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"A handsome boy," at length remarked Mr. | led out to sudden execution by an enormous Jack Simpson. "It's a pity that he has n't different Ketch with red hair and a frightful squint, and colored hair!"

"A pity!" exclaimed the lady: "I think it beautiful! And," added she, looking the astonished man somewhat sternly in the face, "I should be well pleased if all our children had hair of the same color!"

This was a climax! Simpson leaped to his feet as if impelled by the shock of a galvanic battery. "Our children! Well, after that. But I must be dreaming," thought the fastidious ironmonger, as he wiped the perspiration from his teeming forehead; "laboring under some horrid enchantment."

that his friend Puckford was the chaplain reading the funeral service. Gradually, however, his brain cleared, and he grew cooler and more collected. Upon reflection, his position did not appear so very desperate. As to Mrs. Frazer, all that was of course over, past praying for, and he must dismiss it from his mind as speedily as possible. The lady beside him, who he could see was almost as discomposed as himself, was, he had no doubt, a sensible person-her letter was sufficient evidence of that; and when he had explained the unfortunate mistake that had occurred, which he would by and by take a quiet opportunity Dreaming indeed, and to be swiftly and rudely of doing, would no doubt release him from an enawakened. The door opened, and a gentleman gagement he had never intended to contract. He entered, whom Mrs. Frazer immediately intro- would, moreover-Simpson was anything but a duced with " Mr. Simpson, my husband, Mr. churlish or ungenerous man-bestow upon her a Frazer!" marriage-portion of, say, four or five hundred The blow was terrific! Simpson staggered pounds, which would doubtless enable her to marry back as if he had been shot. He glared alter-respectably, and thus console her for her present nately at the husband and wife for a few seconds; disappointment. Thus philosophizing and reasonthen, pale as his shirt-collar, tottered to a chair, ing, Mr. Simpson's spirits, considering the suddenand sinking into it, ejaculated with white lips, ness of the shock he had endured, rallied wonder"Oh !" fully, and he was enabled to address a few words

"What is the matter, sir? you look ill!" said of course to Miss Fortescue in almost a cheerful Mr. Frazer.

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The bewildered man made no reply. His brain was whirling. Who, on earth, then had he been courting?"

A loud knock at the street door somewhat aroused him. My sister, I daresay," exclaimed

Mrs. Frazer.

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voice and manner.

superior order, had been well cultivated, and her conversation was at once refined, sparkling, and sensible. Mr. Simpson was surprised, pleased, almost charmed. Music was proposed, and she sang several songs admirably. Mr. Simpson de

The lady's answer was uttered in the gentlest, sweetest tones he had ever listened to; and Mr. Simpson was a connoisseur in voices. The conversation continued; became general; and the dinner, commenced so inauspiciously, passed off, considering all things, remarkably well. After dinner, Miss Fortescue-her friends, who greatly Her sister! Possibly his Mary might be the esteemed her, generously drawing forth her powers brunette; and yet- There were but three fe--appeared to great advantage. Her mind, of a males present on that fatal evening, besides Mrs. Puckford, that he distinctly remembered; and perhaps Vain hope the door opened, and the brunette and two gentlemen entered- -" Mr. and Mrs. Holland, and Mr. Alfred Gray." All illusion was now over. He, Robert Simp-termined to postpone his explanation-necessarily son, wealthy tradesman, respected fishmonger, and common councilman, was the betrothed husband of a red-haired damsel with a decided cast, with whom, moreover, he had never exchanged a sentence! His first impulse, as the certainty of his miserable fate flashed upon him, was to strangle Alfred Gray out of hand as the author of his destruction, when fortunately another rap-tap arrested his fell intent.

an unpleasant one-till the next day, when he would do it by letter. The party separated about nine o'clock; long before which hour it had several times glanced across the ironmonger's mind, that a dislike of any particular colored hair was, after all, a very absurd prejudice; as to the cast, that, he was satisfied, was so slight as scarcely to deserve the name. It had been arranged that they should all dine with the Frazers the day after the

"Miss Fortescue at last!" cried Mrs. Frazer, next; and as Mr. Simpson handed Mary Fortescue as if announcing glad tidings.

