was a poet of a very sedate, orderly type. He wrote his poetry within certain fixed hours, and turned out a prescribed number of lines with the unfailing regularity of a machine. He was exemplary in all private relations; but it is doubtful how far the world is disposed to accept him as a genuine poet. Wordsworth was a very good, virtuous man, and lived on excellent terms with his wife. But his vanity, his obstinacy, his impatience of conventional arrangements, which restrained the freedom of his movements, might have exasperated many women beyond endurance. He had a hatred of regular meals, and liked when he was hungry to help himself from a cupboard, and then resume his walking or writing. The fact is, that the strenuous application of the mind in a particular direction is apt to produce moral consequences akin to the physical incidents of various occupations. The poet is liable to suffer from a morbid sensitiveness and irritability of temper, just as the clergyman has his sore throat or the painter his colic. As a rule, people who make their mark in the world are not the most comfortable people to live with in daily intercourse; the stamping process which they perform so effectually on the masses is rather too much for individuals near at hand to endure with comfort. Poet's wives and heroes' valets, if they shared confidences, would probably be pretty much in a tale. There may be no absolute necessity why a poet should not dine regularly at seven o'clock, discuss household matters with his wife, and keep a balance at his banker's; but a poet's wife will probably be happier if she does not set her hopes too strongly on such things. To a great poet much might be forgiven, for the delight and profit of generations may be set off against the discomfort and misery which are occasioned to the people immediately around him. But for the poetasters, for the third-rate and fourth-rate bards who claim the immunities of genius without discharging its obligations, there is nothing to be said; and if they will not fall in with the general arrangements of society, they must take the consequences. For their own sake, as well as for

the sake of any who might be tempted to imitate them, it is desirable that the discipline should be sharp and decisive. It is necessary that the world should have poetry, but it is well perhaps that there should not be too many poets.

A DAY IN "BEDLAM."

FROM the golden gallery of Saint Paul's, looking southward across the river, a little blue dome can be seen rising from a still level region, once called Saint George's Fields. Compared with the grander dome on which you stand, it is like a button compared with a full-spread mushroom. That blue bubble is the dome of the noble charity, Bethlehem Hospital.

To that asylum of sane men, whom a mad majority in power have been cruel enough to incarcerate, I betook myself one cheery October morning; and soon, threading the dull and obscure street that borders Blackfriars Road, stood an inquiring pilgrim at the great iron gate, that, when I rang, opened like the gates of a castle in a fairy storylet me in and closed upon me with a rather startling gravity and deliberation. The grim old joke rose in my mind. They'd let me in: would they let me out again? and I half expected to see a gibbering and reviling crowd rush out to welcome me.

It was so deadly quiet along the broad gravel-walk past the porter's lodge; and even the flowers looked spiritless, and bloomed with a tarnished color. In a garden to the left I saw a number of persons (all rather hushed and selfabsorbed) playing at croquet; but there was no gayety, or flirting, or coquetting there; and all the time, to cast an air of madness over the whole, an old woman paced up and down a sidewalk under the tree, muttering vengeance to herself. She was evidently mad; and yet, after all, she might have been a keeper. I have known such mistakes. A clever friend of mine visited this asylum a winter or two ago. In the exercise-ground he saw some patients, quiet and well-behaved, walking round and round with the selfpossession and studious absorption of fellows of colleges;

but in one corner an evident madman was beating himself warm in the athletic cabman fashion. "Is that man very dangerous?" he said to an attendant. "That man in the corner, sir? why, that's the keeper!" was the answer.

In the awful silence of the great hall, no longer guarded by Cibber's "brazen brainless brothers," I stood till the hall-porter came and showed me into the waiting-room. It was a bald. desolate room, looking out on offices; and on a bench at one side sat two doleful, sorrow-stricken old men, who were either out-patients or friends of patients. They seemed stunned by some long, pressing, and hopeless misery — heavy as death, and irresistible as destiny; and to them it appeared indifferent whether the doctor let them out again, or imprisoned them in those dumb and dreadful padded rooms forever. Oh poor suffering Humanity! what countless depths of shadow can pass over a man between youth and age!

