the street, call for the aid of the police, and impeach him as a felon in my name.' "How dare you say this of me?" said Monks. "How dare you urge me to it, young man?" replied Mr. Brownlow, confronting him with a steady look. "Are you mad enough to leave this house? Unhand him. There, sir. You are free to go, and we to follow. But I warn you, by all I hold most solemn and most sacred, that the instant you set foot in the street, that instant will I have you apprehended on a charge of fraud and robbery. I am resolute and immoveable. If you are determined to be the same, your blood be upon your own head!" "By what authority am I kidnapped in the street, and brought here by these dogs?" asked Monks, looking from one to the other of the men who stood beside him. 66 "Those "By mine," replied Mr. Brownlow. persons are indemnified by me. If you complain of being deprived of your liberty-you had power and opportunity to retrieve it as you came along, but you deemed it advisable to remain quiet-I say again, throw yourself for protection have gone upon the law. I will appeal to the law too; but when you too far to recede, do not sue to me for leniency when the power will have passed into other hands, and do not say I plunged you down the gulf into which you rushed yourself." Monks was plainly disconcerted, and alarmed besides. hesitated. He "You will decide quickly," said Mr. Brownlow, with perfect firmness and composure. "If you wish me to prefer my charges publicly, and consign you to a punishment, the extent of which, although I can, with a shudder, foresee, I cannot control, once more, I say, you know the way. If not, and you appeal to my forbearance, and the mercy of those you have deeply injured, seat yourself without a word in that chair. It has waited for you two whole days." Monks muttered some unintelligible words, but wavered still. "You will be prompt," said Mr. Brownlow. "A word from me, and the alternative has gone for ever." 66 Still the man hesitated. I have not the inclination to parley farther," said Mr. Brownlow, and, as I advocate the dearest interests of others, I have not the right." "Is there" demanded Monks, with a faltering tongue,--"is there -no middle course?" "None; emphatically none." Monks looked at the old gentleman with an anxious eye; but, reading in his countenance nothing but severity and determination, walked into the room, and, shrugging his shoulders, sat down. "Lock the door on the outside," said Mr. Brownlow to the attend. ants, "and come when I ring." The men obeyed, and the two were left alone together. "This is pretty treatment, sir," said Monks, throwing down his hat and cloak, "from my father's oldest friend." "It is because I was your father's oldest friend, young man," returned Mr. Brownlow. "It is because the hopes and wishes of young and happy years were bound up with him, and that fair creature of his blood and kindred who rejoined her God in youth, and left me here a solitary, lonely man; it is because he knelt with me beside his only sister's death-bed when he was yet a boy, on the morning that would -but Heaven willed otherwise--have made her my young wife; it is because my seared heart clung to him from that time forth through all his trials and errors, till he died; it is because old recollections and associations fill my heart, and even the sight of you brings with it old thoughts of him; it is all these things that move me to treat you gently now-yes, Edward Leeford, even now-and blush for your unworthi. ness who bear the name." "What has the name to do with it?" asked the other, after contemplating, half in silence, and half in dogged wonder, the agitation of his companion. "What is the name to me?" "Nothing," replied Mr. Brownlow, "nothing to you. But it was hers; and even at this distance of time brings back to me, an old man, the glow and thrill which I once felt only to hear it repeated by a stranger. I am very glad you have changed it-very-very." "This is all mighty fine," said Monks (to retain his assumed designation) after a long silence, during which he had jerked himself in sullen defiance to and fro, and Mr. Brownlow had sat shading his face with his hand. "But, what do you want with me?" "You have a brother," said Mr. Brownlow, rousing himself, "--a brother, the whisper of whose name in your ear, when I came behind you in the street, was in itself almost enough to make you accompany me hither in wonder and alarm." "I have no brother," replied Monks. child. Why do you talk to me of brothers? as I." "You know I was an only You know that as well "Attend to what I do know, and you may not," said Mr. Brown. low. "I shall interest you by and by. I know that of the wretched marriage, into which family pride, and the most sordid and narrowest of all ambition, forced your unhappy father when a mere boy, you were the sole and most unnatural issue," returned Mr. Brownlow. "I don't care for hard names," interrupted Monks, with a jeering laugh. "You know the fact, and that's enough for me,' "But I also know," pursued the old gentleman, "the misery, the slow torture, the protracted anguish of that ill-assorted union; I know how listlessly and wearily each of that wretched pair dragged on their heavy chain through a world that was poisoned to them both; I know how cold formalities were succeeded by open taunts; how indifference gave place to dislike, dislike to hate, and hate to loathing, until at last they wrenched the clanking bond asunder, and retiring a wide space apart, carried each a galling fragment, of which nothing but death could break the rivets, to hide it in new society, beneath the gayest looks they could assume. Your mother succeeded; she forgot it soon: but it rusted and cankered at your father's heart for years." "Well, they were separated," said Monks, "and what of that?" "When they had been separated for some time," returned Mr. Brownlow, "and your mother, wholly given up to continental frivolities, had utterly forgotten the young husband ten good years her junior, who, with prospects blighted, lingered on at home, he fell among new friends. This circumstance, at least, you know already." "Not I," said Monks, turning away his eyes, and beating his foot upon the ground, as a man who is