“Oh !” ejaculated the accepted suitor, dropping nervelessly back into the seat from which he had just risen-" Oh !”

into the cab, in which Mrs. and Mr. Frazer were already seated, she whispered, "Oblige me by coming on Sunday half an hour before the time appointed I have something of importance to say to you.' Mr. Simpson bowed, and-how could he do less?-raised the lady's hand to his lips. The carriage drove off, and the worthy man was left in the most perplexing state of dubiety and

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He was seized with a sort of vertigo; and what occurred, or how he behaved for a considerable interval, he never distinctly remembered. He was, however, soon seated at table by the side of his affianced bride, Mr. Puckford saying grace. This irresolution imaginable. He began to think he was the actual state of affairs; but poor Simpson's impression at the moment was, that he had been

had gone too far to recede with honor; and, what was very extraordinary, he felt scarcely sorry for

it! At all events, he would not act rashly; Sun-erous offer, contemplated marriage-but she was day was not far off: he would defer his expla- even now fully resolved never to do so unlessnation till then. unless"- Mary Fortescue paused in her narrative, and her timid, inquiring glance rested anxiously upon the varying countenance of her auditor. Mr. Simpson was not made of adamant, nor of iron, though he traded in the article; and no wonder, therefore, that the graceful manner, the modest, pleading earnestness, the gentle tones, the filial piety of his betrothed, should have vanquished, subdued him. Her features, plain as they undoubtedly were, irradiated by the lustre of a beautiful soul, kindled into absolute beauty! At all events Mr. Simpson must have thought so, or he would not have caught the joyfully-weeping maiden in his arms and exclaimed, in answer to her agitated appeal, "Unless your home may be theirs also?" Be it so: I have, thank God, enough and to spare for all." Thus was oddly brought about, and finally de

Mr. Simpson, punctual to his engagement, found Miss Fortescue awaiting him alone. He felt on this occasion none of the violent emotions he had experienced on the previous Friday. His heart, instead of knocking and thumping like a caged wild thing, beat tranquilly in his bosom; yet it was not without a calmly-pleasurable emotion that he met the confiding, grateful smile which beamed on his entrance over the lady's features. Seating himself beside her, he, with respectful gentleness, requested her to proceed with the matter she wished to communicate. She blushingly complied, and speedily beguiled him, if not of his tears, which I am not quite sure about, of something, under the circumstances, far more valuable. "Her family, not many years before in apparently affluent circumstances, had been, by reverses in trade, sud-termined on, one of the happiest marriages, if Mr. denly cast down into extreme poverty. The only Simpson himself is to be believed—and he ought surviving members of it, her mother and youngest to know-that holy church has ever blessed. sister, had been long principally dependent on her Should he attain, of which there is every reasonexertions for support. The assistance she had able prospect, the dignity of lord mayor, he will, fortunately been able to render had hitherto sufficed I am quite sure, attribute that, as he now does all them; but of course, if she married, that source fortunate events, to his supreme good-luck in havof income must fail; and she never would marrying unwittingly fallen in love with another man's -indeed she had never, till surprised by his gen

HUMBOLDT'S BIRTHDAY. ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT completed his eightieth year on Friday the 14th instant, and the announcement of his continued health and unabated faculties is hailed with delight in every land. Few spectacles can be more cheering to the sight than the aged philosopher, wise, happy, and venerated. Humboldt is a living triumph over impossibilities, a reconciler of the irreconcilable.

After wandering about the globe, not in the hurried career of the tourist, but in the patient scrutiny of the naturalist and the geologist-after twenty years spent in literary labors, at Paris, that would have blinded stronger men, building up books upon an enormous scale-he returns to find rest in a court; and yet again from that ungenial sphere he pours forth his philosophy in language unstinted and untarnished.

Two truths often seem opposed to each other, or separately incredible, till they are brought together; it has been Humboldt's function to bring truths together, and expound their relations in time and space, and thus to rebuke many a needless conflict. From him the despot and the revolutionary, the bigot and the sceptic, may learn the complement to laws of which they see only a part, and may know that what they are fighting for, to bloodshed, is decreed, all in its good time.

wife!

erable tree typifying such liberty as the French could plant in 1848 and Lamartine "immortalize;" but beyond, borne on the wings of time, whose stream cannot be turned back, is the liberty which despots cannot hinder and revolutionists cannot snatch. Sitting in the narrow circle of his king's court, Humboldt expounds the laws of the Kosmos, and proclaims the future consummation of human science in the free government of man.

