Agnes had believed in it all from the first moment of hearing it, but so singular a strain was upon the minds of both mother and daughter, knowing this extraordinary secret which the others did not know, that it was not wonderful they should give a weight much beyond their desert to the queries of Louis. Yet, indeed, Louis's queries took a wonderfully correct direction, and came very near the truth.

It was a day of extreme agitation to them all, and not until Louis, who had no travelling-bag to pack, had been accompanied once more to the railway, and seen safely away, with many a lingering farewell, was any one able to listen to, or understand, Rachel's version of the events of last night. When he was quite gonewhen it was no longer possible to wave a hand to him in the distance, or even to see the flying white plume of the miraculous horseman who bounded along with all that line of carriages, the three girls came home together through the quiet evening road-the disenchanted road, weary and unlovely, which Marian marvelled much any one could prefer to Bellevue. They walked very close together, with Marian in the midst, comforting her in an implied, sympathetic, girlish fashion-for Rachel, though Louis had belonged to her so very much longer, and was her sole authority, lawgiver, and hero, instinctively kept her own feelings out of sight, and took care of Marian. These girls were very loyal to their own visionary ideas of the mysterious magician who had not come to either of them yet, but whose coming both anticipated some time, with awe and with smiles.

And then Rachel told them how

it had fared with her on the previous night. Rachel had very little to say about the Rector; she had given him up conscientiously to Agnes, and with a distant and reverent admiration of his loftiness, contemplated him afar off, too great a person for her friendship. But in the morning the maid came and took me to Miss Riversdid you ever see Miss Rivers ?—she is very pale and pretty, though she is old, and a very, very great invalid," said Rachel. "Some one has to sit up with her every night, and she has so many troubles-headaches, and pains in her side, and coughs, and every sort of thing! She told me all about them as she lay on the sofa in her pretty white dressing-gown, and in such a soft voice as if she was quite used to them, and did not mind. Do you think you could be a nurse to any one who was ill, Agnes ?”

She has been a nurse to all of us when we were ill," said Marian, rousing herself for the effort, and immediately subsiding into the pensiveness which the sad little beauty would not suffer herself to break, even though she began in secret to be considerably interested about the interior of the mysterious Wood House, and the invisible Miss Rivers. Marian thought Louis would not be pleased if he could imagine her thinking of any one but him, so soon after he had gone away.

"But I don't mean at home-I mean a stranger," said Rachel, "one whom you did not love. I think it must be rather hard sometimes; but do you know I was very nearly offering to be nurse to Miss Rivers, she spoke so kindly to me? And then Louis will have to work," continued the faithful little sister, with tears in her eyes;

you must tell me what I can do, Agnes, not to be a burden upon Louis. Oh, do you think any one would give me money for singing now?"

Lord Winterbourne, all his life, had been a man of guile; he was so long experienced in it, that dissimulation became easy enough to him, when he was not startled or thrown suddenly off his guard. Already every one around him supposed he had quite

forgiven and forgotten the wild escapade of Louis. He had no confidant whatever, not even a valet or a steward, and his most intimate associate knew nothing of his dark and secret counsels. When any one mentioned the ungovernable youth who had fled

from the Hall, Lord Winterbourne said, "Pooh, pooh-he will soon discover his mistake," and smiled his pale and sinister smile. Such a face as his could not well look benign; but people were accustomed to his face, and thought it his misfortune-and everybody set him down as, in this instance at least, of a very forgiving and indulgent spirit, willing that the lad should find out his weakness by experiment, but not at all disposed to inflict any punishment upon his unruly son.