Presently one of the head keepers came to show me round the round I had taken ten years before. Ten years thank God, the fine machinery that martyrdom sometimes fails to shake, yet a grain of sorrow will sometimes disarrange, had gone steadily as clockwork. Yet no doubt some who have come here as careless visitors, have ended with the long wards and those purgatorial companions.

We went first into the grand board-room, a handsome apartment worthy of a great charity, with a portrait of that burly tyrant Henry the Eighth peering at you with his small piggish eyes from over the mantel-piece. A store passage, a door or two leading out of the hall, unbolted, and we were in the first ward, a long gallery with a certain nautical air about it, that irresistibly reminded one of a man-of-war's cabin; though instead of the port-holes for cannon, there were tall windows covered with wirework, that tried to look as harmless, innocent, and unprisonlike as possible. There were no grim iron bars, threatening, defiant, and irritating by sunlight or moonlight. The maximum of security, in fact, with a minimum of show. There were benches by the sides, and tables strewn with books stood here and there by the windows. Good engravings brightened the walls and attracted the eye. By some of the windows stood large aquariums, with merry fish darting and twining among the waving weeds and weltering leaves; while at others there were small aviaries full of doves, that cooed and fluttered, happy in domestic love, of which they seemed the type. It is probable that these aviaries date back from the time of Truelock, a mad fanatical cobbler, who excited James Hatfield, an old dragoon, to shoot at George the Third in Drury-Lane Theatre, on May 16, 1800. Truelock, who believed himself a forerunner of the Messiah, worked as a shoemaker in Bedlam, and was allowed to breed canaries for sale. Nothing can be prettier than the glancing fish and the fluttering birds; but I did not see one of the morose or self-absorbed old men, that sat brooding or muttering near, cast a glance at them. "No prison can be beautiful," says the French proverb; and I suppose nothing a prison contains can be beautiful either. No strange and fantastic sight struck my eye in Bedlam; no wild men shouted prophecies; no imaginary king strutted about in rage; no frantic hero threatened us with death; no fanatic prayed or cursed us; no raging madman ground his teeth or scowled at us from between iron bars. All I saw was groups of care-worn elderly men, fatuous or abstracted, reading attentively or sitting rapt, revolving the one tyrannical and changeless thought. I thought of that fine poem of Crabbe's, where Sir Eustace Grey is described as year after year seeing the same melancholy sunset over the same desolate plain. And years and years seem but as one long unchangeable day. Let the mind entirely lose its elastic power of voluntarily changing its thoughts, and that is madness. Thirty years in Bedlam! What a life! To one very old man, nearly ninety, the keeper stopped to speak, pressing his hand almost affectionately as he did so.

"There," said he, "eighty something; and yet he'll get up and want to box you if you offend him." The poor old fellow looked like a farmer, and I thought what a heart of oak he must have had to still retain so much vigor.

The dinners were being set; and we then, as we walked along an upper ward, saw the attendants dining in a side room. What strange dinner-parties, I thought, must meet round those Bedlam tables which I saw being prepared! what rival theories must be discussed! what jarring fancies be propounded! But, in point of fact, I believe the mere animal desire for food is the one engrossing thought; and, as a rule, the patients are silent at meals, and separate instantly afterwards.

Every thing in Bedlam is as cosy and cheerful as it can be made. The billiard-room is large and airy; and there is a ball-room for the periodical parties which enliven the melancholy and calm the savage. How far one would like to be Cavalier Seul opposite a man who keeps shouting that he gave his eldest son £9,999,000, besides some loose silver and threepence-halfpenny, and another who declares himself to be the "Head Deputy Ironmonger and Patent Hangman to the Home Department," is problematical. The melancholy mad, the keeper informed me, have to be dragged to these dances; but when there, they generally =brighten up and seem better.

