been a measure of Aladdin's jewels, my fingers could scarcely have trembled more as I undid it. There was little to reward me, you might have supposed, but I was perfectly satisfied. One old leather bag containing notes to the value of one hundred dollars. I remembered these very notes were missing, and known to have been in the possession of James Parsons when he so unaccountably disappeared (and I had the numbers of them in my note-book at that very moment, and a crooked sixpence which had also been described. This was absolutely all of value the parcel contained, as two or three scraps of belt, shrivelled and burnt, two buckles, as if braces, a few brass buttons sadly discoloured, and a few charred and partially destroyed bones might seem valueless to any one, but were everything to me, and were life itself to the wretched man, who had tried to hide them to his own destruction.

placed the glass upon the counter, and in another second the other was clasped beside it.

He turned upon me such a look of speechless terror as I shall never forget, and once more I saw before me the same agonized face of the night before, during the midnight watch in the moonlit forest.

"I arrest you for the murder of James Parsons," I said, and he staggered back against the wall, and then fell heavily on the floor.

I assisted him to rise, for he was faint and weak, and the handcuffs prevented him from helping himself. But when he had been seated on a form, where he could support himself against the counter, his pale, haggard face grew red with excitement, and I feared he was going mad.

"Thank God, it's over!" he said. "It's better to be hung at once than to live such a terrible life. I did it! yes, I did it! I killed him and buried his body!"

Carefully wrapping them up, and once more securing Vino, I placed my precious find in my "Take care!" I remonstrated, 66 every word valise, and mounting, rode rapidly along the you say now will be used against you." road after the bullock team. I had not much to "I want them to be used against me," he hide now, as I was quite satisfied in arresting said, loudly. "I want to relieve myself and die. this man, with such a strong chain of evidence I met Parsons about two miles from the Wallaagainst him. I thought it as well to wait, how-by. I was on tramp with my swag, and he ever, until we reached a house of accommodation gave me a lift. I found out he had money, not more than three miles off, which I knew he and coaxed him into the bush, gammoning I must pass, as a desperate man in a lonely bush knew a nice water-hole to camp for the night. had a chance it were as well not to give him. We made a fire near a log, and while he was putting a billy over it, I struck him with the axe-his own axe-right on the back of the head, and he fell into the fire. I piled branches and wood on half the night, until he was burned to cinders, and then, when the fire died out, I raked up every bit of strap, and button, and bone that I could find, so that no one could find any trace. I put these into a bit of rag, and planted them, but, until last night, I never had a chance to take them from the spot. Oh, heavens above! It's a fearful thing to be a murderer! I should have had to drag these bones over the world with me; fire and water would never have hidden them! You will find them

I soon overtook the dray, and I thought the driver looked rather uneasy as he recognized me. "You're luckier than myself, mate!" I cried, as I rode up. "I've been riding in the bush all day lost. I ought to be ashamed to tell it, too, after being in the colony so long." "There's a good many tracks hereabouts," he answered. "You've taken the wrong one, I guess."

"Yes, I took the wrong road after leaving the Wallaby, and then trying to cut across the bush, I lost myself. If it hadn't been for the sound of your whip, I should have pulled myself up. Are we near any public-house?" "Yes, the Accommodation Inn is only about

two miles off."

"Well, I'll go on, then. I am regularly tired. Call as you're passing, mate, and I'll shout."

So we parted, and as I left him I saw a feeling of relief steal over his face. Had there been any other road I should have feared his trying to avoid me; but there was not, so I waited patiently in the bar of the inn, until I heard the dray passing, and then I went to the door and called him in.

There was no one in the bar but the man who served, and who supplied the driver and myself with our chosen drinks. I suffered him to swallow his in peace. Poor wretch, I knew he would require all the fortitude it would give him to enable him to undergo the terrible ordeal before him. But no sooner had he finished than the handcuffs were locked upon the hand that

PARIS: AND LIFE THERE IN 1861.

BY H. T. TUCKERMAN.

(In Two Parts.)

minutiæ of life, noted by Yorick in his sketch | mens of bird's eggs. On the other nand, the

of a Sunday in the French metropolis, when La Fleur brought the butter for his master's déjeuner on a fresh currant-leaf, and found the bouquet he presented his own chosen fair had changed hands three times in the course of the day-though not so patent now, are equally characteristic; the valet still knows his master's debts, and the femme de chambre her mistress's love affairs; there is the same familiarity in the relation of master and servant, but the chance is, there is less gossip between them, as both have more ideas and think oftener than before the days of cheap literature, steam, and telegraphs. Comedy still makes sport of husbands; "the literary mind of France takes a religious turn" occasionally; and "people laugh at everything" as they did in the time of the young Duchess of Burgundy, whose remark to this effect was then considered so naive. The mariage de convenance is quite as prevalent, children as artificial, and old people as child-like; the precieuses ridicules are, however, on the wane, being fused in the cosmopolitan pressure of a more general intelligence, while the femme savante has given place, in a great degree, to the female authors, who are too alive to the inspiration of the times, and their own ideas to be pedantic.

