'One morning my master called me to him, and without expressing his reasons, bade me leave his palace and presence for ever. Whether from a consciousness of meriting such dishonorable dismission, or indignation, felt for a false accusation, I will not say; but I left him without proffering a word in my defence. My companions in service would have thrown themselves at his feet to ask my forgiveness, but the determination visible on his brow excited in their minds feelings of hopelessness. I never saw him but once more.

'After wandering some days in the city through shame and consciousness of having caused my dismissal, I at length turned my steps to the door of my now aged parents, and was welcomed when my entrance could only bring sorrow. Through one of my master's female slaves, they had received information of my attachment for his Circassian slave wife, and how tenderly it had been returned. Knowing the character of my master, and how lasting were his enmities, they preferred interceding for my admittance into the service of some other Effendi, than for a return to his. Some weeks after my dismissal, I was received into the household of the D. A., who had often spoken kindly to me when I had been in attendance on my former master. A few days only elapsed when he received a message from the Z. E., requesting my dismissal, and representing me as unworthy of his protection.

'Unwilling to remain in my aged father's house, a tax upon his limited means, I sought employment in different bureaux of the government, in the several esnaffs or guilds of the capital, but was pursued by his relentless and merciless revenge. An indiscreet sympathy for the unhappiness of his young wife, more than a desire to wean her affections from their legal object, was my only crime. If I loved her, it was involuntary; if my affection was returned by her, it was not sought for by me, but was due to a source from which flows all that is human in the heart, and is akin to divine.

With a heart oppressed with sorrow, more for her fate than my own, I persevered in search of a means of support. I engaged as an assistant rower to one of the Caikjis of the Bosphorus, and thought that in this obscure calling I would be concealed from my late master's hatred. But this was a vain hope; my employer was ordered to dismiss me by the office from which he received a permit for his boat.

'I procured a tabla, or waiter of wood, such as used by the itinerant Ekmekjis of the capital, and retailed bread in the streets; but as I finally had to apply for a permit to follow this trade, it was also eventually denied to me.

'In the midst of my poverty and grief, I learned by accident of the sudden decease of the poor girl on whose account I was so cruelly persecuted, and was told that her master and husband had strangled her with his own hands, in the false belief that she had been unfaithful to him. Overcome with my own sorrow, this news served to increase the anguish of my heart, and reduce me to a state of desperation. Need I follow up my changes and his persecutions? need I excite your farther sympathy for my sufferings, or your abhorrence of his relentless punishment and revenge? For months I was a vagrant among my fellow-men; each time I chose a profession, however humble, or entered an employment, his influence drove me from it into misery.

'When no longer any hope existed in my mind of employment near any member of the government of the capital, my heart revolted against itself; all the moral reflections of my life, all my theories of propriety and virtue forsook me; and, forgetful even of the sorrow which the act would entail upon the home which I loved so well, in a moment of desperation I formed a plan which Iblis but too ably assisted me in executing. When my master entered the mosque of Sultan Ahmet, and knelt before the presiding Imaum, my dagger entered his heart! In a moment the heinousness of my crime deadened my every faculty, and even in my own breast I was a condemned assassin. Oh! Memory, thou art indelible and undying! Tears for the past, like the genii of the departed, obscure my vision, and prevent me continuing my task.

'ONE day later. I have broken my aged father's heart, and they tell me he cannot survive another day; perhaps even now his soul has entered eternal life. My mother bends with the blow; it is an attribute of her gentler sex to offer consolation to the wounded heart, whilst her own is bleeding. My sister, sweet Ayesha, has been to kiss the fettered hand of her yet beloved brother, and mingle her tears with his, though without being able to offer one consolation to his murderous breast.

'I HAVE learned my sentence. The Sultan has ordered my decapitation, and in a few hours more you will receive this imperfect sketch. My poor father is no more, and I am denied the satisfaction of being pressed once more in the arms of my heart-broken mother and sister! My home - my childhood's home-I can never enter again; from my window I gaze upon it for the last time. Oh! how magical is the effect of these two words upon my mind! They offer the severest pang of all my unhappiness.

'Yesterday, as they led me past its now ancient and crumbling threshold, in one moment flashed across my mind the remembrance of my ather, mother, sister, and departed brother, and a thousand associations, once endearing, but now teeming with anguish and misery! They -farewell!'

come

POOR OLD CHARLEY.

CLARA rushed into my room, her fair hair floating down her shoulders, her little feet in slippers, and her dressing-gown wrapped hastily round her little figure.

'What is it?' I asked, starting half conscious out of a heavy, summermorning sleep, with a dim fear that the baby might be ill or the house on fire.

'One of the horses is dead! it must be Charley! They brought him out of the stable just now, and he laid himself down and died.'