In the convalescent ward there seemed to be gleams of sunshine on the walls, and hope singing at the window. Some of the patients looked as if the dark cloud was fast rising from their brains; and a sense of calm enjoyment (like the lull after a storm) seemed entrancing them. On a sofa near a table on which were books, a young man, with a fine, thoughtful, and very intellectual face, rested. He I had a black silk skull-cap on his head, which made his face seem paler than it was, and he was reading (I think a Testament) very attentively. In dress and manner, in a certain rapt devoutness, he reminded me of a young Roman Catholic priest at his devotions. The attendant with me I stopped and asked him how he was. "Oh, better; very much better," he said, looking up with a very amiable and hopeful expression, and yet that looked bright and sane. He might have been just sane enough to wish to appear saner than he was; still, he had evidently turned the corner. As the keeper closed the door of that ward behind us, I asked him the cause of that patient's insanity. He replied, "Religious excitement; he has been here twice before. He leaves perfectly well; then they allow him to plunge into these ritualistic services, and he gets upset again. He'll soon be well now."

On the wall of one of the rather bald and desolatelooking staircases, there hangs a large picture by Dadd the parricide, formerly an inmate of Bethlehem; but now removed, with the other criminal patients, to Broadmoor. The subject of this painting-the very appropriate story of the Good Samaritan-is treated in a large historical manner. It is a little pale and dull in color, and the figures rather want roundness. In all other respects it is not unworthy of either Dyce or Herbert. A certain asceticism of style is, I think, never unsuitable to religious art; and that, not unnaturally, rather shrinks from the flowergarden color of Rubens, and the sensual glow of Titian. The character of this work is so grave and solemn, that one feels the painter of it was in earnest. There was something affecting in the thought that the painter was himself a madman, whom good Samaritans had brought within these walls, and for Christ's sake had nourished and tended. Still sadder was it to reflect that a man who had such powers could never again be safely set at liberty. Dadd killed his father under the most shocking circumstances, and was one of the most dangerous of madmen, being subject to intermittent paroxysms of homicidal mania, during which time he became eager for blood, and filled with an irresistible desire to take life. Even in this picture, I felt sure I could detect in one detail a crafty and lurking insanity. In the foreground of the picture lies a wounded traveller, half stripped, in the pathetic attitude of the dead Christ in the Pietas of the Italian painters. The scene is a parched desert, and the loneliness adds an appropriate mournfulness to the subject. It adds a still greater pathos when we remember that it was in the desert that insanity first seized the artist. Over the wounded man kneels the good Samaritan, who is pouring oil from a flask into a

spear-thrust in the sufferer's side. So far so good. The treatment is good, the drawing learned, the grouping effective; but the whole is marred by what seems to me the one point of insanity. Dadd has made the long neck of the oil-flask the exact size, color, and shape of a pistolbarrel. The result of this perversion is, that the good Samaritan's notion of intently pursuing a good work seems, with a hypocritical grin, to be charging a loaded pistol straight into his patient's heart; and this grim, sardonic, practical joke the madman no doubt chuckled over as his grand work slowly grew under his hands. This discovery was no mere fancy on my part. I may mention that ten years ago, when I visited Bethlehem, I went to see Dadd at work. Oxford -poor vain creature, no more insane than the keeper-was in the room, and McNaghten, the murderer of Mr. Drummond. Dadd was then painting another picture — also a desert scene of an Israelite encampment. It was, I remember, dry and hard, and in color tawny and disagreeable. A very straight palm-tree inartistically cut the composition into two halves, in a way at which even a pre-Raphaelite would have shuddered. The groups of Israelites were reasonably well arranged, and in the foreground some brown, half-naked children were playing. One of them, who held a bowl, was splashing his companions with water. Here the artist's insanity broke out. The water was of a glow-worm color, and broke in phosphorescent sparkles, like so much scattered quicksilver, over the children upon whom it fell. The picture, otherwise sane, though crude and eccentric, was in this one place stark-staring, raging mad: and I recoiled from it with a secret horror that I could not altogether conceal, though I took care to say nothing, as I had no great reliance on the solitary keeper, it a sudden revolt broke out among the murderers and madmen by whom I was surrounded. I hope I did not get to the door with any indecorous

haste.