If ever there was a typical man, it is he who still lives with us; whose new gifts are still awaited with expectant gratitude. The universe exists, boundless and eternal; and he has looked upon it-it has been his, mortal thing creeping upon this earth of ours, to look forth upon the universe in time and space, and to open for his kind that vast and wondrous vision, in all its beauty-not only to their knowledge, but to their affections. It has been his to show that the political fate of man rests, as to its essential progress, on the changeless laws of that universe; his to show that the wisdom of the seer and the station of the court minister may be united with the unpretending good-nature, the practical tolerant virtue, of the honest and kindly man. own personal success illustrates his philosophy; he has succeeded in small things without forfeiting success in great; he has played his part in daily life without forgetting eternity; he has served kings, and borne consolation to the humblest and most oppressed, by proclaiming the laws that govern kings, and discovering in the order of the Kosmos the charter of mankind.-Speciator, 22

The other day, one of last year's "trees of liberty" was blown down in the Place de la Bastile-a mournful omen to the soldier of liberty! Humboldt, looking across long ages, sees the laws that govern that blustering wind-he sees the Bastile swept away, the republic, the restoration, Sept. the dynasty of the bourgeoise, and now this mis

His

From the Britannia.
RUSSIAN AND TURKISH TREATIES.

As the relations of Russia with Turkey are again likely to be brought prominently before the European eye, we give a sketch of their history for the last hundred years.

The wars between Russia and the Porte had existed from the conquest of Western Asia by the Ottoman monarchs, but generally without results; the war was an inroad, and the peace was a truce. The rise of Russia under Peter the Great made those wars more inveterate, but with effects equally transitory. It was only in the reign of Catherine II., a woman of masculine mind and more than Russian ambition, that those barbaric conflicts assumed the form of a determination to conquer, and that every war was followed by a permanent accession to the dominions of Russia.

of Othman. He now once more abolished the Nizam Jedid.

In 1812 the pressure of Russian affairs by the French invasion produced a peace, by which, however, Turkey lost Bessarabia and the principal mouth of the Danube.

The Greek revolt next occupied the troops of Turkey until the struggle was closed by the ruin of the Turkish fleet at Navarino, in 1827, an act of the most obvious impolicy on the part of the existing cabinets of Europe, and especially of the whig cabinet.

The old quarrel between Russia and Turkey relative to their share of influence in Moldavia and Wallachia had been pacified by the treaty of Akerman in 1826. But war recommenced in 1828. In the following year Diebitsch crossed the Balkan and reached Adrianople, while Paskiewitch invaded Asia Minor. The imminent peril of the sultan now brought the ambassadors of England and the continental powers to his protection. But by the peace of Adrianople, in 1829, Mahmoud acknowledged the independence of Greece, and paid five millions of ducats for the expenses of the Russian army.

The peace of Kuchuk-Kaimarji, in 1774, the result of a succession of victories won by the celebrated names of Romanzoff, Suwaroff, and Kamenski, gave Russia almost the entire of the Turkish fortresses to the north of the Danube, the co-protectorship of Moldavia and Wallachia, and the still more important right of protectorship over all The insurrection in Egypt under Mehemet Ali the Greek churches in the Turkish dominions. again mutilated the dominions of the sultan, who The Crimea also was declared independent of marched an army against the pasha, but was deTurkey, which was equivalent to its future pos-feated in 1831. The Egyptian troops under Ibrasession by Russia. This peace was regarded by European statesmen as laying Turkey finally at the feet of Russia. It was, unquestionably, a severe blow. But history is full of the follies of political prophecy.

Russia suddenly seized on the Crimea in 1787, and war again began. The Turks fought stubbornly, but, through inferiority of means, lost every battle; until the war was concluded by the peace of Jassy in 1792. The Crimea was surrendered to Russia, and the Dneister was made the frontier.

At this period Selim III. was sultan. He was a man of intelligence and vigor, and, from his melancholy proofs of the superiority of European discipline, he took advantage of the interval of peace to reform the Turkish armies. He now established a new force, named the Nizam Jedid. This establishment threatened the power of the Janizaries, who rose in insurrection and threw the sultan into a dungeon.

him Pasha reached within 130 miles of Constantinople, when they were stopped by the Russian ambassador, who had ordered a Russian army to march for the defence of the capital. The recompense for this service was the treaty of Hunkiar Skelessi, by which the passage of the Dardanelles was in future to be closed to all the enemies of Russia.