To such an extent does the tyranny of custom dominate in the social history of France, that duels and gaming have their periods of triumph as well as bonnets and constitutions; at times they have each enjoyed a fashionable prestige, so that individuals, without the least taste for either occupation, in order to be comme il faut have sought to lose a notable amount at roulette and to provoke some famous swordsman to combat. An acute observer of Parisian life, prophecies that two growing tastes are now at work destined to modify the French character, one the rage for English horses, and the other the use of cigars. Of the normal traits of the national mind, that which apparently remains most intact is the instinct of military life. The same adaptation for the camp that we recognize in Froissart's Chronicles and Napoleon's campaigns, is obvious at this moment. "This is worth considering," says Montaigne, "that our nation places valour (vaillance) in the highest degree of virtue.”

French are better understood across the Channel; it is curious, at the present era of alliance, to read one of the old travellers, who reported France to Londoners, in the heyday of British prejudice. "What is there," says the famous Thomas Nashe, "in France to be learned more than in England, but falsehood in friendship, perfect slovenry and to love no man for my pleasure? I have known some that have continued there by the space of half-a-dozen years, and when they came home they have had a little, weerish, lean-face, under a broad French hat, kept a terrible coil with the dust in the street in their long cloaks of gray paper, and spoken English strangely. Naught else have they profited by their travel, but to distinguish the true Bordeaux grape and know a cup of neat Gascoigne wine from wine of Orleans; yet peradventure to wear a velvet patch on their face and walk melancholy with their arms folded."*

We recognize the life of Paris by the analytical pictures of the French novelists and the graphic details of the memoirs. No mode of national existence had ever been so candidly revealed; the stranger, if familiar with the authors of the country, is better acquainted with what is peculiar in the habits and tableaux around him than an unlettered native. Parisian character and the salient qualities which distinguish metropolitan and provincial existence have been daguerreotyped and anatomized by Balzac; each class, economy, and phase he makes the basis of a story, has been not only carefully observed but artistically and psychologically studied. What memories of an old pension haunt the reader of Père Goriot-a kind of prose Lear-as he gazes upon some venerable house of that description! how intensely he realizes the consciousness of the well-endowed yet sated young Parisian, as he recals the opening chapters of La Peau de Chagrin. Every aspect and secret of grisette life has been depicted; the poetry of the career of a gifted French noble, whose first youth witnessed the prologue of the fatal revolutionary drama, is embalmed in tragic or tender lines in the autobiography of Chateaubriand; Saint Beuve's critiques have revived the associations of each epoch of French literature; Lammenais The same extravagant notion of an English- recorded what of faith lingered in the heart of Ian's whims and sang froid prevail in the the people; Scribe reflects the most shifting French capital as used to supply farce-writers traits of manners and character; and thus each before the age of steam. Veron recently pub-indigenous figure, building, and custom appeals lished the anecdote of un Anglais, who had been to the imaginative memory as well as to the his neighbour at a restaurant for several weeks, curious eye. bidding him good-bye one day, as he was going on a trip round the world; and eighteen months after, the traveller reappeared at the accustomed hour and table, and found his old companion in the same seat; meantime, the Englishman had circumnavigated the globe. We are told in Paris of every conceivable mania on the part of English collectors; one spent a fortune in bottles of water from all the rivers in the world, one in every kind of pipe, and another in speci

The salon of a literary clique suggests the extraordinary social history of Paris; and the others, memorable as female arbiters and queens names of De Staël, Sévigné, Recamier, and in conversation, occur to us in connection with each political era and great name in science, art,

"The Unfortunate Traveller: or Life of Jack Wilton." London, 1594.