66

At the time that Dadd's insanity was ripening, and soon after his return from the East, his friend and fellow-student, Mr. E. M. Ward, now the well-known Royal Academician, used to frequently visit him, to see how his work progressed, and to chat over artistic projects. On one occasion, Mr. Ward some years ago told me, before he had any apprehension that his friend's mind was unbalanced, he was in his room, stooping down in a corner looking over the contents of a portfolio of Oriental sketches, when all at once, as he lifted his head, he saw in a pier-glass Dadd stepping towards him with a knife raised in his hand. Mr. Ward did not start up or utter any cry of alarm, but had the admirable presence of mind to directly say, Dadd, just run and get me that drawing we left in the other room.' Dadd, thrown off his guard, at once laid down the knife (taken from the kitchen-table) and went for the drawing. During this interval, Mr. Ward slipped quietly out of the house. On Dadd's arrest, there was found in his desk or portfolio a sheet of portraits of his relations and friends; and round the necks of many of these, including his father and Mr. Ward, the mad artist had drawn an ominous crimson line, showing that he had doomed them to destruction. His mania consisted in a belief that his father, and many of those especially dear to him, were possessed with devils, and that by killing them he freed them from these terrible tenants. The poor fellow, the fine machinery of whose brain no human workman can restore, will inger at Broadmoor till death comes with the only anodyne that can cure such profound misery as his.

In a neat corrider, quiet and lonely, I was shown, at the end of a passage upon which the patients' dormitory opened, the strong room, used in cases of raging madness of a suicidal tendency. It was close to where harmless men, with brains merely benumbed for a time or forever, snatched their blissful moments of forgetfulness. But this is unavoidable in an asylum, however large. Oh! even with all the tenderness of our gentle and more tender modern science, it was a dismal place a cell of purgatory as ghastly as one of Dante's. The walls nearly to the ceiling were padded thick and soft; the floor was padded; the bed was a mere pallet on the ground; the only light came,

from a round window far out of the patients' reach. In the worst cases of raging despair, the sufferer, closely muffled in a strait-waistcoat, was placed in here till the paroxysm subsided. There were cases of suicidal mania, the keeper said, which required three months of such horrible isolation. Poor humanity! A genius to-day: to-morrow slight disturbance of the network of the brain, and the genius wallows here, raving, tearing, screaming for the death that will not come at his bidding.

a

It was but very gradually that philanthropic science discovered that kindness cures madmen sooner than severity. The chains and other harsh means were slowly done away with. Even as late as 1823, in this asylum, the system was very severe. Let us take two instances. The most dreaded of the patients of 1823 was Patrick Walsh, an Irish sailor. This wretch confessed to having murdered nine or ten persons with his own hands. He joined in the mutiny and massacre on board the Hermicote frigate in the West Indies, in 1797, and served with Abercrombie in Egypt, and was near Nelson when he fell. He had killed three fellow-patients, and his whole mind was bent on murder. He was secured by day with an iron belt and strong hand-cuffs; at night he was chained to his bedstead by one hand and leg. He was kept close, and the door of his room was of remarkable strength, and secured with double bolts. His conversation consisted chiefly of blasphemy, and raving descriptions of imaginary murders, over which he gloated. At quieter moments he would, with a madman's cunning, affect regret for the last fellow-patient he had murdered, in order to wheedle the keeper out of a little snuff, as a reward for his better state of feeling. That this man required repression there can be no doubt; but firmness and kindness would be now tried, even with such a dangerous lunatic.

Our second instance is a terrible exemplification of the ignorant cruelties heaped in former times upon unfortunate madmen in country places. Andrew Harvey was a native of Penzance, where he had been kept in a lonely hut, chained like a bull to a post driven into the ground. He saw no one except when frightened children came to stare at and jeer him, or when a woman came at regular intervals to bring him food. This woman he seized and murdered during one of his worst paroxysms. Harvey was brought up from Cornwall chained in a cart, and attended by keepers who seemed to regard him as a wild beast. In Bedlam he was kept separated by an iron railing from the other patients, and secured by an iron belt and handcuffs.

The female patients in Bedlam are dressmakers, governesses, servants, mechanics' wives, shop-women, and wives of tradesmen. There are about 140 mad women in Bedlam, to 113 males. Eleven of these former were driven mad by religious excitement, a cause which has only sent to Bedlam seven of the males. One woman had gone mad from intemperance, to seven men; while twelve men have lost their reason from pecuniary embarrassments. Women, less responsible in money matters, send only four contributors under this item. The annual report shows that, as man works his brain most, there naturally are sixteen patients here suffering from mental anxiety, and only four females. It appears that the diseases attending childbirth have caused murders in twenty-four cases.