In 1839 war broke out again with Mehemet Ali, who defeated the Turkish army, and drove it into the defiles of Mount Taurus. In this period of national calamity Mahmoud died, in 1840, a man of great natural ability and general good conduct, but rash in his reforms, and exposing his country to hazards, by enfeebling the attachment of his people to their old institutions before he had firmly established new.

England now interfered, and Abdel Mejid, the present sultan, was delivered from the Egyptian army by the English squadron on the coast of Syria. Tyre, Sidon, and Acre were gallantly Mustapha IV., the cousin of Selim, began his captured; and Ibrahim Pasha was driven out of reign in 1807. Bairactar, a pasha and friend of Syria with the loss, by climate, the sword, and the deposed sultan, marched at the head of an want of provisions, of nearly 50,000 men. Syria army into Constantinople to restore him. Mus- was thus restored; but a treaty confirmed the tapha, to render this impossible, put him to death, Pasha of Egypt in his government, which was but was himself deposed, and Mahmoud II., his made hereditary on the condition of acknowledgbrother, placed on the throne in 1808, by the aiding the sultan's supremacy and paying an annual of Bairactar. The Nizam Jedid was now restored. tribute. But the Janizaries revolted again, stormed the seraglio, and drove Bairactar, then grand vizier, into a tower, which he defended with his characteristic bravery, until he blew himself up, rather than fall into the hands of his enemies. Mahmoud against northern encroachment. was spared, only as being the sole adult descendant from recent obligations, remain only a spectator.

The question of peace and war with Russia will naturally bring into view, and possibly into action, the political interests connected, in every European country, with the security of the great barrier Austria may,

But England and France, and, by a scarcely in- made for themselves in Punch a chosen organ. ferior necessity, Prussia and Western Germany, In calculating the probable future of the nation, it must take a part in sustaining the Turkish cause were better to leave out the Court of Arches and as the fortress of the south and west. the chancellor, if not the queen herself, than to leave out Punch.

But, even if Turkey rested on the Mahometan powers alone, her conquest might demand both The extract we give below has been cut by us remarkable force and remarkable good fortune on at second hand from the columns of some mislaid the part of her antagonist. With a warlike pop- exchange paper. Its dense and powerful words ulation of perhaps twelve millions; with the will be read with a thrill by all who read them. acknowledged right to call on Mahometanism It has something in it of the awfulness of the throughout all Western Asia and the Mediter- thunder-cloud. It will demonstrate of itself that ranean for her defence; with the armies and fleet Punch is sometimes other than a joker. Its closof Egypt at her direct command; and with the general voice of Europe, in this instance, on her side, she could not be broken down in a day.

A battery at the northern end of the Bosphorus might shut up the Russian fleet in the Euxine, while a proclamation would find the whole body of those gallant and able leaders who have fought so perseveringly at the head of the Hungarian peasants crowding to take the conduct of the Turkish armies. Even Russia herself might not be beyond the reach of invasion. A million sterling sent among the Tartar tribes might shake her Asiatic supremacy; a bombardment of Cronstadt might tell her that even St. Petersburg was not safe. Poland might receive her own heroic exiles with sudden exultation; and a year of war might subvert the empire of centuries.

England deeply deprecates this scene of confusion; for peace is not merely her policy, but her principle. But necessity is the first of all laws, and the protection of Constantinople is now the first necessity of the civilized world.

PUNCH.

Fro.n the Independent.

THEY greatly misconceive of the London Punch who suppose it a mere harmless collection of jokes and bon mots, of funny puns and funnier caricatures. There is no review or magazine in the world that has a more definite system of thought than Punch has, or that lives and acts for a more definite purpose; whose forces all work towards an individual end more consentaneously. It presses towards this with wonderful persistence of resolution, and oftentimes with wonderful vividness and energy of language. Whatever else there may be in Punch there is no hesitation, no "reserve," no masking of batteries, no frittering away of differences, no failing of an object for want of the fearless use at the right time of a hard word. Its logic may sometimes be covered over with wit, until it is concealed; but the sharp edge lies close beneath the wreathing flowers. Its parries and thrusts may seem to the uninitiated mere scenic displays, the flashings of bloodless and unfleshed swords; but every one of them is a thrust for reform; a blow at abuses, imagined or real; a keen arrow from a full quiver, whistling into the heart of some veteran wrong. It should be distinctly understood that the choicest wits, the most pointed writers and thinkers of the reform party in England, have

ing reference is to the capture of a fugitive from justice, who had murdered his friend and eluded the officers, and was supposed to be on his passage across the seas when the steam-frigate was sent to stay him.

