation of notes, in tune and out of tune, enough to rive the entrails of the earth. It was a genuine scene worthy of the opera in the Rua-dos-Condes. Minuets, gavottes, countrydances, waltzes, cotillons, jigs and rigadoons succeeded one another without break or transition, and with a rapidity, a prodigality, that was marvellous; while now and then he wrenched his eyes off his crouching adversary to look up at the aperture for the glimpse of day, to which alone he could trust for his deliverance. But that night had sworn to last at least fifty hours for the poor fiddler. The centrifugal charm of his violin appeared to have as much influence on Aurora as on the wolf, keeping them both aloof. The perspiration which his fears had at first drawn was now streaming down him from sheer fatigue. His arm, before so laboriously exercised at the ball, was beginning to fail him, when at last the gleams of day peered through the false trellis-work over his head; and soon afterward steps, voices and laughter were distinguishable near the cavern. The shepherds who had laid the trap were coming to see if they had caught anything, and, wondering at the strange subterranean music, they hastened toward it with a thousand wild conjectures. Having removed the boughs that covered the mouth of the pit, they looked down, eager to learn what this extraordinary revel could be. Baptist, fearing to lose by one moment's intermission of his music the safety he had won at so much cost, answered them in chanted prose, fiddling all the while and huddling two or three words into every note : "Pit of terror! Night of horror! How I tremble!" entreating to be quickly released and intimating that he would tell them all about it presently. A ladder was the first thing to be procured; one was immediately found in the nearest farmhouse, the inmates of which, as anxious as their neighbors to gratify their curiosity, came running with the rest to witness such an unexampled sight. The pit was surrounded with people of both sexes. The ladder was hardly fixed when Baptist clambered up as fast as he possibly could without the use of his hands-for he was still fiddling -till he reached the top, more dead than alive. Scarcely had he found himself amid kindly human faces, and in the light of one of the loveliest mornings that ever shone on the Estrella, when, laying down his fiddle to make the sign of the cross, he discovered at his side his own Anna. Hers was the ladder that had saved him; hers the neighboring farmhouse; and the soft scarlet kerchief of cotton that was instantly offered to him to wipe his forehead was taken from her own neck. He was conducted to her house (it was possibly only because it was the nearest at hand) and placed by the hearth, where mother and daughter vied with each other in making him comfortable, and after serving him with a good breakfast and giving him a thousand unequivocal proofs of their benevolence they left him to take five or six hours of delicious repose on a well-filled and wellsmoothed palliasse of Indian-corn straw. In less than three months after that breakfast Baptist was the husband of Anna. The artist who had figured so brilliantly at other people's wedding-parties performed prodigies at his own. The wolf, which Baptist and Anna would not suffer to be destroyed, was carefully secured, and, being of a tamable. age at the time of his capture, is now a part of the family and is kept in better condition than ever wolf was kept before. The friendly evening gatherings at this farmhouse are celebrated in the district, and all the neighbors hope and trust that the harmony which reigns there will never be interrupted-that in the mutual relation of husband and wife, and of mother and son-in-law, the fiddle will never be out of tune. Translation of WILLIAM TAIT. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. N° JAMES MACPHERSON. Alexander Campbell and Alexander Leigh ton. John Mackay Wilson, the son of a millwright, was born in the year 1804, in Tweedmouth, at Berwick-on-Tweed. In youth he endured many hardships, and the sufferings of his "Poor Scholar" in London are said to O literary production has created such controversy as Macpherson's Ossian. When first published, it was announced to the public as a collection, made in the High-represent his own trials in that great city. 1 In the year 1832 he became the editor of the Berwick Advertiser, and in that journal, on November 8, 1834, was published the first story of The Tales of the Borders. He died, at the early age of thirty-one, on the 2d of October, 1835. At the time of his death he was in receipt of a large income that would soon have made him wealthy, but the privations and toils of his youth brought him to an early grave. lands of Scotland, of ancient poems trans- PIERRE JEAN DE BÉRANGER. HIS remarkable writer of popular lyrics, who has with propriety been called the has given its verdict against Macpherson, and "Burns of France," was born in Paris, Authe poems of Ossian are now almost univergust 19, 1780. Of very humble origin, sally regarded as his own production. They, which he constantly vaunted, he came into however, must have intrinsic merit, for they being in time to take part in the struggles are yet highly appreciated and widely read. of the people during the French Revolution. James Macpherson was born at Ruthven, As a child he saw the capture of the Basin the Highlands of Scotland, in the year tille, and soon ranged himself with the demo1738, and died at Bellville, Inverness, Feb-cratic party. Apprenticed to a printer, he ruary 17, 1796. At his own request, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. began early to write and print his patriotic songs; but his master failed, and he found that even popular poetry would not give him bread. In 1803, being in great poverty, he wrote to Lucien Bonaparte, who benevolently aided him, transferring to him his own pension as member of the Institute. It was about this time that he wrote his Senator, The Little Man in Grey and The King of Yvetôt. His songs, in the simple language |