In the female wards there was the same serenity and order. In one room an old woman with very little hair, and wrapped up in rather a ghostly way in flannel, was playing some music admirably on a piano-forte. She seemed melancholy but self-possessed, and did not deign us any special notice. In another gallery, two neatly-dressed and rather handsome young women were working at the same table in a friendly and rational way. One makes it a rule in such a place not to stop and especially notice any of the patients, for fear it might give them pain or rouse their anger. The patients, too, seldom looked direct at the visitors; but in every case when I looked back down a gallery, or at a special group, their eyes were fixed with a suspicious interest on us and the attendant. The madmen were disclosed in those glances, and also in the strange introspective, thoughtful air. It is almost rare that a knot

of insane patients is seen where a general topic is being discussed; self, and self alone, seems the order of the day: no friendly feeling, no association. Were it otherwise, and the mad plotted and co-operated, how many keepers would be needed for their charge!

I asked the matron- a quick, resolute, shrewd woman (kind, but infinitely firm), who had been five-and-twenty years in Bedlam-if she had noticed whether the patients were worse at the full of the moon. The strong light after midnight might, I thought, without believing in occult astral influences, excite madmen and keep them sleepless. She replied distinctly, "No; but that in very hot weather the insane seemed sometimes worse." It was very hot then, and I gave a look round at the old women among whom we stood as she said this. Just then one of the patients came up to her, and in the most rational way begged that some change she had before requested might be made. In the female as in the male wards, the same sad-wrung face, the same self-absorbed, restless manner, the same indescribable difference from the sane, struck me in every patient I saw. I confess somehow that I was glad when the last glass door was closed and locked behind me, and I once more stood free in the board-room, mutely questioned by the eyes of Henry the Eighth, who founded this hospital in Moorfields.

The new building was erected here in 1815. The great hospital has been a ceaseless fountain of good for centuries, having within the last hundred years tended 19,000 poor mad people, of whom 8,903 have been discharged cured. Only think of that! What suffering! what sorrow! what charity! what tenderness! I turned my back on the hospital with even a fuller sense than I had before of the terribly frail tenure on which man holds his reason, and still more convinced that the best proof of a sincere love of God is shown by sympathy and charity to the poor and the unhappy.

The smoky air of the Blackfriars Road seemed sweet and fresh to me now, as I struck homeward across the bridge, and a second time escaped from Bedlam.

THE STORY OF HENRIETTA RHENSE.

JUST outside the small town of Stauffenheim stands the Schloss Weissbach, a rather pretentious-looking place, with grounds laid out in the French fashion, and enclosed, on the side next the town, by a high wall. There are few people who enter Stauffenheim for the first time whose curiosity is not aroused by the appearance of an octagonal odd-looking building which stands within the grounds, and is only separated from the rest of the town by this wall. It is too big to be a mausoleum. It cannot be a house for the domestics of the Schloss, for apparently it has no windows. Besides, while the Schloss itself is kept in perfect order, and inhabited by a French family who bought it some few years ago, this peculiar-looking building has seemingly been allowed to fall into decay. Was there a murder committed in that solitary circular unwindowed house, which stands all by itself at the extremity of the grounds, holding no communication with the Schloss above?

Doubtless there were murders, of every grade of atrocity, committed in this building; but they were histrionic murders. At one time these octagonal walls enclosed all the manifold life of a theatre; and if you ask the people of Stauffenheim how it befell that a theatre-far too big to belong to a private house came to be placed in the grounds of the Schloss Weissbach, they will tell you the story of Henrietta Rhense.

At one time this octagonal building was the Stadt-theatre of Stauffenheim. There was no big wall round it then; for the grounds of the Schloss came down to a small piece of waste land, which was used for various purposes by the manager of the theatre. There was, it is true, a small private gate leading out of the grounds, by which the Count Otto von Engelhardt, who owned the Schloss, and his friends could, if they were in a hurry, slip over to the

theatre without going round by the streets. But there were duties required of the owner of the Schloss; and, although this short cut would have saved the Count much trouble, it was expected of him that, when he deigned to visit the theatre, he should drive round and up to the door in his heavy French carriage, with all its appurtenances and

servants.

