TERRIFIC REGISTER.

strain at every stroke of a drum beaten on the occasion; but very soon the strokes gradually following closer, become so loud that these wretches are obliged to make great exertions of their lungs, and the most devout never finish the procession without spitting blood. The appearance of these monks is always gloomy and austere, and they are so persuaded of the sanctity of their practice, and so sure of pleasing heaven by their howlings, that they never look on other men but with the most profound contempt.

TRUE COURAGE.

When the American army was at Valley Forge, in the winter of 1777, a captain of the Virginian line refused a challenge sent him by a brother officer, alleging that his life was devoted to the service of his country, and that he did not think it a point of duty to risk it, to gratify the caprice of His antagonist gave him the character of a coward throughout the any man. whole army. Conscious of not having merited the aspersion, and discovering the injury he should sustain in the minds of those acquainted with him, he repaired one evening to a general meeting of the officers of that line. On his entrance he was avoided by the company, and the officer who had challenged him insolently ordered him to leave the room, a request which was loudly re-echoed from all parts. He refused, and asserted that he came there to vindicate his fame; and, after mentioning the reasons which induced him not to accept the challenge, he applied a large hand-grenade to the candle, and when the fusee had caught fire, threw it on the floor, saying, "Here gentlemen, this will quickly determine which of us all dare brave danger most." At first, they stared upon him for a moment in stupid astonishment, but their eyes soon fell upon the fusee of the grenade, which was fast burning down. Away scampered colonel, general, ensign, and all made Some fell, and others made a rush at the door simultaneously and confused. their way over the bodies of their comrades; some succeeded in getting out, but for an instant there was a general heap of flesh sprawling at the entrance of the apartment. Here was a colonel jostling with a subaltern, and there fat generals pressing lean lieutenants into the boards, and blustering majors and squeaking ensigns wrestling for exit; the size of the one and the feebleness of the other making their chance of departure pretty equal, until time, which does all things at last, cleared the room, and left the captain standing over the grenade with his arms folded, and his countenance expressing every kind of scorn and contempt for the train of scrambling red coats, as they toiled and bustled, and bored their way out at the door. After the explosion had taken place, some of them ventured to return, to take a peep at the mangled remains of their comrade, whom, however, to their great surprise, they found alive and uninjured. When they were all gone, the captain threw himself flat on the floor, as the only possible means of escape, and fortunately came off with a whole skin and a repaired reputation.

EXTRAORDINARY ESCAPE,

Some time since a chief in the village of the Lake of the Two Mountains, when going to bed, incautiously stuck a lighted candle against the wainscot of a garret where he and his household, amounting to eighteen

persons, had retired to rest. After some time, the tallow, by which the candle adhered, melting, it fell down, unfortunately, into a basket where there was a bag containing eighty-four pounds of gunpowder. The consequence was an immediate explosion, which blew off the roof, rent away the sides, and, in a word, reduced the house to splinters. By such an accident, one would suppose that many were killed and wounded; but it was quite the reverse; for not a single person, though all were blown out of an upper story to the distance of thirty yards, was injured materially.

The chief, whose name is Jacob Commandant, alighted on his feet in a canoe on the beach, through which his legs penetrated as far as the ankles, and held him fast, as it were, in the stocks. There he was found by some of the inhabitants, in inexpressible terror, imagining his situation to have proceeded from some malicious demon, whose exit and entrance had destroyed his house. A child who was sleeping with its head near the basket, suffered no other hurt than having its hair singed; and to crown all, a leathern bag, containing three pounds more of gunpowder, and lying in the same basket, was found near the house unexploded.

THE PROWESS AND FEROCITY OF SOME CRUSADING CHIEFS.

