his grave. This historical fact sufficiently disposes of James's unsupported romance of lime barrels, and the rest. Indeed, Lawrance himself was incapable of a dastardly or dishonourable action. He was a brave and gallant gentleman, and deserved honour of the enemy and renown and gratitude of his country. And he got both. Captain Broke, too, was a noble-hearted man and gallant officer. All through the American war he distinguished himself by the discipline and high moral tone of his ship. He fought, not for prize-money and personal gain, he used to say, but for glory and his country. Therefore, considering that it demoralised his men as well as weakened his crew to send them home in his prizes, he generally took what was portable and valuable out of the ships to share among his crew, and sunk the rest; preferring to pay the value of what he lost out of his own pocket, that his men should not be discontented and think themselves hardly used, than see them demoralised by the love of gain and pelf. So at least said Mr. John Wilson Croker in the House, and the Times of the 9th of July, 1813, echoes him. Of course there was considerable roaring of the British lion here in England when the despatches came. But on the 11th of September there was a fatal crow on Lake Erie, given by Commodore Perry over Captain Barclay, which had to remain unanswered and unavenged-until to-day.

well for the Chesapeake if her guns had answered better to their names, and carried their metal a little more steadily and truly.

As everything connected with America is of interest at the present moment, when it seems as if our cousins want to force us into a hand-to-hand fight if we are to preserve our status among nations or our dignity as men, it perhaps will be pleasant to read of a fight when English courage and English pluck carried it over distinct odds, and to believe that the race has not quite died out yet, but has left a handful of representatives behind it. The other day, when the first intimation of an American captain's desire to speak with an English mailsteamer was by firing a round shot across her bows, and sending a shell to within a hundred yards of her, we have nothing of the gallant spirit which sent courteously-worded challenges, and gave a dead enemy burial with all the honours of war. Fancy the modern rowdies of the North giving any honour at all to the best spirits of the South! In the old war with us the Americans were rude and bragging enough, but they were sucking-doves compared with what they are now, when success in trade and invention has inflated the whole nation like a gigantic balloon, and every one is preparing for the shock of its collapse.

The fact is, the Americans are like a party of overbearing schoolboys, who want a sound There was one tragic disaster during the thrashing and to be turned down to the lower fight of the Shannon and the Chesapeake, forms before they can be said to be rebuked. worth recording because of its piteous fatality. Apparently they are exceedingly ambitious that Lieutenant Wall, of the Shannon, one of the we should hold the rod, when they may be sure boarding party, was told to haul down the Ame- we shall not spare the stripes. Meanwhile we rican flags, and hoist instead the brave old bit cannot do better than call to mind the Shannon of blue. By mistake he pulled the wrong hal- and the Chesapeake-how we fought at odds and liards, and hoisted the American colours first, beat, simply by superior discipline and pluck. upon which the men left on board his own ship "The mirror of the prophet hangs behind him," thought that the Chesapeake had rallied again, and round its border is the legend, "What has and fired in a broadside, which laid the poor been may be again." It is not unlikely that the lieutenant low for ever. Another curious cir- affair of the Trent and San Jacinto may have cumstance was the explosion of an open cask of other and sterner outgrowths than what have musket cartridges left standing on the Chesa- appeared as yet above the earth-outgrowths peake's cabin. They caught fire and blew up, which will bear the mark of England's shaping but did no injury to man or spar. Even the hand and the impress of her conquering foot; the spanker-boom, directly in the way of the ex-thin gay flags, torn and soiled with blood, hauled plosion, was barely singed; which unusual direction of natural forces was taken as a matter of special Providence in those days, and the Boston divines made the most of it. The names of the Chesapeake's guns, too, are curious. On the main-deck were Brother Jonathan, True Blue, Yankee Protection, Putnam, Raging Eagle, Viper, General Warren, Mad Anthony, America, Washington, Liberty for Ever, Dreadnought, Defiance, Liberty or Death; on the forecastle were the United Tars, Jumping Billy, Rattler; on the quarter-deck Bulldog, Spitfire, Nancy Dawson, Redcap, Bunker's Hill, Pocohontas, Towser, and Wilful Murder, each name engraved on a square plate of copper, and fastened on the gun-carriages. It would have been

down, and the Union Jack floating from the top.

NEW WORK

BY SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON.
NEXT WEEK

Will be continued (to be completed next March)

A STRANGE STORY,

BY THE

AUTHOR OF "MY NOVEL," "RIENZI," &c. &c.