The Count Otto was a young man, whose parents had died when he was a boy. He had therefore had the management of his life pretty much in his own hands, and he spent it in a manner that seemed sufficiently strange in the eyes of the simple townsfolk of Stauffenheim. For, instead of figuring at the Grand-duke's court, where his birth, position, wealth, and personal endowments, would have made him conspicuous, he chose to live the life of a student and a recluse in this small and remote town. His visitors, too, were not of his own class; they were poets, and writers, and such people, who were of like habits with himself, and scarcely fit company for a Count. He professed, for example, to think more of a young man called Schiller, who had just written a play called "The Robbers," than of the great Wohlgemuth, who had written a History of the Church that was recommended by all the priests, and who was a great friend of the Grand-duke's. Indeed, Count Otto was not nearly so popular as his father had beenthe old Count, whose youthful dare-devil deeds in love and wine were still talked over and joked about. The Count Otto was haughty and reserved. Good-looking as he was himself, - for he had a stately bearing, and a handsome face, with plenty of brown curls, and a light-blue eye, - the prettiest girl in Stauffenheim might pass before him without receiving a second glance from him. When he sat in his box in the theatre (and he went thither pretty often) he seldom withdrew his eyes from the stage; and when he did, they wandered in absolute indifference over the faces around him. He was now getting on towards thirty, and the people of Stauffenheim said he would never marry he was too much given over to his books, and his studies, and his correspondence with poor authors in various parts of the country.

This was the state of affairs when the manager of the little Stadt-theatre announced the forthcoming production of a piece of féerie which had achieved a great popularity in Vienna. That sort of entertainment was not very common then, nor had it acquired the marvellous resources that are now drawn upon for pantomimes, extravaganzas, and burlesques; while, with the new awakening of German literature, the people were crying for a national theatre and native plays, and were disposed to look with disfavor on any thing of French origin. However, this féerie had been a great success in Vienna; and the manager at Stauffenheim had not only imported the piece, but had also engaged the services of the principal actress in it, Fraulein Rhense. Great preparations were made for the production of the piece, and the townsfolk looked forward to something particularly fine.

It was not to be expected that Count Engelhardt should come to see a piece of féerie, consisting chiefly of gorgeous scenery, masks, music, and magical transformations. Indeed, the manager had sent a messenger to the Count, to ask if the box which belonged by right to the Schloss might be offered to the burgermeister of the town. The manager was surprised to hear, in reply, that the Count and a small party would honor the theatre with their presence on the first night of the new piece.

There was a little comedy to precede the féerie, and during its progress the Count and two other gentlemen appeared. Count Otto seemed to be in rather a merrier mood than usual, and paid much more attention to the remarks of his companions than to the remainder of the comedy. The plot of the féerie was a sort of allegory, apparently designed to introduce as many different scenes as possible. It represented the adventures of a young Princess who, somehow or other, has forsaken her first love, and wanders about in search of some one who will recall to her all the wonderful illusions of that mystical and half-forgotten period. Many lovers pay suit to her, and many wonderful

things she sees; but she cannot catch a glimpse of the wonderful Rose-world that she vaguely remembers. Now, it is with a view of this Rose-world that the feerie opened; and the simple people of Stauffenheim, unaccustomed to spectacle, beheld with delight and surprise the gorgeous masses of scenery (much of which had come from Vienna), lit up by the strongest lights the manager could procure. The Rose-world of first love was hung with garlands of fainthued roses, that faded back into an indefinite mist of flowers; and all around were secret and silent bowers, and overhead the calm blue, and in the distance the white windings of a river that lay in the midst of a beautiful plain. And while they sat and gazed on this wonderful scene, that was so silent and so lovely, there suddenly appeared the Princess. The effect of her entrance was magical; for into the vague Rose-world, so pale in its hues, stepped a beautiful young creature with jet-black hair, with a calm, pale face, that had wonderful dark eyes in it, and a look of absorbed, wistful melancholy. This was the Fräulein Rhense, about whom they had heard so much; and yet the people were taken too much by surprise to applaud. As for her, she seemed unaware of their existence. She had already assumed the dreamlike air of the Princess, and was wandering about in the Rose-world, filled with a strange and yet unsatisfied happiness. As she went out and in among the pale pink bowers, they had now time to see how strikingly handsome she was, how perfect was her figure, and what splendid masses of black hair hung down upon her shoulders. Her Princess's dress, too, was sufficient to wake the admiration of the spectators, who were convinced that the Grossherzogin herself had nothing so splendid.