The women of Antioch lined the ramparts; they were vociferous in their exhortations to their husbands to fight and the Christians pretended to distinguish the sincere shouts of the Turkish wives from the artificial cries of the female Greeks and Armenians. But Baghasian had ill measured the strength and valour of the combatants; and he re-opened the gates for the preservation of the fugitives. The historians of the battle command us to believe, that if all the Christian soldiers had fought with the heroic valour of the Dukes of Lorraine and Normandy, (of whom stupendous feats are related,) few of the Turks would have escaped the edge of their faulchions. Godfrey cut one of his foes through the middle. The upper part of the body fell to the ground; but so firmly did the miscreant sit, that the lower members remained on the saddle, and the affrighted horse galloped into the town. Another wretched Moslem he clave asunder from the neck to the groin, by taking aim at his head with a sword; and the weapon not only performed its prescribed duty, but cut entirely through the saddle and the back bone of the horse. The sword of Robert of Normandy cleft the skull of a Saracen from the crown to the shoulders; and seeing one of the parts rolling over the ground, he charitably dismissed it to the powers of hell. Tancred enjoined his squire not to publish his deeds; but we must not let the modesty of the hero diminish our admiration of his courage. A son of Baghasian, twelve emirs, and two thousand men of common rank fell in this dreadful battle: and if night had not suspended the victorious heroes ferocity, Antioch would have fallen. The spoil reconciled the Christians to the disasters which they had experienced. On the earliest dawn of the ensuing day, the Turks quitted the city, collected the dead bodies of their friends. and buried them in the common place of interment without the walls. Familiarity with scenes of horror had extinguished every feeling of humanity; the Christians pulled the corpses from the sepulchre, and despoiled them of their dresses and ornaments. They severed the heads from the trunks; and fifteen hundred of them were exposed on pikes to the weeping Turks; and some were sent to the caliph of Egypt in proof of victory.

CAUTION OF A BROTHER'S SPIRIT.

Two wealthy merchants, travelling through the Taurine hills into France, upon the way they met with a man of more than human stature who thus said to them: "Salute my brother Lewis Sforza, and deliver him this letter from me." They were amazed, and asked who he was? He told them, that he was Galeacius Sforza, and immediately vanished out of sight. They made haste to Milan, and delivered the Duke's letter, wherein was thus written : "Oh Lewis! take heed to thyself, for the Venetians and French will unite to thy ruin, and deprive thy posterity of their estate. But if thou wilt deliver me three thousand guilders, I will endeavour that the spirits being reconciled, thy unhappy fate may be averted; and this I hope to perform, if thou shalt not refuse what I have requested: farewell." The subscription was: "The soul of Galeacius thy brother." This was laughed at by most as a fiction: but not long after, the duke was dispossessed of his government, and taken prisoner by Lewis XII., King of France. Thus far Bernard Arulnus, in the first section of the history of Milan, who also was an eye-witness of what had passed.

MERCY TOO LATE.

The case of William Townley, who was executed at Gloucester in April, 1811, was attended with circumstances particularly unfortunate. On the Friday night preceding his execution, a reprieve for him was put into the post office of Hereford, addressed by mistake to the Under Sheriff of Herefordshire, instead of Gloucestershire; the letter was delivered to Messrs. Bird and Woollaston, Under Sheriffs for the county of Hereford, about half past eleven o'clock on the following day. As soon as the importance of its contents were ascertained, an express was humanely sent off with the utmost celerity to Gloucester; but the messenger arrived too late; the unfortunate man had been turned off twenty minutes before, and was then suspended on the drop.

THE CATACOMBS OF KIEV.

Kiev is a large town, well built, populous, finely situated, and the chief place of the district of the same name. In the ninth century, we are told, that it contained four hundred churches, eight market-places, and an immense population." Of this splendor and magnificence," says a recent traveller, "no vestige remains." We notice that part of Kiev which is more especially indicative of decay, and we therefore quote the account of the catacombs, "Which so many thousands of infatuated people in the Russian empire, go on foot to visit every year. The preparation for descending into this repository of the dead was more solemn than the scene itself; for the monk accompanying us, related such incredible and ridiculous stories of the saints whose relics lay there, that we must have had a more than common share of credulity to have believed them. Every person going down into these vaults purchases a wax taper, and having lighted it, in solemn silence follows the monk, who, as he conducts the visitors through these vaulted sepulchres of the dead, opens the coffin lid, unfolds the shroud, and tells the name of the saint enshrined that repository: no part of the body is to be seen, of course the flesh is all wasted, and the bones only remain perfect, from having

been completely kept from the air; the face and hands are commonly covered with gold or silver tissue, or brocade; a cap is placed on the head, of the same material. Several cells are shewn, where they say monks, in a vow of penance, have had themselves walled up, and only a little window left, at which they received daily their bread and water, and there remained until their deaths in one of the cells are twelve masons who built the church, and then entered as monks into the monastery.

