in a gloomy vault beside a roaring fire, enveloped in tnick clouds of smoke, through which she could but dimly discern our figures. She fancied she had descended to the other world, and did her old friend Heinrich the compliment of supposing him to be the devil.

"I am in no humour, woman," said he, "to listen to your prate. Thank your master and mistress, there, for saving you from the wolves, for the devil a hand I'd have stirred towards it. However, as you are here, take this drop of brandy; and that may call back your brains again, if you ever had any in your paper skull."

He proffered her the draught of what he considered a panacea for all the ills of life, and which, to do him justice, he did not prescribe without having duly tried its qualities upon himself. While hastily running back for the tinderbox, he could not resist the temptation of carrying off a small basket of provisions, which happened to contain a brandy-bottle, and it was put into immediate requisition. Louise received the glass with unfeigned politeness in spite of the ungallant speech by which it was prefaced, and, cheered by the restorative, and delighted beyond measure with her escape, was beginning a long story of her own courage during the adventure, when she was suddenly interrupted by a piercing shriek from outside.

"Silence!" said Heinrich mournfully. "I thought so. It is the poor horses, sir. They stand a great deal, the dumb beasts, without making cry or moan; but when one comes to be torn to pieces by wolves, it is quite a different thing. Ay, there's the other. There's an end of them both, poor things! I feared they had not a run in them; and the blackguard brutes outside have a supper after all,and little good may it do them!"

"What!" said Louise with a fresh access of terror, wolves outside?"

66 are the

"Indeed they are," replied the chasseur, beginning to smoke "You will soon hear them, my dear, and perhaps see them too Don't be afraid, however, for a while," continued he, as he saw her clinging to her mistress; "all in good time-you are safe for a bit yet.'

It was not long, indeed, before we heard them; for, apparently, after they had eaten the horses, they surrounded the building on all sides. We could hear them scraping and pushing against the gates, and endeavouring to climb up the wall. The only exit for the smoke was by an aperture in the roof, through which at first it issued in volumes, and seemed to serve as a sort of guide to the wolves; at least we heard them clambering along the roof, as if in search of an entrance. After a short time, the smoke began to clear, and a fresh wind having arisen, it was so far blown away, that, looking up, we could plainly behold the blue sky studded with stars. You may believe me when I tell you that we had no taste for admiring heaven's clear azure, as we saw plainly that the aperture would enable the wolves to come down upon us. Our fears were not without foundation, for in a short time a wolf appeared and looked in. Louise fainted outright; but we lost no time in striking the intruder with our fowling-pieces, and the brute fell through the hole. We speedily knocked him on the head. Heinrich then thrust a large blazing spar through the aperture, and waved it about for a few minutes, uttering the cry used by the chasseurs when they hunt the wolf. We heard what appeared to us to be a general flight from

the roof.

66

They will not try that way again," said Heinrich, and he was right," during the darkness; for they are scared off by the fire, and they have sufficient instinct to know that one of their party is killed. We are then safe all night."

"I wish," said I, "it was morning."

It is a wise wish," said the old man ; "for why should you wish for morning? Our horses are killed; we have near twenty miles to get through snow to the next post-house; and how could Miss Adelaide, to say nothing of this helpless jade here, walk that distance before nightfall, when we should have the wolves on us again, if we had them not before? We must not expect another lodge like this. Nay, though this fire keeps away the wolves during the night, yet when daylight returns it will shine so much more dimly, that it will lose its effect, and daunt them no more."

"I thought," said I, "the wolves retired by day, and prowled only at night."

Ay, that's generally the case; but when there is so strong a pack as this, and they know that prey is at hand, and see nobody to scare them away, they sometimes take courage, and do not dread the daylight. Besides, it must have been hunger that drove them so early into these parts; and what brought them here will keep them from going back."

"We, then, have no chance of escape

Nay, I don't say that neither: while there's life, there's hope. Something may fright the brutes off; or some travellers, seeing our carriage, may stop and come to our assistance; or—

Or, in short," said I, “some angel in seven-leagued boots may descend from the sky. But no matter, dear Adelaide, we have at least another day's provision; and if the worst comes to the worst, as we lived together we shall die together. Strangers must close the eyes of our father, and strangers sit in his halls."

"It is the will of God, dear Herman," said Adelaide; "and God's will be done!"