The fact was, however, that Lord Winterbourne was considerably excited and uneasy. He spent hours in a little private library among his papers-carefully went over them, collating and arranging again and again-destroyed some, and filled the private drawers of his cabinet with others. He sent orders to his agent to prosecute with all the energy possible his suit against the Athelings. He had his letters brought to him in his own room, where he was alone, and looked over them with eager haste and something like apprehension. Servants, always sufficiently quick-witted under such circumstances, concluded that my lord expected something, and the expectation descended accordingly through all the grades of the great house; but this did not by any means diminish the number of his guests, or the splendour of his hospitality. New arrivals came constantly to the Hall-and very great people indeed, on their way to Scotland and the moors, looked in upon the disappointed statesman by way of solace. He had made an unspeakable failure in his attempt at statesmanship; but still he had a certain amount of influence, and merited a certain degree of consideration. The quiet country brightened under the shower of noble sportsmen and fair ladies. All Banburyshire crowded to pay its homage. Mrs Edgerley brought her own private menagerie, the newest lion who could be heard of; and herself fell into the wildest fever of architecturalism-fitted up an oratory under the directions of a fellow of Merton-set up an Ecclesiological Society in the darkest of her drawing-rooms-made

ex

drawings of severe saints," and purchased casts of the finest amples"-began to embroider an altar-cloth from the designs of one of the most renowned connoisseurs in the ecclesiological city, and talked of nothing but Early English and Middle Pointed. Politics, literature, and the fine arts, sport, flirtation, and festivity, kept in unusual excitement the whole spectator county of Banbury, and the busy occupants of Winterbourne Hall.

In the midst of all this, the Lord of Winterbourne spent solitary hours in his library among his papers, took solitary rides towards Abingford, moodily courted a meeting with Miss Anastasia, even addressed her when they met, and did all that one unassisted man could do to gain information of her proceedings. He was in a state of restless expectation, not easy to account for. He knew that Louis was in London, but not who had given him the means to go there; and he could find no pretence for bringing back the youth, or asserting authority over him. He waited in well-concealed but frightfullyfelt excitement for something, watching with a stealthy but perpetual observation the humble house of the Athelings and the Priory at Abingford. He did not say to himself what it was he apprehended, nor indeed that he apprehended anything; but with that strange certainty which criminals always seem to retain, that fate must come some time, waited in the midst of his gay, busy, frivolous guests, sharing all the occupations round him, like a man in a dream, waited as the world waits in a pause of deadly silence for the thunderclap. It would rouse him when it came.

It came, but not as he looked for

it. Oh blind, vain, guilty soul, with but one honest thought among all its crafts and falsehoods! It came not like the rousing tumult of the thunder, but like an avalanche from the hills; he fell under it with a groan of mortal agony; there was nothing in heaven or earth to defend him from the misery of this sudden blow. All his schemes, all his endeavours, what were they good for now?

THE map of Europe sufficiently explains why Bucharest, by no means the smallest or least interesting capital in this division of the globe's surface, is unquestionably the least visited and known. Situate beyond the lands of the Austrian, the Russian, and the Turk, it is remote from every place to which business or pleasure attracts travellers. Distant from frequented highways, the paths to it are long and wearisome. Down the Danube from Vienna, or up it from Constantinople, or across Roumelia and Bulgaria, with rough and savage posting, are the three best but still untempting routes. And in Western Europe, people generally know and care extremely little about Moldavia and Wallachia, provinces concerning which little has been written, save in the ephemeral pages of newspapers. The late war has done something to improve our acquaintance with them; but still there exists concerning them an enormous amount of ignorance, even amongst persons otherwise well informed. It is not long since we met with such persons, who imagined a Hospodar to be a sort of savage chief, dressed in sheep's-skin, and took Boyards to be minor barbarians, inhabiting caves, and living by plunder and the chase. This is far, indeed, from the fact. The Moldo-Wallachians are amongst the greatest ramblers of our time; there are few members of the upper classes who do not quit their own country for some weeks or months every year, and those who have met with them in Vienna and Paris, and in their favourite summer haunts, the baths of France and Germany, will have found them to be usually people of much external polish, of luxurious habits and profuse expenditure, speaking French fluently, and (although often with a bad accent and a deficiency of refinement) almost as their native tongue, and anxious to elevate their race and country in the eyes of foreigners, who, they well know, are little acquainted with and apt to depreciate them. At home they are a good-natured, courteous, and hospitable people, to whom

