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by the simple process of repeating what had not the breakfast-room she found Mrs. Cridland in been said.

Mrs. Cridland knew in her heart that Anthony could not have said words so unkind, but the thing pained and wounded her all the same, and she retired with trembling hands and lips. She had reason to tremble at the prospect. To begin with, she had lost, or would probably lose, her comfortable post and salary; she would have to fall back upon her little savings, and live in poverty and pinching; and then there was Alison and the terrible calamity which seemed hanging over her.

It was not Stephen's present intention to tell Alison of his suspicions. As yet he would only alarm her and make her anxious.

He received her with the same grave and judicial solemnity which he had observed toward Mrs. Cridland. He was seated now, and had before him a bundle of papers which he looked at from time to time as he spoke. Alison remained standing.

"Pray excuse me, Alison," he began. "In my capacity as administrator of these estates I have to trouble you from time to time with matters of business. Tell me, please-I asked you this once before-all you know about your your mother."

"I know nothing."

At least her name."

He began to make notes of her answers. This irritated Alison.

"Not even her name. Papa once told meit was the only occasion on which he seemed to speak harshly-that I was never to ask him any questions about her."

He took this down in writing.

"But-the lady with whom you lived before you came here - Mrs. Duncombe. Did she never speak to you about your mother?"

She knew nothing about her. I was brought to her a year-old child by papa. That is all she knew."

"And the trinkets-nothing to connect you with your mother?"

"Nothing except a little coral necklace, which was found in a box of baby-clothes which came with me."

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'A coral necklace is nothing," said Stephen, making a careful note of it. "And that was all?"

"That was all, indeed. Why do you ask? Is there anything depending on my mother's name?"

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'Uncle Stephen?" asked Alison in surprise. 'Why is he horrid and wicked, auntie? He has said nothing. He only asked me for the second time what I knew of my poor dear mother, whom I never saw. To be sure, he wrote down my replies. But then, as I know nothing about her, there was not much to be said. And he had an odd way with him too. What is the matter?”

Mrs. Cridland breathed more freely on Alison's account. Here was at any rate a respite for her. She did not know, as yet, the miserable thing that was waiting for her, to be revealed at the man's good pleasure. So she replied with reference to her own troubles.

"we

Ste

"My dear," she said, wiping her eyes, are to leave the house, Nicolas and I. phen has ordered us to go. We are to leave as soon as the money which is due to me has been paid. He says I must have cajoled your poor father-"

"But what does he mean? What excuse has he?"

"None that I know, except that I said a thing which angered him. And then there is the expense of keeping Nicolas and me. To be sure, the poor boy has got a large appetite."

"Wait," said Alison. "I will know the reason of this." She had no notion of a guardian's duties extending to the dismissal of her friends and companions.

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Alison, dear Alison, do not, for Heaven's sake, do not anger him!"

But Alison was already in the study.

"Uncle Stephen," she cried, with an angry spot on either cheek, "will you be kind enough to tell me why you have ordered Aunt Flora out of the house?

Stephen was already far advanced in one of his most brilliant and uncontrollable attacks of evil temper.

"I shall certainly not tell you, Alison," he replied curtly.

"Not tell me? But you shall tell me!"

Stephen remarked, while he felt that he was about to measure swords with an antagonist worthy of himself, that Alison had never before so strongly reminded him of his mother, especially at those moments while the Señora allowed Alison retired, confused and anxious. In herself to be overcome with wrath. These mo

"There may be, Alison. A great deal may depend upon it. Be assured that I shall do my best to find out the truth. Of course I mean in your interests."

ments, thanks to her son, were neither few nor far between.

“I shall tell you, shall I?" he replied. "You order me to tell you, do you? Come, this is rather good. Be assured, young lady, that I have my reasons that Flora Cridland and her little devil of a boy shall turn out of this, without any delay, and that, as to my reasons, they are my own business."

