Scharaffa stood gazing on his master with a ghastly stare.

"Well!" said he, at length, "what admirable villany! Ay, he does it easily, with the hand of a master! That boy Devereux! Who would have foreseen it? What must be done?"

"Oh!" said Wolfstein, "should the worst happen, we can blow up the castle, and finish our pantomime at the bottom of the Adriatic!"

CHAPTER XII.

"Of chance or change, oh! let not man complain, Else, shall he never, never cease to wail!"

Beattie.

We must now, for a short season, quit the shores of the Adriatic for the banks of the Danube, and as we return to the Austrian court, the reflection is pressed hard upon us how many a melancholy change a few years, nay, a few months of absence create in the haunts once peopled with forms dear to the heart or the fancy.-How many are gone or altered, or if they are still what they were, they are become otherwise to our fickle. perceptions! But what avails it to sigh. over time's ravages! They will proceed, and he who has courage to let the current pass, bear what it may along its surface,

is alone a fit inhabitant of this revolving planet, where all that has been, has passed;

all that is, is passing; all that shall be, will pass! However mighty, exalted, beautiful, or beloved, neither pride nor might, nor what is stronger than all, af fection, can counteract this eternal lawall must change! The very dust on which we trample once stood erect, and smiled and exulted, and reasoned, and took its heedless path over dust that had once been animate, as we do now. Have these reflections their use. It is hard to decide a sigh must follow them, and sighs are so plenty in our atmosphere, that it is scarcely wise to court them. She who decked the thorny crown of Ferdinand with the roses of love and friendship, the lovely, the mild, the dignified Mary Anne was no more, and every fibre in the heart of the Imperial widower was quivering to the stroke. He had contended with many things, and she had taught him patience; but the smile which

had ever cheered him was now extinct, the tender bosom on which his aching head securely rested was cold and unfeeling; no sorrow, no joy of his could touch it more! Where, in this deepest anguish, might he now listen for comfort, since the voice which had never failed him had ceased in everlasting silence? Still, as he looked towards the Heaven whither she was fled, something like the echo of those precious accents whispered, "Yet a little while," and those words be came the soothers of his affliction. Little, indeed, can the mere votary of this world guess how some hearts have learned to cling to the reflection that all things pass! The lively, piquante, brilliant Princess of Stolberg, she was no more! Not, indeed, that the machine which bore that name had vanished from the earth, but the spirit was extinct, and the character which constituted her identity gone, Her mind drooped, and her health languished; she had watched the decline

of her august mistress, beheld its termination, and wept over that bier where she would fain have laid her own head. Lindau, once the gay butterfly of the Austrian court, had felt the blighting influence of the season, and he, too, looked back with disgust and scorn to the toys and rattles of his youth. Just at the period when the real designs of the elder Vallenstein became manifest to his army, and when the officers found themselves compelled to choose their master, between him and the Emperor, the Margrave, whose allegiance the Duke had only attempted cautiously, endeavouring to attach him by acts of favour and demonstrations of affection, received so critical an account of his only sister, the sweet Ulrica, that he abruptly demanded leave to absent himself, which the Duke of Friedland was not then in circumstances to refuse. Desmond, for whom Lindau had caused a strict and secret search to be made, was at length