Now Ready, price Fourpence,
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FORMING THE

EXTRA DOUBLE NUMBER
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The right of Translating Articles from ALL THE YEAR ROUND is reserved by the Authors.

Published at the Office, No. 26, Welington Street, strand. Printed by C. WHITING, Beaufort House, Cl

1

ALL THE YEAR ROUND.

A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28, 1861.

No. 140.]

A STRANGE STORY.

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in battling firmly against any grotesque illusion and accepting his departure as a simple proof

BY THE AUTHOR OF "MY NOVEL," "RIENZI," &c. that my jealous fears had been amongst my other

CHAPTER LI.

WHEN we separated for the night, which we did at eleven o'clock, Margrave said :

"Good night and good-by. I must leave you to-morrow, Strahan, and before your usual hour for rising. I took the liberty of requesting one of your men to order me a chaise from LPardon my seeming abruptness, but I always avoid long leave-takings, and I had fixed the date of my departure almost as soon as I accepted your invitation."

66

chimeras, and that as he had really only visited Lilian out of friendship to me, in my peril, so he might, with his characteristic acuteness, have guessed my jealousy, and ceased his visits from a kindly motive delicately concealed? And might not the same motive now have dictated the words which were intended to assure me that Lcontained no attractions to tempt him to return to it? Thus gradually soothed and cheered by the course to which my reflections led me, I continued to muse for hours. At length, looking at my watch, I was surprised to find it was the I have no right to complain. The place second hour after midnight. I was just about must be dull, indeed, to a gay young fellow like to rise from my chair to undress, and secure some you. It is dull even to me. I am meditating hours of sleep, when the well-remembered cold flight already. Are you going back to L- wind passed through the room, stirring the roots "Not even for such things as I left at my of my hair, and before me stood, against the wall, lodgings. When I settle somewhere, and can the Luminous Shadow. give an address, I shall direct them to be sent to There are, I hear, beautiful patches of scenery towards the north, only known to pedestrian tourists. I am a good walker; and you know, Fenwick, that I am also a child of Nature. Adieu to you both; and many thanks to you, Strahan, for your hospitality."

me.

He left the room.

גיפ

"I am not sorry he is going," said Strahan, after a pause, and with a quick breath as if of relief. "Do you not feel that he exhausts one? An excess of oxygen, as you would say in a lecture."

"Rise, and follow me," said the voice, sounding much nearer to me than it had ever done before.

And at those words I rose mechanically, and like a sleep-walker.

"Take up the light."

I took it.

The Scin-Læca glided along the wall towards the threshold, and motioned to me to open the door. I did so. The Shadow flitted on through the corridor. I followed, with hushed footsteps, down a small stair into Forman's study. In all my subsequent proceedings, about to

I was alone in my own chamber; I felt indis-be narrated, the Shadow guided me, sometimes posed for bed and for sleep; the curious conversation I had held with Margrave weighed on me. In that conversation, we had indirectly touched upon the prodigies which I had not brought myself to speak of with frank courage, and certainly nothing in Margrave's manner had betrayed consciousness of my suspicions; on the contrary, the open frankness with which he evinced his predilection for mystic speculation, or uttered his more unamiable sentiments, rather tended to disarm than encourage belief in gloomy secrets or sinister powers. And he was about to quit the neighbourhood, he would not again see Lilian, not even enter the town of L. Was I to ascribe this relief from his presence to the promise of the Shadow, or was I not rather right

VOL. VI.

by voice, sometimes by sign. I obeyed the guidance not only unresistingly, but without a desire to resist. I was unconscious either of curiosity or of awe-only of a calm and passive indifference, neither pleasurable nor painful. In this obedience, from which all will seemed extracted, I took into my hands the staff which I had examined the day before, and which lay on the table, just where Margrave had cast it on reentering the house. I unclosed the shutter to the casement, lifted the sash, and, with the light in my left hand, the staff in my right, stepped forth into the garden. The night was still; the flame of the candle scarcely trembled in the air; the Shadow moved on before me towards the old pavilion described in an earlier part of this nar

140

it, and my lips commenced the formula again whispered into my ear, when I heard distinctly a voice of warning and of anguish, that murmured "Hold!" I knew the voice; it was Lilian's. I paused-I turned towards the quarter from which the voice had come, and in the space afar I saw the features, the form of Lilian. Her arms were stretched towards me in supplication, her countenance was deadly pale and anxious with unutterable distress. The whole image seemed in unison with the voice; - the look, the attitude, the gesture, of one who sees another in deadly peril, and cries "Beware!"