"No," replied Alison; “ they are my business. You are my guardian, I know; but in a twelvemonth you will be guardian no longer. Let us understand one another, Uncle Stephen. You have certain powers for a limited time. Remember, however, that it is but a very limited time." "Oh!" said Stephen, looking dark and angry, "you are going to lecture me on my duties as guardian, are you?"

"No, I am not; but I am ready to tell you that, if Aunt Flora leaves this house, I shall go with her. I do not understand your duties to extend to depriving me of my companion and protector."

"She is an heiress, this girl," said Stephen. He had left the chair and his papers, and was standing upon the hearth-rug in one of his old and familiar rages-one of those with which he would confront his mother in the old times. His bald temples were flushed and his black eyes glittered. "She thinks she is an heiress. She is a grande dame. Very good. She tries to hector me. Very good, indeed. She shall learn a lesson. Listen, Alison. You may threaten anything you like. At one word from me, at one single word, all this wealth of yours vanishes. Learn, that if I choose, say, when I choose, you will step out of this house a penniless beggar."

"What do you mean?"

"Remember every one of my words. They mean exactly what they say. You depend at this moment on my forbearance; and, by Heaven! that has come very nearly to the end of the rope."

"You think that I am in your power. Is that

it ?"

"That is exactly what I think."

"Then, Uncle Stephen "-Alison stepped up to him and looked him full in the face. Like her uncle, she was flushed with excitement and indignant surprise, but her eyes expanded while his contracted under their emotions-" do not think that by anything you can say, or by any facts of which I know nothing, that I can be brought into your power. I used to wonder how two brothers could be so unlike each other as you and my dear father. Henceforth I shall be more and more thankful for the want of resemblance. Meantime you will find that I shall not want protectors."

She left him, and shut the door. "Have I been precipitate?" Stephen thought, when he had had time to calm down. "Perhaps a little. Yet, after all, what matters? Sooner or later the blow must have fallen."

He rang the bell again.

"Give my compliments to Miss Hamblin," he said; "ask her if she will favor me with one minute more."

Alison returned. "You are going to explain what you said."

"I am," he said, "if your abominable temper will allow you to be calm for five minutes. Listen: Since your father's death I have been diligently hunting in your interests for any record of his marriage. There is none. Do you understand what that means?"

"No."

"If no proof can be found, Anthony had no children-"

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'No children? But I am his daughter." "He said so. Prove your-your descent by proving your father's marriage. The law does not recognize likeness as proof of descent." Still Alison did not comprehend.

"You will find out what all this means in the course of time. For the moment, the only things you need understand are that your father was never married-he never had a wife; he therefore never had a child, in the eyes of the law. He made no will; you can not therefore inherit one penny. The sole heir to all his propertythis house and all that is in it "-he swept round his arm with an air of comprehensive proprietorship-" is myself." "You?"

"Myself; no other. In your interests, I have been doing what I could to find proofs of the marriage. There are none. Everybody has always suspected this; I have always known it. In your interests, and out of consideration to your own feelings, I have been silent all this time."

"In my interests!" she repeated.

She had indeed the spirit of his mother, her quick perceptions, and her fearlessness. With all his assumed exterior calm, Stephen felt that the girl was stronger than himself, as she faced him this time with every outward sign of outraged honor-flashing eyes, flushed cheeks, and panting breast.

"In my interests!" There were scorn and passion in her tones beyond the power of an Englishwoman.

Mrs. Cridland, who had stolen timidly after the girl, fearful that this impious slanderer of his dead mother might insult her, stood within the door, trembling yet admiring. Behind her, the pink-faced boy, with the heavy white eyebrows,

who had just come home from school, gazed with curiosity, wonder, and delight. Uncle Stephen was catching it. This was better than pie. Alison-she really was a splendid fellow, he said to himself was letting him have it. "No one, after all," thought young Nick, "when it comes to real slanging, can pitch in like a girl in a wax."