Count Otto spoke no more to his companions. He sat and gazed upon the pantomimic world before him, and upon the beautiful creature who wandered through it, literally spellbound. She was in the Rose-world, looking for her

first love he had met his there.

But then she was merely an actress, and Count Otto, although a recluse, knew the value of his rank. So he sent for the manager, who forthwith appeared at the door of the box.

"Is the Fräulein Rhense married?" he asked.
"No, Herr Graf," replied the manager.
"Who accompanied her from Vienna?"

"Her father.'

"Is he in the theatre." "Yes."

"Then present my compliments to the Fräulein, and say that my friends and myself will be glad if she and her father will favor us with their company at supper in the Schloss, as soon as the performance is over. The young lady need not change her dress."

The Count delivered the invitation pretty much as if it were a command, and such he probably considered it. For an actress in a small provincial theatre to be asked as a guest to Schloss Weissbach was an honor which it never entered his head could be refused; and yet refused it was. Some half-hour thereafter, the manager returned, and begged to see the Count alone. Count Otto stepped out into the passage, and the manager said, with great embarrass

"The fact is, Herr Graf, her answer was precisely in these words:Pray present my compliments to Count Engelhardt, and say that my father and myself never accept invitations from strangers.

"Der Teufel!" exclaimed the Count in genuine surprise. And then with a slight gesture of haughty indifference, he returned to the box.

But in spite of this repulse, the spell was still upon him; and he followed the fortunes of the Princess through all the various scenes with a persistent, wistful attention that called

down upon him the satirical comments of his friends. He seemed to pay no heed to them. He was transported body and soul into the wonderful regions of the féerie, and was scarcely aware of the existence of those beside him. The short and the long of it was, that the young man had been taken captive by Henrietta Rhense's eyes, and that he had abandoned himself wholly to the passing infatuation of the hour.

Yet he was no longer quite a young man, as we use the phrase to denote inexperience of the world. If his own acquaintance with men and women was limited, he had reaped the results of other people's knowledge; and doubtless his theories about the only possible relation which could exist between an actress in an extravaganza and the owner of Schloss Weissbach were pretty much similar to those held by most men of rank at the time. Her refusal to accept his invitation had surprised him, but he forgot his wounded pride in looking at her and listening to her voice; and by the time the performance was over, and he and his friends on their way home, he was as much in love as a man well could be.

The Count's preoccupation had not escaped the notice of his companions, and there were sundry hints thrown out about it as they sat down to supper. He frankly told them of the invitation he had sent to the young actress, and of her refusal.

"It is a ruse merely," exclaimed the youngest of the trio, a youthful lieutenant from Dresden. "She refused in order to pique your curiosity-that is all. If I cared to do it, I could undertake to make her acquaintance by two o'clock to-morrow, and to bring her here in the evening to sup with us."

Why was it that Count Otto's face was suddenly overspread with a frown? The young man had only offered to do what he himself had attempted to do. But he said bruskly,

Certainly."

"But I must have the means. I must have a little present to send her in the morning. One cannot get jewelry in Stauffenheim."

"I have a bracelet I had intended sending to an aunt of mine in Styria. You may have that," said Count Otto.

He was evidently bent on making his friend fulfil his promise. If he succeeded, he would then be able to estimate Fräulein Rhense at her true value; if he failed, he would be proud of her victory; for it was not to be concealed that his impression of her had gradually altered since her refusal had been announced to him.

Lieut. Arno framed a careful little epistle in the morning, and sent it with the bracelet to the Fräulein Henrietta. No one knew what he had said to her, or what request he had made; but after the messenger had been despatched, he lit a cigar, and observed to his friends, that before he had finished smoking the young lady's answer would

arrive.