rative, and of which the mouldering doors stood wide open. I followed the Shadow into the pavilion, up the crazy stair to the room above, with its four great blank, unglazed windows, or rather arcades, north, south, east, and west. I halted on the middle of the floor: Right before my eyes, through the vista made by breathless boughs, stood out from the moonlit air the dreary mausoleum. Then, at the command conveyed to me, I placed the candle on a wooden settle, touched a spring in the handle of the staff, a lid flew back, and I drew from the hollow, first a lump of some dark bituminous substance, next a small slender wand of polished steel, of which This apparition vanished in a moment; but the point was tipped with a translucent material that moment sufficed to free my mind from the which appeared to me like crystal. Bending constraint which had before enslaved it. I down, still obedient to the direction conveyed dashed the wand to the ground, sprang from the to me, I described on the floor with the lump circle, rushed from the place. How I got into of bitumen (if I may so call it) the figure my own room I can remember not-I know not; of the pentacle with the interlaced triangles, I have a vague reminiscence of some intervening in a circle nine feet in diameter, just as I wanderings, of giant trees, of shroud-like moonhad drawn it for Margrave the evening before. light, of the Shining Shadow and its angry The material used made the figure perceptible, aspect, of the blind walls and iron door of the in a dark colour of mingled black and red. I House of the Dead, of spectral images--a conapplied the flame of the candle to the circle, and fused and dreary phantasmagoria. But all I can immediately it became lambent with a low steady recal with distinctness is the sight of my own splendour that rose about an inch from the floor, hueless face in the mirror in my own still room, and gradually from this light there emanated a by the light of the white moon through the soft grey transparent mist and a faint but exqui-window; and sinking down, I said to myself, site odour. I stood in the midst of the circle, "This at least, is, an hallucination or a dream!" and within the circle also, close by my side, stood the Scin-Læca; no longer reflected on the wall, but apart from it, erect, rounded into more integral and distinct form, yet impalpable, and from it there breathed an icy air. Then lifting the wand the broader end of which rested in the palm of my hand, the two fore-fingers closing lightly over it in a line parallel with the point, I directed it towards the wide aperture before me, fronting the mausoleum. I repeated aloud some words whispered to me in a language I knew not: those words I would not trace on this paper could I remember them. As they came to a close, I heard a howl from the watch-dog in the yard-a dismal, lugubrious howl. Other dogs in the distant village caught up the sound, and bayed in a dirge-like chorus; and the howling went on louder and louder. Again strange words were whispered to me, and I repeated them in mechanical submission; and when they, too, were ended, I felt the ground tremble beneath me, and as my eyes looked straight forward down the vista, that, stretching from the casement, was bounded by the solitary mausoleum, vague formless shadows seemed to pass across the moonlight-below, along the sward-above, in the air; and then suddenly a terror, not before conceived,

came upon me.

And a third time words were whispered; but though I knew no more of their meaning than I did of those that had preceded them, I felt a re pugnance to utter them aloud. Mutely I turned towards the Sein-Laca,, and the expression of its face was menacing and terrible; my will became yet more compelled to the control imposed upon

CHAPTER LII.

A HEAVY sleep came over me at daybreak, but I did not undress nor go to bed. The sun was high in the heavens when, on waking, I saw the servant, who had attended me, bustling about the room.

"I beg your pardon, sir, I am afraid I disturbed you; but I have been three times to see if you were not coming down, and found you so soundly asleep I did not like to wake you. Mr. Strahan has finished breakfast, and gone out riding; Mr. Margrave has left-left before six | o'clock."

"Ah, he said he was going early."

"Yes, sir; and he seemed so cross when he went. I could never have supposed so pleasant a gentleman could put himself into such a passion!"

"What was the matter ?"

"Why, his walking-stick could not be found; it was not in the hall. He said he had left it in the study; we could not find it there. At last he found it himself in the old summer-house, and said-I beg pardon, he said-'he was sure you had taken it there: that some one, at all events, had been meddling with it. However, I am very glad it was found, since he seems to set such store on it."

"Did Mr. Margrave go himself into the summer-house to look for it?"

"Yes, sir; no one else would have thought of such a place; no one likes to go there even in the day-time."

"Why ?"

'Why, sir, they say it is haunted since poor horseback. He received my apologies for not waitSir Philip's death; and, indeed, there are strange ing his return to bid him farewell, without obsernoises in every part of the house. I am afraid vation, and, dismounting, led his horse and you had a bad night, sir," continued the servant, walked beside me on my road. I saw that there with evident curiosity glancing towards the bed, was something on his mind; at last he said, which I had not pressed, and towards the even-looking down, ing-dress, which, while he spoke, I was rapidly changing for that which I habitually wore in the morning. "I hope you did not feel yourself ill ?"