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"In my interests!" she pointed her finger at his scowling face and downcast eyes. •He pretends that my father was a deceiver of women : he pretends that my father threw away his honor, and my mother her virtue: he pretends that I am a cheat and an impostor: he pretends that everybody has always suspected it: he pretends that I have no right to the very name I bear. This man alone, of all the world, has been base enough to think such a thing of my father, he alone has dared to say it. In my interests he searches private papers for a secret which would not be there, and rejoices not to find it. In my interests he seeks to prove that he is himself my father's heir!"

She paused a moment.

(To be continued.)

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"Alison!" whispered Mrs. Cridland, "it is enough. Do not drive him to desperation." "He shall be no guardian of mine," the girl went on. Henceforth, he shall be no uncle of mine. O father-father-" she burst into sobs and crying, "my poor dead father! Is there no one to call this man a liar, and give you back your honor?"

Stephen answered never a word.

Mrs. Cridland drew the girl passively away.

But young Nick rushed to the front. His eyes were lit with the light of enthusiastic partisanship. His white eyebrows stood out like the fur of a cat in a rage. He brandished his youthful fists in Stephen's face.

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HAVING just a week at my disposal before we did one afternoon; and drove along deep val

the period of my sojourn in England must end, I determined to have a glimpse of Cornish scenery, the kindness of Weymouth friends enabling me to join a small party of excursionists who were about to proceed from Weymouth as far as Boscastle. It is not my purpose to inflict upon the reader a description of Weymouth, with its fine promenade and bay; or of our rambles through Dorset, and that other county, Devon, which, it seems to me, has an immeasurably higher claim to be called "The Garden of England" than Kent; I will merely say of Devon that its gracious climate, beautiful scenery and flowers, superb mansions, hedge-embowered roads, and exquisite Torquay, impressed me as a piece of earth more Italian than English. My wish is merely to sketch at random a few of the scenes which interested me in Cornwallscenes which, from their remoteness, are yet comparatively unfamiliar even to English tourists, and which, from their singular wildness and grandeur, or poetical and historical associations, are well worthy of, at least, passing remark.

Imagine, then, that we have left the lawns and orchards of Devon behind and crossed the river Tamar between Pentillie and Cothele. This

leys, shut in by great rounded hills well clothed with forest-trees, the glens crossing and recrossing, intersecting each other at various angles, and each with its own little gushing stream buried in moss and fern. And such moss and fern! the former so green and soft and luxuriant, and the latter with its great spreading leaves bending gracefully over the chattering stream underneath. There are few spots left in England at once so beautiful and retired as this stretch of broken, confused country on the Cornish side of the river Tamar. One afternoon we came to a hamlet placed just at the head of one of these valleys. Its whitewashed walls, red roofs, and chimneys surmounted by light curling smoke, stood out against the mountain-side as some point emerges from the midst of Turner's canvas-almost smothered in color. A little to the left of the hamlet, on a well-rounded hill fringed with larch and spruce-fir, stood the church-a gray old tower covered with green and orange lichens which grow everywhere in this moist climate, and surrounded by a little knot of firtrees whose heavy green foliage struck vividly across the hazy outline of the adjacent hill. Nowhere else in England had I beheld such cloud