So it did. He took the cigar from his mouth as the messenger returned, and prepared to open Fräulein Rhense's note; but great was his surprise to observe that along with the note came the same little box he had sent to her. His companions saw it also; and Count Otto, with a prodigious laugh, exclaimed,

"Du lieber Himmel! She has sent thee back thy bracelet, du unglücklicher Junge!"

The Count seemed in nowise chagrined by the ill success of the lieutenant. On the contrary, he could scarce conceal his delight; and when the lieutenant and his friend departed for Leipsic next day, the Count, in bidding him farewell, bade him remember the rebuff which had been ministered to him by Henrietta Rhense.

Left to himself, Count Otto withdrew for a day or two to the solitude of his own rooms in the Schloss. Perhaps he was endeavoring to check his passion at the outset, and had resolved not to brave farther the temptation of going to the theatre. However that may be, on the third evening he

again appeared in his box, and sat there alone and entranced. Night after night he went, until it was clear that he had wholly abandoned himself to the delight of gazing at the beautiful young actress, wherever that might lead him. He sought for no society; he imparted his raptures to no one; he even made no farther effort to become acquainted personally with Henrietta Rhense; but every morning a bouquet, brought by a man who was not in the Count's livery, was left for her at the theatre; and every evening the young man sat in the shadow of his box, and looked down into the wonderful Rose-world, in which the Princess wandered.

At length the Count made the acquaintance of Fräulein Rhense, and that in the most commonplace way. He did not rescue her from the burning theatre, or save her from being run over in the streets, or, in fact, do any thing heroic and dramatic; but one evening, as he was leaving the thea tre, he observed an old man, gray and worn, speaking to the manager; and as he passed, the old man was talking of the wonderful musical powers of a boy whom he had heard play in Vienna. Count Otto caught the name of Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and, without any form of introduction, stopped at once and inquired of the old man what he knew of this wonderful lad. The old man, it seemed, was professionally a musician. Count Otto had achieved a tolerable reputation as an amateur composer, and insensibly they glided into a long and earnest conversation about the various masters of the day, their qualities, their followers, and their prospects. At the end of their talk the Count abruptly asked his newly-found friend to call upon him next morning at the Schloss, that he might show him some MSS., which had been sent him by a great composer of the time. "I have the honor, then, of addressing the Count Engelhardt?" said the old man, rather taken aback.

The Count now remembered that he did not even know the name of the person whom he had asked to visit him; and at this juncture the manager stepped in with a formal introduction, and the Count discovered that he had been talking to Herr Ludwig Rhense, the father of Henrietta.

Old Rhense kept his appointment next day at the Schloss, and from that moment a warm friendship sprang up between the two men, who had been placed on terms of equality by their love of a great art. It need hardly be said that Henrietta Rhense could not long remain a stranger to the Count; and so, after all, the young actress, in the company of her father, did actually make her appearance at the Schloss, and was conducted over the place by the Count.

Nothing could exceed the courtesy of his manner towards her. Indeed, it is probable that he strove by every outward mark of deference and respect to obliterate from her mind the remembrance of the message he had sent her. And the more the Count saw of the young actress's nature, the more he learned to admire her. He found in her all the graces of character which he had imagined she might possess. The more he saw of her, the more he knew she was worthy of his love; until one morning, when he found her alone in her father's room, he asked her to become his wife.

Her face was pale and her eyes were sad as she looked at him and met his anxious gaze. "And

"I am very grateful,” she said in a low voice. yet I ought not to have let you say this to me for I knew that you would say it. I ought to have gone away; and yet to remain was very pleasant."

There was something in her voice that told him she loved him, although she spoke so sadly. "I cannot be your wife at least, not now," she said. "It is too hurried. You do not know me. You do not know how long your love might last. And then you might come to regret having pledged your life to a fleeting fancy. I will go away from here, and some time hence I may come back; and then, if your love has stood the test of absence, I shall know that I need not fear. That is all I can promise."

Nothing would shake her resolution; and, her engage ment with the manager of the Stauffenheim Theatre being