"In another place you are shewn the body, or rather the head and shoulders of a man stuck in the ground in a vow of penance he dug á hole, in which he placed himself, standing with his hands by his sides, and then had the hole filled, so that only his head, and a little below the shoulders, could be seen here he lived, they say, fifteen years, having food and drink brought to him, and a lamp constantly burning by his side; they still allow him a lamp, which burns day and night continually, though he has been dead six or seven hundred years; this, however, they can well afford to do, as he brings a considerable share of the riches of the convent. The cap he wears is supposed to work miracles, and restore the sick; accordingly, hundreds come to visit St. Antonia, and wear his cap, which is frequently the undoubted means of restoring health, though not in the way that enthusiasm and credulity imagine, but by the simple process of being the cause of their taking unusual exercise in the open air, and exercising also a temperance not habitual to them. I should not omit to mention that St. Antonia is said to sink a little lower in the ground every year, and that the world is to be at an end by the time he entirely disappears. Amongst the wonders which they relate, this can scarcely be classed as the greatest; and if time in its mighty changes does not annihilate the monastery of Pestcherskey, St. Antonia will probably not disappear, while he continues so instrumental to the well-doing of his brethren.

"Having so particularly mentioned the merits of this saint, let me do justice to the others also, and state, that all have their votaries, and that money lay scattered in every coffin, as if the golden age had returned, and man no longer continued to heap sordid gold, or require its aid to help him to the comforts of life. It is reckoned that from sixty to a hundred thousand pilgrims, from all parts of the Russian empire, visit the monastery of Kiev, in one year and the revenue the monks derive from the sale of wax candles, is alone sufficient to furnish food for the establishment."

DEATHS OF LANGOIRAN AND THE ABBE DUPUIS.

At the entrance of the court-house of Bourdeaux, the Abbé Dupuis received a first wound; others soon levelled him to the ground. A young lad, of about fifteen or sixteen, cut a hole in the cheek with a knife, to hold up the head by, while others were employed in haggling it from the body, which was still in agonies. This operation not succeeding in such a crowd, they took hold of the legs, and drew the carcase about the streets and round the ramparts.

Mr. Langoiran had but just set his foot on the first step of the stairs, when he was knocked down. His head was hacked off in an instant, and a ruffian held it up, crying aloud: " Off with your hats! long live the nation." The bareheaded populace answered: " Long live the nation." The head was then carried round the town in signal of a triumph, gained by a tumultuous populace and ten thousand soldiers under arms, over a poor defenceless priest.

TERRIFIC REGISTER.

THE MIDNIGHT ASSASSINATION.

IN the county of Galway, in Ireland, there lived a young couple, the children of two neighbouring cottagers, who were betrothed to each other from the earliest period of infancy. They had been educated in the same rude retirement, had partaken of the same fare, had shared in the same amusements; and were now anxiously waiting the period of their union. Their parents were of the lowest class of Irish peasantry, and possessed no inconsiderable share of the national virtues and vices. With dispositions naturally good, their passions had been inflamed by the civil dissensions of the period, and embittered by the pressure of acute poverty; and which finally induced them to join the ill-fated rebellion, that terminated in the death of poor Emmett and his associates.

It happened one night that the father and mother of the young girl, with the youth to whom she was betrothed, were sitting round their little fire-side, gloomily awaiting an increase of poverty and misery, when a sudden knock at the cottage door roused them from their reverie and induced them to hasten to the gate; a tall elegant stranger, close muffled up in a military cloak, entered their humble dwelling, and without waiting for the consent of the party, seated himself in a chair opposite, and through the folds of his robe attentively surveyed the groupe. He appeared young, noble, but wrapt in gloom, and worn down with public anxieties; which at that period to which we allude, were felt more or less by almost every Irish Patriot. After a long pause, he relaxed somewhat in his scrutiny, and addressed himself to the young man and his intended father-in-law, and having insisted on the departure of the females, shrouded his face more closely in his mantle, and in blended accents of pity, shame, and indignation, commenced an animated recital of the civil dissensions of Ireland, of its shameful subjugation by England, its decay of public spirit and private worth, and terminated his discourse by solemnly conjuring them as they valued their rights, their liberties, and their principles, to join