splendor, either, or detected that peculiar azure in the sky which constantly hangs over Naples, and is always associated with sea and mountains and sunshine. The blending of repose, color, and antiquity was absolutely perfect. As we followed the road which winds up the hill, we could look back over the retreating valleys through which we had passed, and at last, when we got to the top, we had a glorious view over Dartmoor-its distant hills bounding the horizon with a bold, undulating outline. Passing on, we had a view of a strange-looking, dilapidated church on the Tor-the "Brent Tor," described so graphically by Kingsley in his "Westward Ho!"-where a congregation still assembles every Sunday afternoon for public worship. Presently we turned a sharp corner, and the whole view was changed. Below us flowed the river, making a grand sweep under Pentillie Castle, and opposite the bleak Devonshire sides of the Tamar, which were sprinkled here and there with tall mine-chimneys, and crowned with a desolate-looking slate-roofed village. Close on our right there stood a great, solid-looking, square tower, surrounded by a low wall and a fosse. The whole building was grown over with ivy, and buried in thick brushwood and large trees, some of which started out of the wall. A flight of some half-dozen broken-down steps brought us to the wall of this tower. In the wall there is a little window, about a foot square, with a granite mullion. Looking through this window you see a stone figure on the opposite wall, sitting down on a stone chair, and dressed in the long, flowing wig and quaint costume of the last century. That is Sir James Tillie, of Pentillie! Who was he? He was a bon vivant in his lifetime, who laughed at the possibility of any future state of rewards and punishments. So opposed was he apparently to all religion that he ordered this tower to be built in order that he might be buried in it, not in a recumbent position, however, like an ordinary mortal, but in a sitting posture. It was, as far as can be ascertained, his own intention that he should be put in a chair in this tower with a table in front of him, on which were to be placed bottles and glasses, pipes and tobacco, as emblems of a sensual life. This was not done, however. Some years ago, the father of the present owner of Pentillie Castle opened the vault, and found there the remains of his ancestor, in a sitting posture, indeed, but inclosed in a coffin. There his bones rest still! There stands the old, ivy-mantled tower—the monument of a man who dared to scorn the mysteries of death and futurity.

It was on a cloudless day that we left the grand and wild cliffs of Bude, to spend a few hours at Tintagel, the reputed birthplace of (to quote from Caxton) "the most renouned crysten VOL. VII.-8

kyng. . . . Kyng Arthur, whyche ought moost to be remembered emonge us Englysshe men tofore al other crysten kynges." It is to this romantic ruin that Tennyson, too, alludes in his "Idylls of the King":

"After tempest, when the long wave broke

All down the thundering shores of Bude and Boss,
There came a day as still as heaven, and then
They found a naked child upon the sands
Of wild Dundagil by the Cornish sea;
And that was Arthur!"

The road was most picturesque, giving us occasional glimpses of the deep-blue sea on our right hand, and a wide expanse of Cornish scenery on our left, with many a church-tower in sight, round which a village clustered, and in the far distance, the craggy peaks of Rowtor and Brownwilly, two of Cornwall's finest mountains. Lizards were sunning themselves on every mossy bank, the hedges were full of wild flowers, and the Osmunda regalis grew tall and luxuriant in the sedgy ditches by the roadside.

The apparently interminable descent into the town of Boscastle gave us the sensation of driving into an abyss. The grandeur of the scenery is indescribable. From the little bridge at the bottom of the town, we gazed upward awe-struck at the threatening craggy hills that inclosed us on every side. A Lilliputian at the bottom of a Tyrolese peasant's inverted hat might be supposed to look upward with much the same feelings as we were then experiencing. The darkgray rock burst here and there through its turfy mantle, and the houses of the town of Boscastle, built one above another up a precipitous hill, gave the idea that if the topmost house received a push, the whole village would fall over like a pack of cards.

As some of our party were unequal to the walk of three miles that lay between Boscastle and Tintagel, and our own mules were too tired to proceed farther, we made inquiries about a conveyance, and being unable to meet with one at the hotel, we proceeded to climb the village street, on the strength of a report that a muletrap could be obtained at the top of the town. We little knew what we were attempting when we set out, or the most delicate among us would have preferred the three-mile walk to Tintagel, over headland and down, to the fatiguing ascent of the village, and the subsequent drive that was in store for them. We had no need to be told that we were "rambling beyond railways." The Old World (but not less interesting) appearance of the town, and the pursuit under difficulties of this fabulous mule-trap-of which some whom we questioned had heard, and others had not— bore sufficient testimony to the fact, which was

further demonstrated by our discovering the identical "trap" drawn up in front of the last house in the village.