determined to deny everything. "Not I." "Your manner, no less than your actions, assures me that you have never forgotten it, or ceased to think of it with bitterness," returned Mr. Brownlow. "I speak of fifteen years ago, when you were not more than eleven years old, and your father but one-and-thirty-for he was I repeat, a boy, when his father ordered him to marry. I go Must back to events that cast a shade upon the memory of your parent, or will you spare it, and disclose to me the truth?" "I have nothing to disclose," rejoined Monks, in evident confusion. "You must talk on if you will." "These new friends, then," said Mr. Brownlow, "were a naval offi. cer, retired from active service, whose wife had died some half a year before, and left him with two children-there had been more, but, of all their family, happily but two survived. They were both daughters ; one a beautiful creature of nineteen, and the other a mere child of two or three years old." "What's that to me," said Monks. "They resided," said Mr. Brownlow, without seeming to hear the interruption, in a "part of the country to which your father, in his wandering, had repaired, and where he had taken up his abode. Acquaintance, intimacy, friendship, fast followed on each other. Your father was gifted as few men are—he had his sister's sou! and person. As the old officer knew him more and more, he grew to love him. I would that it had ended there. His daughter did the same." The old gentleman paused; Monks was biting his lips, with his eyes fixed upon the floor; seeing this, he immediately resumed. "The end of a year found him contracted, solemnly contracted, to that daughter; the object of the first true, ardent, only passion of a guileless, untried girl." ASLEEP WITH THE FLOWERS. Fictis jocari nos meminerit fabulis.-PHŒDR. PROL. [N. B. Some of the following songs have already appeared with music.] CHAPTER I. "METHINKS, if flowers had voices, they would sing a wondrous sweet music!" thought I to myself one summer's evening, as I carelessly wandered by a brook that meandered through a sweet variety of setting sun-light and shade, trees and lowly blossoms, rocky margins and interruptions, that made the little petulant water murmur its disquiet;-and then, again, green velvet banks, under whose sleepy influ ence it seemed to sink into a motionless tranquillity,—like an infant tired into slumber by its waywardness and passion! On one of those damask cushions, as I laid me down, Thompson's beautiful lines, from his "Castle of Indolence," occurred to me, and I whispered to myself, "A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was; Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye; I think it is Fontaine that says, "J'ai toujours cru, et le crois encore, que le sommeil est une chose invincible. Il n'y a procès, ni affliction, ni amour qui tienne;" and I found it so upon this occasion; for, though I frequently endeavoured to dismiss my somnolency, that I might enjoy the sweet scene around me, it proved to be "une chose invincible," and accordingly I was fast asleep in a few moments. But if my eyes closed upon a sweet scene of this world, they opened to one of more delicate beauty and delight in the land of vision. I thought, or dreamed, I was in a place where the flowers were the only animate beings. At first, melody seemed to me to be a respirable quality of its atmosphere; for I heard soft melancholy cadences murmuring sweet echoes to my own breathings, low and gentle as they were, but which afterwards I found were the flowers' voices; and, if ever harmony “rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes, and stole upon the air," 'twas in that dream, where " the painted populace that dwell in fields" were the minstrels ! The novelty of my situation presented such a mixture of diffidence and delight, fear of intrusion and yet wish to stay, that I should have sunk quite confused, had not a most gentle strain of indescribable sweetness stolen upon my senses, and completely absorbing my attention, left me quite indifferent to every other consideration. Unused as my mortal ears were to such delicate harmonies, I listened with a rapture bordering upon insanity to a whispered Pastorale, that required my most breathless attention to follow up; but what was my ecstasy when, at its almost noiseless conclusion, I heard breathing distinctly, but still faintly, on every side around me, the following CHORUS OF FLOWERS. Hear our tiny voices, hear! Lower than the night-wind's sighs; 'Tis we that to the sleeper's ear Sing dreams of heaven's melodies! Listen to the songs of flow'rs- Look on our beauty-we were born Or that sweet light that loves the west! What beauty is there like to ours? You think us happy while we bloom What melody is like to ours? Hear our tiny voices, hear! Lower than the night-wind's sighs 'Tis we that to the sleeper's ear Sing dreams of heaven's melodies! Listen to the songs of flow'rs What melody is like to ours? A little emboldened, for I now began to think I was not an unwelcome intruder, I straightway commenced examining the fairy scene that everywhere saluted my enraptured sense. There seemed to be no particular climate influencing it; Nature had congregated her wildest varieties into one harmonious link; the seasons, forgetting their animosities, joined hand in hand, and by their united friendliness made all seem tempered down into such gentle peace, that acacias and fir. trees, snow-drops and roses, myrtles and mistletoes, were all seen embracing each other in a happy oblivion of their respective times and localities. I took a pathway that led me gently down a sloping lawn, determined to search every cranny of this wilderness of sweets. I had not wandered far before I was riveted with new delight by a low melar. choly breathing that issued from a thicket of sweet-smelling shrut whose perfume seemed to be the only difficulty that its music had to struggle through. Here, laying myself down upon a mossy bank, i listened with astonishment and delight to the "It hath been observed by the ancients, that where a rainbow seemeth to touch or hang over, there breatheth forth a sweet smell."-BACON. + The nightingale, celebrated in many a poem as the rose's cher ami. |