a stranger needs but slight introduction to be sure of friendly welcome and attention. And if the introduction be a special one, or the foreigner's qualities, name, or position recommend him particularly to the notice, and open to him the heart, of the Danubian magnate, he will find himself feasted, caressed, and cherished to an unbounded extent; he will be bidden to repasts savoury of the skill of exotic artists; he will be supplied with horses and escorted to promenades, and made welcome at whatever hour he present himself, and made acquainted with all the pretty women and eligible men in the country-bans, vorniks, logothetes, postelniks, or by whatever other uncouth-sounding titles they may be known. Certainly whoever goes to the Principalities with the idea that he is proceeding to an uncivilised and unpleasant country, will be most agreeably surprised before he has sojourned there three days. The rural districts may not much interest him ; the roads, or their absence, may provoke his malediction, and he will not be very loud in praise of the inns; if he enter by way of Galatz, he will doubtless pronounce that flourishing town to be the ugliest and most wearisome place in which ever the convenience or caprice of the Austrian Lloyds' Steam Company compelled a disgusted traveller to lose forty-eight hours; the small country-towns will hardly attract him much, unless it be those which, like Giurgevo, are memorable for actions of war; but the capitals, and especially Bucharest, will offer him pleasures, amusements, and even comforts he did not anticipate when plunging into this frontier land of the Christian and the Turk. Wallachians have a local proverb to the effect that he who once drinks of the water of the Dumbrovitza, will never drink of any other. The Dumbrovitza is a turbid, narrow, poplarand-willow-fringed streamlet that flows through Bucharest, valueless for navigation, and having waters of no very pleasant flavour or attractive limpidity; but the metaphor is more

The

Sau 1 car buxurious day, wanaras bevond railways, and into regens Sitle trodden, occasionally Tid apple cause for complaint of scaled houses of entertainment. The about the Lower Danube ace rather of a savage sort, and those a: Gurgevo and Galatz, especially at the former place, are decidedly bad; a Spanish posada is not exactly the Kind of hostelry one would select for a long sojourn; even in comfortable Germany, when one gets off the main tracks, one often finds rough commons and hard quarters in the small towns and village gasthauser. But I suppose there is no inn in the world, ranking as the first in a capital city, from which a person of ordinary palate, patience, and purse, feels more rejoiced to escape than from the much-trumpeted Hôtel d'Angleterre, at Pera, Constantinople. Doubtless the author of Eothen little thought, when vaunting the activity, resources, and polyglot accomplishments of his travelling attendant, that he was providing future fame and custom for one of the most detestable caravanserais to which, for want of a better, Englishmen ever thronged. Missiri's hotel, the best in Pera, is one of the worst and dearest in Europe. Small rooms, bad wines, unwholesome dinners of a bastard French description, enormous charges, and gross impertinence, constitute the programme of an establishment which, during the war, was so overwhelmed with custom that it frequently rejected, in one morning, as many guests as would have filled it from cellar to garret. The notion had got abroad that it was the only possible inn in Pora; that at all the others you were poisoned, and plundered, and floa bitten to an unendurable extent; in short, that it was the correct house of resort. When an idea of this kind takes root amongst Englishmen, argument and proof are alike in vain to eradicate it. The truth is that there were other hotels, very little, it at all worse, than that of Angle

terre, and where, if the dining-room was rather smaller, the civility-was certainly much greater. But this was not credited; and the English flocked to Missiri's, until no Englishman who could possibly find roomthough it were but a shakedown in a subterranean suite, to which lastcomers were consigned-would go elsewhere, because at Missiri's alone was he sure to find his acquaintances and countrymen. So that the hotel had literally the pick of the innumerable English passing to and from the Crimea, or abiding for a time in Constantinople. It was in the position of a dealer who finds ten times as many buyers as his stock will supply, and who sells at his own price, delivering his goods with a grumble and a snarl, as if he reproached himself at the last moment with not hav ing been more extortionate. cool insolence with which this great, crowded, noisy, comfortless tavern rejected every species of complaint, however well founded, bidding malcontents to go farther and fare worse, the unblushing assurance with which the most exorbitant charges were defended and maintained, the grudging surliness with which the merest trifle was conceded when out of the established routine of the house, the impertinent opposition frequently made to the private arrangements of guests, caused one to sigh for the comforts and civility of an English village inn or French provincial hostelry-each fifth-rate in its own country; but oh! how superior in all essentials to the best hotel at Pera!