"No; but it seems I fell asleep in my chair." "Did you hear, sir, how the dogs howled about two o'clock in the morning? They woke me. Very frightful!"

"The moon was at her full. the moon."

Dogs will bay

"Did you hear the dogs howl last night ?"
"Yes! the full moon!"

"You were awake, then, at the time. Did you hear any other sound? Did you see anything?"

What should I hear or see?"

Strahan was silent for some moments; then he said, with great seriousness,

E

"I could not sleep when I went to bed last night; I felt feverish and restless. Somehow or I felt relieved to think that I should not find other, Margrave got into my head, mixed up, in Strahan in the breakfast-room, and hastening some strange way, with Sir Philip Derval. I through the ceremony of a meal which I scarcely heard the dogs howl, and at the same time, or touched, I went out into the park unobserved, rather a few minutes later, I felt the whole house and creeping round the copses and into the tremble, as a frail corner-house in London seems neglected garden, made my way to the pa- to tremble at night when a carriage is driven vilion. I mounted the stairs-I looked on the past it. The howling had then ceased, and floor of the upper room; yes, there, still was the ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I felt a black figure of the pentacle-the circle. So, then, vague superstitious alarm; I got up, and went to it was not a dream! Till then I had doubted. Or my window, which was unclosed (it is my habit might it not still be so far a dream, that I had to sleep with my windows open)-the moon was walked in my sleep, and, with an imagination very bright-and I saw, I declare I saw, along preoccupied by my conversations with Margrave the green alley that leads from the old part of || -by the hieroglyphics on the staff I had handled, the house to the mausoleum-No, I will not by the very figure associated with superstitious say what I saw or believed I saw-you would practices which I had copied from some weird ridicule me, and justly. But, whatever it might book at his request, by all the strange impres-be, on the earth without or in the fancy within sions previously stamped on my mind-might I not, in truth, have carried thither in sleep the staff, described the circle, and all the rest been but visionary delusion? Surely-surely, so common sense and so Julius Faber would interpret the riddles that perplexed me. Be that as it may, my first thought was to efface the marks on the floor. I found this easier than I had ventured to hope. I rubbed the circle and the pentacle away from the boards with the sole of my foot, leaving but an undistinguishable smudge behind. I know not why, but I felt the more nervously anxious to remove all such evidences of my nocturnal visit to that room, because Margrave had so openly gone thither to "Not return till the old house is rased to the seek for the staff, and had so rudely named me to ground. That is my resolve. You approve? the servant as having meddled with it. Might heThat's well. All success to you, Fenwick. I not awake some suspicion against me? Sus. will canter back, and get my portmanteau ready picion, what of? I knew not, but I feared! and the carriage out in time for the five o'clock train."

The healthful air of day gradually nerved my spirits and relieved my thoughts. But the place had become hateful to me. I resolved not to wait for Strahan's return, but to walk back to L, and leave a message for my host. It was sufficient excuse that I could not longer absent myself from my patients; accordingly, I gave directions to have the few things which I had brought with me sent to my house by any servant who might be going to L, and was soon pleased to find myself outside the park gates and on the high road.

I had not gone a mile before I met Strahan on

my brain, I was so terrified, that I rushed back to my bed, and buried my face in my pillow. I would have come to you; but I did not dare to stir. I have been riding hard all the morning in order to recover my nerves. But I dread sleeping again under that roof, and now that you and Margrave leave me, I shall go this very day to London. I hope all that I have told you is no bad sign of any coming disease; blood to the head, eh?"

No; but imagination overstrained can produce wondrous effects. You do right to change the scene. Go to London at once, amuse yourself, and

دو

So, then, he, too, had seen-what? I did not dare and I did not desire to ask him. But he, at least, was not walking in his sleep! Did we both dream, or neither?

CHAPTER LIII.