We wrapped ourselves in our cloaks, and tried to sleep during that dismal night. Louise, who had shrieked and moaned away all her powers, did, I believe, at last fall into an exhausted slumber. Heinrich smoked, and sipped brandy, and alternately sung snatches of ballads or mumbled forth fragments of prayers, until he was as soundly asleep as if he was in bed. Adelaide and I were silent, ruminating on our condition, on the blighting of budding hopes and the darkening of brilliant prospects, on the melancholy fate for which we were reserved, and on our father waiting in the sickly suspense of hope deferred for his children, and perhaps sinking down to die chiding us for the unkindness of our delay. In reflections such as these passed the night, undisturbed by any sound but that of the ceaseless howling of the wolves outside, and the crackling of the faggots within.

All things must have an end, and so had this night. The tardy day broke at last, and Heinrich, rousing himself, flung numerous logs on the fire to excite as great a blaze as possible.

It will be all of no use," muttered the old chasseur as he plied this work; "they will come in spite of us: but one should never give up. In the mean time, let us take whatever we can get for breakfast; for, believe me, we shall want all the strength and spirits we can muster before long."

He prepared breakfast accordingly, as well as his materials allowed, and we partook of it with heavy hearts. The sun soon shone brightly through the aperture, and the logs began to "pale their ineffectual fire." We made ourselves ready for the expected attack; for, as Heinrich anticipated, the wolves had not withdrawn. A sufficient charge for the blunderbuss, which I committed to the chasseur, was scraped together from our united stores, and, except my pistols, one of which, to say the truth, I had reserved for myself, if dire necessity imposed on me that use of the other on which I dreaded to think, we had no other means of defence but the butt-ends of our fusils. Nothing beyond howling occurred until about three hours after sunrise, and what awful hours were they !—when suddenly our eyes, which were scarcely for a moment divested from the aperture, saw the object of their fear. Two or three wolves of the largest size had climbed up the roof, and were preparing to jump in. A discharge of the blunderbuss drove them away, and the body of one huge brute dropped dead into the lodge. Short respite!-the way was found, and the sun had deprived the firebrand of its power. Another and fiercer relay was soon on the roof, and we had no means of preventing their descent.

"Now," whispered Heinrich," may God help us! for there is no help for us in this world. Have you the pistol ready?"

I assented by a glance.

The shaggy wolves, howling incessantly, glared down upon us with ravenous eyes from the top, waiting the moment to spring. Below stood Heinrich and I, illuminated in the blaze of the faggots, our reversed fowling-pieces in our hands ready to strike. Louise lay at our feet prostrate, fainting on the ground; and Adelaide, sunk upon her knees, seemed, as the light from above streamed upon her uplifted countenance, emerging in radiant beauty from the smoke and glare, like an angel about to wing her way back to her native heaven from the darkness and the turmoil of a hapless and uncongenial world.

"And is this all?" said my cousin Lucy.

"I have not time," said I, "to write any more, for I am going out to shoot with your brother Dick."

"But I tell you this will never do you must put an end to it. How were they saved?"

"Are you sure they were saved?"

"Yes, quite sure; else how could you hear Herman tell the story? And he says, beside, that Adelaide told him how she overheard his whispering.

"Ah! I forgot that; but I must be off."

"Not before you finish the story."

"Finish it yourself."

"I can't-it's not my business."

"Why, you will never thrive in it, if you cannot devise some way of bringing in the lover to the rescue, with his train of huntsmen and wolf-dogs. He must have heard of the bursting down of a pack of wolves, and followed on their traces just at the right moment to save the party, to kill the marauders, to put fresh horses to the carriage, to whirl off to papa, and to come in time for his blessing. Then the rest is easy. Herman gets the estates,-Sobieski gets his wife ;they both get back to his mother's; there they get-very happy,— and I get rid of the story."

WAYLAC.

FICTIONS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

BONOMYE THE USURER.

HOLMCOLTRAM, or Holm's Cultram, was, as everybody may not know, a respectable ecclesiastical foundation in the north of Cumberland; and the chronicle from which the following tradition is taken was lately purchased in that county, where it had lain unnoticed by any antiquary, from Leland to the pundits of the "Collectanea Topographica." It is a small folio volume, written in double columns, by "various hands," as the phrase goes, commencing with the year 1160, and ending in 1455, and contains several curious drawings and illuminations, to say nothing of the remarkably funny stories to be found in it of Scotch barbarity and Cumbrian civilization, of portents in air and on earth, miracles, and such like matters. Moreover, it details at great length, and with singular minuteness, an event merely alluded to by other writers; viz. how Walter Biset, out of revenge, cruelly burnt Patrick, the son of Thomas de Galway, with his companions, in a barn at Haddington, where he slept the night after a tournament in which he had unhorsed the same Walter. It would have delighted Scott, who was a sensible man, but would drive the poor antiquaries of the present hour out of their senses; wherefore the possessor will, out of charity to them, keep the volume to himself.