and letters. Delaroche's portrait of Napoleon | of the scholars that haunt the bookstalls on the amid the Alps and at Fontainebleau has stamped quai, have the associations of the past awakened that remarkable countenance in all its itensity by these picturesque and suggestive localities; of expression upon the mind; and thus it ever yet they signalize the enterprise of Philip the reappears on the scene of his power. The new Handsome, of Charles the Fifth, of Francis the style of pavement attests the triumphs of barri- First, Henry the Second, Henry the Fourth, cades; and every old lamp-post the horrors of Philipe Augustus, and Louis the Fourteenth. the Reign of Terror. We cannot pass a found- There Clovis and his Germanic tribes and ling hospital without thinking of Rousseau; the his converted Clotilde, formed the nucleus of Jardin des Plants brings back the benign re- Pepin's inheritance, and Charlemagne estabsearches of Buffon, Michaux, Cuvier, and the lished his name; thither came the Scandinavian host of French naturalists; old Montaigne's pirates, and musing on the banks of the dingy Essays are recalled by many a philosophic hint stream now associated with science and fétes, and maxim of worldly wisdom; and each with baths and suicides, with boot-blacks and glimpse of the comedy of French life is elequent laundresses, with the romance of student life, of Molière. As we pass either palace or prison, artistic, medical and literary, and charming to the fair vision of Marie Antoinette, as it lives in the eye for elegant bridges and massive quaysBurke's description, the heroic devotion of the historical dreamer recals a century and a Madame Roland, and the heart-melting voice of half of wars between French and English kings: Charlotte Corday, appeal to remembrance; and the Black Prince and Joan of Arc, Calvin and thus the localities of Paris lead the fancy, at every the Huguenots, Guise and St. Bartholomew, step, from the guillotine to the fête, from Condé, Montmorency, Maria de Medicis, Anne massacre to beauty, from blood to flowers; and of Austria, Richelieu, Louis the Sixteenth-the in early morning rambles we almost expect to Revolution, Bonaparte, and the Bourbon! Such see the First Consul roaming incog., wrapt in a panorama, its foreground crowded with mehis gray coat. Notre Dame to the admirers of morable figures, its perspective dim with the Victor Hugo, seems less a Cathedral than an smoke of battle, its groups distinguishable by architectural Romance. Yet, there is no city varied symbols-the oriflamme, the lilies, the where the past is so lost sight of in the present, cross, the tricolour-blood-stained yet radiant and where local tradition has so slight a hold with female beauty and animated by martial upon the sympathies. It is fortunate, therefore, prowess, seems to bear no relation to the living that when inclined to detach ourselves from the scene typical of prosperous order and the immediate-here so absorbing-and rehearse age of commerce, of luxury, and of science. the story of the past, with every needful aid to Yet the analyst detects in the most commonmemory and imagination, there is an available place fact of to-day the influence of a dynasty and complete resource: we have but to quit and the bequest of an era. Madame de Genlis Paris for Versailles. The Place de Carousel and tells us how she taught the boy Louis Philipe the Tuileries are unimpressive in comparison after Rousseau's maxims; and made him cosmowith the stately decadence of that palatial politan in taste by her German system of garchâteau, before which the mob, with ferocious dening, dining after the English fashion, and glances, heaved like a raging sea up to the bal- taking supper en Italien; and Veron says her cony where stood the Queen and Lafayette; pupil, when he became King, introduced the the first solemn confronting of regal and popu- rage for fine horses and clever jockeys; it was, lar will, ere the deadly struggle began-whose according to the same authority, the fermiers renewal is ever at hand. Within those walls is generaux who initiated French cookery as a gathered the pictorial history of France in unique art in their table rivalry with the old successive and elaborate series; the noblesse. "Scarcity of fuel," says the Quarterly counsels, domestic life of every Review, "has not been without its effect in reign; the lineaments of heroes, poets, and forming the manners of the polished Parisians, kings; the deeds, and the men and women that and has transferred to the theatre and the café are identified with the country from the be- those attractions, which in the British islands ginning. To live at Versailles, with a good belong essentially to the domestic hearth." The library at hand, and pass hours of every day in use of tobacco, in the form of cigars, is another these halls, would make us intimate, not only in modification of the national habits; but a few a technical but in a picturesque way, with the years ago it was deemed a nuisance, now it preannals and the celebrities of the kingdom. It vails among both sexes; and keen observers would be as if French history was enacted be- declare that the French have grown more confore us and we saw the features of the leading templative and less excitable as the puff has suspirits of each generation as we listened to perseded the pinch, and the slowly-evolved their achievements. "C'est à la Seine," says a cloud (emblem of ruminating quiescence) taken popular historiographer, "que Paris doit ses the place of those "pungent grains of titillating premiers aggrandizement;" but so completely dust" which stimulate a bon-mot rather than lure have modern activity and embellishment overto reflection. laid the rude defences whereby barbaric hordes indicated the site of a magnificent capital, that few of the artists who linger on the bridges to note the effect of moonlight on arch and islet, or

one

battles,

"You would hardly believe," said Madame de Maintenon, "how much a talent for combing hair contributed to my elevation:" tact in the minor economies, the ability to minister to