THE BERMONDSEY HORROR.

God's lightning pursuing murder is become a true and active thing. What was a figure of speech is now a working minister. We have brought devastation into servitude; we have made a bond slave of destruction. Murder has hardly turned from its abomination-scarcely set forth lightning stays the homicide. Marvellous is the upon its shuddering flight-when the avenging poetry of our daily life! We out-act the dreams of story books. The Arabian tales are flat, crude gossip, against the written activities of our social state. Murder, with its black heart beating thick, its brain blood-gorged, reads the history of its damnation. Hundreds of miles away from its ghastly work, murder, in the stupidity of deepest guilt-for the greater the crime the greater the folly, that ever as a shadow accompanies and betrays it-murder, with forced belief in its impunity, reads its own doings chronicled and commented upon in the newspaper sheet; and—so far from the victim's grave, the retreat so cunningly assured, the hiding place so wisely chosen-murder draws freer breath, and holds itself secure !tric pulse-thrills in the wires, and in a moment And the while, the inexorable lightning-the elecidiot murder stammers and grows white in the face of justice. In the marvellousness that sublimates the mind of man, our electric tales make poor work of the Arabian. Solomon's genii may sleep in their brazen kettles. They are, in truth, the veriest smoke compared with the genii of the wires. In the contemplation of this last atrocity there is matter for abomination is committed, and so wonderful are sad congratulation, for mournful thanksgiving. An the means of apprehension-so sure and so astounding in their operation-that guilt has but a few gasps of fancied freedom, and guilt is captive. Considering the certainty-the fate that travels the wires -we take hope that from the self-conviction of dis covery-from the disheartening belief that there is crime, the miserable wretch tempted to evil will no escape, no evasion from the consequence of turn in his mind the many odds, and refrain upon the lowest principle-that of calculation. The murderer in mind, who would not be stayed in his guilt by the thought of after lightning, may pause, awed by the thought of lightning ready-the unand awful work begun, when the Fire Queen, with erring telegraph. It was a solemn business, a stern her black flag of smoke, stood out from Portsmouth, bound to cross the Atlantic, if need were to stay and overhaul the Victoria, freighted with

the curse of murder. There is a fine, stern lesson in this, a noble sermon preached extempore to embryo crime. Justice at the home office makes the

Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,

Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now-now to sit, or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!

wires speak, saying to a certain admiral-“Send In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, a fast-sailing ship to sea, that retribution may be In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire, done to blood-shedders." There is something solemn, awful, in the warning uttered in this. It says to crime-Though the sea encompass you, though you have balked pursuit, and justice, like a hound at fault, beats and gropes confounded-though you have begun to count the profits of blood, and how to make the most of them, how in your new country to live a life of impunity and ease-nevertheless, give up the dream; dismiss the vision, and awake to horrid truth. There, in the horizon, miles away, is a thin dark vapor, the man at the mast has seen and reported it, and with every ten minutes it becomes more distinct; and now the distant gun is heard across the water, booming command; the ship's yards swing round-she lies to; and how rapid the ceremony-how brief the time! Murder, aghast and manacled, is made again to turn its face towards the land it has outraged with the sacrifice of blood.

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How they clang, and clash, and roar !
What a horror they outpour

On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear, it fully knows,
By the twanging
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling

And the wrangling,

How the danger sinks and swells, [bellsBy the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the Of the bells

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells

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Is a groan.

And the people-ah, the people,
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,

And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling

On the human heart a stone-
They are neither man nor woman-
They are neither brute nor human—
They are Ghouls;

And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls

A pæan from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells

With the pean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the pæans of the bells-
Of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the throbbing of the bells
Of the bells, bells, bells—
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,

To the rolling of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells;
To the tolling of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-

To the moaning and the groaning of the belle

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