THERE is an instance of the absorbing tyranny of every-day life which must have struck all such of my readers as have ever experienced one of those portents which are so at variance with every-day life, that the ordinary epithet bestowed on them is "supernatural."

invariably the mind refuses to linger over and recal it. No man freed an hour before from a raging tooth-ache, the rack of a neuralgia, seats himself in his arm-chair to recollect and ponder upon the anguish he has undergone. It is the same with certain afflictions of the mind-not with those that strike on our affections, or blast our fortunes, overshadowing our whole future with a sense of loss-but where a trouble or calamity has been an accident, an episode in our wonted life, where it affects ourselves alone, where it is attended with a sense of shame and humiliation, where the pain of recalling it seems idle, and if indulged would almost madden us; agonies of that kind we do not brood over as we

And be my readers few or many, there will be no small proportion of them to whom, once, at least, in the course of their existence, a something strange and eirie has occurred-a something which perplexed and baffled rational conjecture, and struck on those chords which vibrate to superstition. It may have been only a dream unaccountably verified, an undefinable presentiment or forewarning; but up from such slighter and vaguer tokens of the realm of marvel-up to the portents of ghostly apparitions or haunted chambers, I believe that the greater number of persons arrived at middle age, however instructed the class, however civilised the land, however sceptical the period, to which they belong, have either in themselves experienced, or heard re-do over the death or falsehood of beloved friends, corded by intimate associates whose veracity they accept as indisputable in all ordinary transactions of life-phenomena which are not to be solved by the wit that mocks them, nor, perhaps, always and entirely, to the contentment of the reason or the philosophy that explains them away. Such phenomena, I say, are infinitely more numerous than would appear from the instances currently quoted and dismissed with a jest, for few of those who have witnessed them are disposed to own it, and they who only hear of them through others, however trustworthy, would not impugn their character for common sense by professing a belief to which common sense is a merciless persecutor. But he who reads my assertion in the quiet of his own room will, perhaps, pause, ransack his memory, and find there in some dark corner which he excludes from "the babbling and remorseless day" a pale recollection that proves the assertion

not untrue.

or the train of events by which we are reduced from wealth to penury. No one, for instance, who has escaped from a shipwreck, from the brink of a precipice, from the jaws of a tiger, spends his days and nights in reviving his terrors past, re-imagining dangers not to occur again, or, if they do occur, from which the experience undergone can suggest no additional safeguards. The current of our life, indeed, like that of the rivers, is most rapid in the midmost channel, where all streams are alike, comparatively slow in the depth and along the shores in which each life, as each river, has a character peculiar to itself. And hence, those who would sail with the tide of the world, as those who sail with the tide of a river, hasten to take the middle of the stream, as those who sail against the tide are found clinging to the shore. I returned to my habitual duties and avocations with renewed energy; I did not suffer my thoughts to dwell And it is, I say, an instance of the absorbing on the dreary wonders that had haunted me, tyranny of every-day life that whenever some from the evening I first met Sir Philip Derval such startling incident disturbs its regular tenor to the morning in which I had quitted the of thought and occupation, that same every-day house of his heir; whether realities or hallife hastens to bury in its sands the object which lucinations, no guess of mine could unravel has troubled its surface; the more unaccount-such marvels, and no prudence of mine guard able, the more prodigious has been the pheno-me against their repetition. But I had no fear menon which has scared and astounded us; the that they would be repeated, any more than the more, with involuntary effort, the mind seeks to rid itself of an enigma which might disease the reason that tries to solve it. We go about our mundane business with renewed avidity; we feel the necessity of proving to ourselves that we are still sober practical men, and refuse to be unfitted for the world which we know, by unsolicited visitations from worlds into which every glimpse is soon lost amid shadows. But that which did accompany and haunt me And it amazes us to think how soon such in- through all my occupations and pursuits, was the cidents, though not actually forgotten, though melancholy remembrance of the love I had lost they can be recalled-and recalled too vividly in Lilian. I heard from Mrs. Ashleigh, who for health-at our will, are, nevertheless, thrust, still frequently visited me, that her daughter as it were, out of the mind's sight, as we cast seemed much in the same quiet state of mindinto lumber-rooms the crutches and splints perfectly reconciled to our separation-seldom that remind us of a broken limb which has re- mentioning my name-if mentioning it, with covered its strength and tone. It is a felicitous indifference; the only thing remarkable in her peculiarity in our organisation, which all mem-state was her aversion to all society, and a kind bers of my profession will have noticed, how of lethargy that would come over her, often in soon, when a bodily pain is once past, it becomes the daytime. She would suddenly fall into sleep, erased from the recollection, how soon and how and so remain for hours, but a sleep that seemed

man who has gone through shipwreck, or the hairbreadth escape from a fall down a glacier, fears again to be found in a similar peril. Margrave had departed, whither I knew not, and, with his departure, ceased all sense of his influence. A certain calm within me, a tranquillising feeling of relief, seemed to me like a pledge of permanent delivery.