The

From this, most joyfully, on a morning early in May, did I turn my steps, followed by two porters bearing my moderate baggage, and descend that precipitous and perilous street which, its surface agreeably varied by loose paving-stones, dead rats, and deep holes, is the most direct route to the Bosphorus. The journey is not fifteen minutes long, but one passes through much variety. The upper part of the street is rather busy. First comes the Russian embassy, then scraping and cleaning preparatory to the reception of a new ambassador. was used, during the war, as a hospital for French officers. A little lower down are the English post

It

office and the French army post; also some French buvettes or wineshops, with inscriptions on their windows and walls, such as one sees at the barriers and in the faubourgs of Paris, announcing the excellence and price of the wine and absinthe vended within. A hotel succeeds to the English post, and just opposite to it are some tottering uninhabited houses, such as there are many of in Pera, uselessly encumbering ground of immense building value, and threatening to fall into the balconies over the way. Below this the street gets narrow, and assumes a solitary and mysterious aspect. Armenian families dwell here; and here, as may be known by the close latticeshutters that defend every opening, are the houses of Mussulmans. No sign of life at door or window, and few passengers in the street. You meet perhaps a porter toiling up with one of those tremendous loads, which Turks alone have the power and knack of bearing; his sinewy brown legs bare, and the sweat raining from his shaggy eyebrows; further on, you come upon a group of British cavalry officers, just across from Scutari, upon luncheon and lounging intent; lower down you overtake a commissariat official in blue uniform, with velvet facings, rosy, and inclined to corpulence, as commissaries should be, and not unfrequently are. He is in command of a small party of soldiers, escorting a string of Turks, laden with specie for the Crimea. Then you are in your turn overtaken by one in staff uniform, mounted on a handsome Arab, too good to be knocked about amongst these abominable pavements and holey places, and followed by an interpreter in cap of red and gold. It is the gallant and popular Major Bone of Charles James Napier's Scinde lambs, who reigns supreme over the depot of the Turkish Contingent on the Bosphorus, and is on his way to Stamboul to smoke the pipe of peace and hold converse of grave import with the worthy Seraskier Mehemet Rushdi Pasha-one of the few honest and disinterested statesmen, be it said en passant, of whom Turkey at the present day can boast. And now a short turn to the left and another to the right take us through a series of

old-clothes shops, in and outside of which is exhibited the most extraordinary collection of cast-off garments and ancient rags that the eccentric fancy of a crazy painter ever threw together. Houndsditch would stare aghast at the motley museum of toggery, to which all the nations of the earth have contributed. Then we got into Pipe Street; so christened from the occupation of its inhabitants, who are seen sitting in their open shops, which are exactly like wooden boxes with one side taken out, kneading and moulding red clay, and gilding and carving it with much cunning, and fashioning cherry and jasmin sticks, and fitting mouthpieces of glass and amber, and so composing the tchibouk-instrument well beloved by Turks, and well enough suited to a sedate people, sedentary in habits and composed in motions, but ill adapted to Western vivacity and briskness, and a very sorry exchange for the commodious cigar. After passing Pipe Street, one gets into the region of strong scents. We will give a wide berth, if you please, to that butcher's shop which forms the corner; but, wide though it be, it suffices not, and we are nearly knocked down by the whiff that overtakes us. We pass a block of grimy, tumbledown houses, at whose open windows and doors are seen what we at first take to be a party of boys in gaudy masquerade dresses. They are Armenian women, tawdrily attired, for the most part in jackets and loose trousers, having upon their heads fantastical caps of gaudy embroidered cloth, and in their mouths large paper cigars. This street is known amongst the British, and particularly the maritime portion of the population of Pera, Galata, and Tophaneh, as Kummupjonni Street, a name on whose etymology we are pondering when we are enveloped and assailed by such a diabolical and horrible stench that all reflection and reasoning are at once expelled from our head. It is like passing Death's laboratory, just as a bottle of Concentrated Essence of Cholera is broken. How anybody can live for a day within a thousand yards of this dreadful exhalation appears miraculous. Yet the neighbourhood is