I tumbled up somehow and ran to the window. Of course my room commanded the stable-yard, but one horse-chestnut, of untimely luxuriance, had popped a big leafy bough just between my point of vision and the spot where the unfortunate deceased lay, so that I could barely discern two hoofs and a nose. With a speed that emulated my muchabhorred and shudderingly-remembered New-Haven toilettes, (in those dreary college-days when we had fifteen minutes to dress in, without light or fire, on a New-England winter-morning, the thermometer as low down as it could go,) I sprang into the nearest habiliments, precipitated myself down stairs, and appeared upon the scene. Yes, there he lay, poor old Charley, fearfully swollen, (it was inflammation of the lungs, so far as our veterinary knowledge enabled us to judge;) around his halfopen mouth were some dark stains on the grass, where Tom had been trying to bleed him: it was no use.

'He seemed all right last night, Sir,' said the groom: (that I knew myself, having seen him at seven.) This morning, when I took him out, he rolled right over, and choked, and swelled, and died in a minute, as you may say. And,' continued Tom, as he saw me regarding the body with a puzzled air, 'I sent Mike off for old Cæsar to come and bury him.'

I returned to the house, performed my matutinal ablutions, and went through the ceremony of breakfast, unsentimental as it may seem under the circumstances; then moved back to the stable-yard, and arrived there just as old Cæsar drove in.

Such an apparition I never saw before or since. Imagine a man very short and thick-set, any age you please on the grave side of seventy, but strong and active notwithstanding; a grizzly black face; grizzly white hair and whiskers; long, knotty, prehensile hands, and nails like claws; a hat that resembled a fragment of a very rusty and battered stove-pipe; and clothes they really knock the spots out of my poor pen, so far as doing them justice is concerned. Such variety of wretchedness! They were more like the mysteriously-united collections of rags one reads of in the sketches of Irish travellers, than any thing ever seen in an Anglo-Saxon community. That his cart might not have been painted at some remote era, I will not make bold to affirm; but if it ever had been overlaid with color, time, weather, and filth had long since rendered that color indistinguishable; a general hue of mud pervaded the establishment. The horse was worthy of the chariot and charioteer: a mere

peny in height, of a flea-bitten gray, turned rusty by exposure to the elements. Every rib and bony angle protruded through his frame-work of skin; every joint was swollen to twice its natural size. He had no more tail than a Manx cat; and his head was absolutely fixed between his fore-legs, as if the muscles which raise the neck had lost their power. That old horse alone, if turned out in a conspicuous position, would have been enough to infect a whole landscape with an air of desolation. As I looked at Cæsar and his fortunes, he seemed to me some evil spirit or gnome, come to snatch away the remains of my poor favorite; a Charon in a cart instead of a boat, who was to bear off Charley to some fearful region where dead horses go. At length I found voice, and demanded his intentions respecting the corpse.

'We used to throw 'em into the river,' said Cæsar, (it was extraordinary to hear him talk like an ordinary person; he ought to have spoken some unnatural jargon, I thought,) but the Corporation won't let us now, so we take 'em somewhere and bury 'em.'

It was said that Cæsar had a peculiar style of burying his subjects; that, in short, he was a Gothamite representative of the European knacker; boiled up the unhappy beasts; made glue and dogs' meat of them; sausages, probably, to some extent-perhaps ate them himself. My resolution was taken on the spot.

'Friend Cæsar,' said I, 'I would n't have Charley thrown overboard if the Corporation asked me to. You shall bury him, but you need not take him any farther than the orchard. We will put him there; he may improve the apple-trees; I understand they put dead cats into grapevine beds sometimes.'

'And sure,' put in Tom with a smile of approbation, he was a good horse in his time, and deserves dacent burial all the same as a Christian. (Christian, as above used, means merely human being, or one of the genus homo. It is not solely an Hibernicism, but an English provincialism also, and as such has attracted notice in the erudite pages of the discriminating Mr. Punch:

"THE ass he drinks water, and likewise the cow,
But none but a Christian takes beer, you'll allow.')

Tom was not uncommonly popular, notwithstanding his professional merits. Indeed, he was something of a misanthropist, and a good deal of a misogynist, (I wonder what he would say if he heard me calling him such awful names?) but for the noble animal he cherished a tender affection and consideration. Once, when Billy, the cart-horse, had an internal inflammation which I, in my pride of veterinary knowledge, took for the bots, and accordingly 'exhibited' some whiskey and red pepper, which very nearly did his business for him, Tom, at the first symptoms of peril, dashed off on a run to the farrier's, just three miles off, without waiting for orders; and when some of the servants afterwards bantered him on his earnestness, he only condescended to allude to his having been sent for the doctor in similar haste one night when the cook was ill, adding, by way of conclusive explanation, that a sick horse needed a doctor as much Christian.'

as any

We prepared to put Charley on the antediluvian cart. One is accus