The condition of the Jews during the reign of Henry the Third was, perhaps, worse than it is said to have been under his predecessors. They had no security whatever for their lives and property as far as the king was concerned. He tormented and robbed them as he pleased. On one occasion they were summoned to give him the third of all their goods, and on another the half; and Henry, who had borrowed large sums of his brother Richard Earl of Cornwall, at last assigned him all the Jews in England in payment, that is to say, he was to get his money out of them in any way he could; so that, as a writer of the time observes, "after the king had flayed them alive, he delivered them over to his brother to embowel."

In spite, however, of the daily persecution to which they were subjected, the Jews continued to be, with the exception of the Italian merchants, the sole capitalists of the kingdom. Misfortune only sharpened their wits and increased their energies; they became expert professors of the ingenious arts of clipping and shearing, forging and cheating, realised large sums in trade, and still larger profits by usury. All attempts to get rid of them only proved their existence to be an evil necessary to the state: and another historian, who had witnessed their enormities, and in his pious zeal desired nothing better than their total ruin and extirpation, exclaims, in a momentary despair, "this accursed race is like unto the beard of the chin ;-shave as close as you may to-day, there will be food for the razor to-mor

row."

Usury is a mighty sin, saith the Gospel, the law, and the Chronicle of Holmcoltram. According to the latter respectable authority, it was coeval with the first use of money, and mankind required no instructor in an art suggested by, and agreeable to, the natural cupidity of the

human race.

The chronicler expresses some wonder that the character of the

usurer is ever the same, and quotes the eloquent essay of St. Ambrose on the story Tobias for the portrait of a money-lender in the days of the venerable metropolitan of Milan, "which in every respect," says he, "is applicable to the ungodly and iniquitous of our own age." But at the close of the thirteenth century the generalization of ideas was unknown, and the only philosophy was that of the schools; or the worthy monk, instead of being surprised at this fact, would have remarked, with the pertness of a modern moralist, that the same passions produce the same effects in all ages and under all circumstances.

The object of the chronicler in relating the story we translate, is, to impress upon his readers that a terrible punishment invariably awaits the most successful wickedness; that although the cup of enjoyment may have already touched the lip, the hand of retribution is ready to dash it down,-to reclaim the iniquitous from the ways of evil, and to warn the thoughtless and profuse of the danger of entangling themselves in the toils of avarice and the Jews. The horror he expresses of the whole race of usurers was natural enough to one who lived in an age when their profits were enormous, and who viewed their practices as contrary to the precepts of the Gospel ; but, without running into political economy, it may be observed, that the high interest which money then bore was only equal to the immense profits reaped by the few mercantile adventurers of the time, and that the people in general, and much less the clergy, had not yet perceived that money is a mere article of merchandise, the value of which is always proportioned to the supply of it. Trite as this remark now is, it had not then entered the heads of our warlike legislators, who, suiting their acts to their own convenience, were unaware that, while at one time they refused to acknowledge the legality of usury, and at another endeavoured to limit the rate of it, they repressed the spirit of commercial speculation, the grand source of national wealth.

"The tale was related unto us," says the chronicler," in our refectory, by Sir Thomas de Multon of Egremont, who heard it while in London from persons of approved credit. The same Sir Thomas tarried with us on the eve of the Ascension in the first year of King Edward, and presented a cup for the Eucharist, made of a griffin's egg set in silver gilt, and curiously wrought with strange devices: he also confirmed unto us the four dozen dishes of ore out of the iron mine at Coupland, formerly given unto us by Lambert de Multon; and the holy father abbot gave unto him a little casket containing a toe-nail of St. Osith, which the said pious knight received with much veneration and joyfully carried away with him."

No one can doubt that the abbot had the best of the bargain, for he had long ceased to trust in relics for protection against the Scots thieves who harried his lands and burned his barns; but the iron would pay the armed men he was obliged to support, and who would have given no thanks for a cart-load of arm-bones, double teeth, and toe-nails, though they had once pertained to the greatest saints in the calendar.

Bonomye the Jew sat, towards the close of an autumn day in the year 1247, in the little back-room of his tenement in Milk-street, Cheapside. The house was a miserable wooden erection, patched up against a stone building appropriated to the officers of the royal wardrobe; and the room to which we refer was of the most uncomfortable descrip