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Let not the reader suppose that a Boscastle mule-trap is one of those dainty, morocco-cushioned equipages driven by a sinart youth in a jaunty cap, which may be seen at fashionable watering-places during the summer months. The mule-trap we at length secured was neither more nor less than a tax-cart without springs, drawn by a bony animal of the size of a small horse, with a head ornamented with a gigantic pair of donkey's ears. A good-natured woman, with a loud voice and broad Cornish accent, consented to drive three of the party from Boskittle" to Tintagel, and three ladies were assisted into the cart; two seated on the bare wooden board that constituted the front seat, and one perched behind on a high stool, placed for the occasion, which performed pleasing little peregrinations as the vehicle jolted forward. We only waited to see the driver mounted on her own seat, which consisted of the wooden ridge that formed the front of the cart, with a moderate allowance of the lap of the lady immediately behind her; and when she had, by dint of sawing away at the reins with her whole strength, and noisily belaboring the bony back of the poor mule with a large stick, succeeded in making him crawl forward in a zigzag direction, we retraced our own steps down the precipice, bestowing many a sympathizing thought upon those of our party who were jolting along the high-road at a snail's pace, and whose comical faces of woful despair, as they cast a parting look at us, still lingered in our imaginations.

From Boscastle we walked first to the harbor, which is half a mile from the town. It is a curious and romantic little inlet, winding between high rocks, and not a stone's-throw in breadth. The sea is in constant agitation, so that the cove itself offers no protection to ships; but at its extremity there is a space large enough to hold two or three vessels at a time, and this is guarded by a small pier. The water, owing to the proximity of high, dark rocks, is black and dreary-looking, and one could fancy many kinds of death less fearful than that of being drowned in the gloomy waters of Boscastle Harbor. We sat for some time on a seat at the foot of the headland of Willapark, and watched the curious and somewhat rare phenomenon of the blowing-hole, which is caused by the water being drawn up into a fissure in a rock outside the harbor, and ejected again with a volley of spray resembling a jet of steam. A passer-by made our blood run cold with the information that some years before a young lady bathing in the harbor was sucked into the blowing-hole, and never afterward heard

of. He informed us also that at low tide, when the sea happens to be unusually agitated, a column of water is violently projected across the harbor, by means of a passage underground, communicating with the open sea, and that this action is accompanied by a terrific report. There is something melancholy and depressing in this iron-bound coast, where even an ordinary fishing-boat can not be launched with any feelings of security, and where stories of terror abound, from the awful tales of Cornish wreckers raising false lights in this immediate neighborhood to lure vessels to destruction, down to innumerable cases of death by drowning, either from the bathers having been sucked out by the irresistible sandwave, or drawn off by one of the many strong currents that invest these shores.

On leaving the harbor, we came within sight of the "silent tower of Bottreaux," to which is attached one of the most poetical of the many wild Cornish legends. It is said that a jealousy existed between Bottreaux and Tintagel, because the church of the latter village possessed a beautiful peal of bells, while the former possessed none; and on summer evenings the musical chime of Tintagel bells would be wafted up the coast, to meet with no response from the sistertower. The inhabitants of Bottreaux raised a sum of money to purchase a peal of bells for their church, and, after long and anxious waiting, the day at length arrived when a vessel hove in sight containing the longed-for and precious freight. As the vessel drew near the shore, the sweet peal of the Tintagel chimes came over the water. The pilot, who was a Tintagel man, uncovered his head with feelings of rapture and thankfulness. "Thank God!" he exclaimed, "that I hear those bells once more! With his blessing we shall set foot on shore this evening." "Thank God upon land, you fool!" exclaimed the captain, in brutal tones; "on sea thank the seaman's skill, the good ship, and the prosperous wind."

No sooner were the scoffing words uttered than the wind began to blow high, the fearful waves of that terrible coast grew stronger and fiercer; the captain's cheek grew pale, and the noble ship, with its stalwart crew, sank, never to be seen more, one man alone being rescued from a watery grave-the pilot who had “given God the glory."

So Bottreaux lost her peal within sight of her own gray and lichened walls, and, according to the "Echoes from Old Cornwall"

"Still when the storm of Bottreaux' waves
Is raging in his weedy caves,
Those bells, that sullen surges hide,
Peal their deep tones beneath the tide!

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