the mass of the Italian people saw the triumph of a victor to be glorified by the halo of a martyr. If Italy again needs to hear the deep voice of Garibaldi, it will find an echo in the hearts of the mass of the population as true as at any former moment.

The act itself enables history to speak of the campaign of 1860 as dramatically complete. Whatever be the future lot of Garibaldi, nothing can detract from the grandeur of the fact that, in six months, by his single energy, he destroyed a secular tyranny that was the vilest on earth, and laid down the power of a sovereign (for the songs of the people were of Garibaldi nostro re) without receiving even the pay of a private soldier.

The greatest human fame has been that of either the founders, the preservers, or the destroyers of kingdoms. Of the first class of great men, it would be untimely here to speak. Neither is it among the second, whether such as maintained the welfare of their country by wise legislation— men such as Numa, Solon, Justinian, even Napoleon regarded as a legislator alone or such as maintained a long struggle for the liberties or the existence of their country-as Alfred in England, as Sertorius in Spain, as Arthur in romance-that Garibaldi can be ranked. Among those who have acted as the hammer by which Divine Providence smote to pieces the throne of oppression (not the scourges of mankind, like Alaric, Timour, Genghis Khan, but the soldiers of humanity,) Garibaldi has, while yet living, assumed no inferior place. Nor is it a small tribute to his character, when we regard at once the magnitude of his work and the grandeur of his soul, if he be placed next to that illustrious Carthaginian who, with the sole and majestic exception of the mighty Julius, ranks in history as the first of all captains whose helmet pressed a brow that was not wet with the sacred chrism of a king.

R.

RALPH, THE BAILIFF.

IN THREE PARTS.-PART III.

CHAPTER VI.

In spite of the doctor's attention, in spite of her own care, Jenny Carleon did not regain her health. She felt herself gradually growing weaker; she felt that, by such slow degrees as were almost imperceptible, her strength was ebbing away from her. It was only by looking back at the end of a week, and remembering that seven days before she had been able to do this or that, which she was utterly powerless to do now, that she discovered how much she had changed. She struggled hard against this daily diminution of her strength, for she seemed to have a strange horror of being confined to her room; but she succumbed at last, and kept her bed day after day. A good-tempered maid-servant waited upon her, and brought her her medicines, which she poured out herself.

Her husband came into her room several times a day to ask after her health. He brought her piles of novels obtained for her from a circulating library in the market town; but he still appeared to attach little importance to her illness, and was so much occupied about the farm that he could seldom stay with her for any length of time.

She used to ask every morning whether Ralph, the bailiff, was going away that day, always to be told that he was not; but that he would leave in a day or two at the latest. Once, after having received this answer, she turned her head round impatiently upon her pillow, and, with her face to the wall, burst out crying.

66

Jenny, what is the matter with you?" asked her husband.

She did not answer; but he could see that her delicate frame was shaken, by her sobs.

"Jenny, I insist upon knowing the meaning of this?"

She lifted her head from the pillow, supported herself upon her elbow, and, putting her hair away from her tear-stained face, said to him, solemnly,

"Dudley Carleon, the presence of that man is killing me, day by day, and hour by hour. Shut up in this room, I cannot see him; but I can feel and know that an unseen influence is sapping my very life, and that influence is his. If you are not his slave, if you are not bound to him by some tie too fearful to be broken, send him from this house; or, if I have strength to crawl out of it, I will go myself."

"Jenny, Jenny, this is an invalid's fancy. Don't give me reason to think you are as mad as Agnes Marlow.”

"Dudley Carleon, will you send that man away ?”
"Since you are so silly, Yes. He shall go to-night."

"Do this,

She held out her wasted little hand to him with a smile. Dudley," she said, " and I shall think that you love me." Something in the tone of her voice, in the sad but gentle expression

of her face, touched his reserved and undemonstrative nature. Dudley Carleon clasped her suddenly to his heart, and, hiding his face upon her shoulder, sobbed aloud.

"Oh, my poor little wife," he said, "what is to become of us-what is to become of us?"

"Dudley, Dudley; don't cry.
He rose from his seat by the

his eyes.

You terrify-you grieve me!"
bedside, and brushed the tears from

"I am a fool, Jenny; for I distress you and myself. But make your mind easy, Ralph shall go to-night! As there is a heaven above us, he shall go to-night!" He turned out of the room as he finished speaking. It was now late in February; there had been continued wet weather for upwards of a week, and on this day the rain beat incessantly against the windows of Jenny's room. The sky without was dull and leaden, and the wind whistled in the long corridor outside the door. Jenny found her novels very stupid. The volumes were too heavy for her to hold, and they dropped out of her weak hands and slid off the counterpane on to the floor. She lay, hour after hour, listening to every sound in the house-to the servants passing now and then across the hall below, to the occasional opening and shutting of a door, to the striking of the clocks, and to the barking of the sheep-dog in the back premises. The day was long and dreary, and the invalid welcomed the winter twilight and the maid-servant who brought her her tea.

"Who makes my tea, Mary ?" Jenny asked, as the girl arranged the things on a table by the bed.

"I do, ma'am."

"And nobody ever touches it but yourself?"

"Nobody as I knows of, ma'am. I leave the teapot on the oven-top when I've mashed the tea, for it to draw. I'm sometimes out of the kitchen; but I don't suppose any one would touch it."

"Is Ralph Purvis often in the kitchen?"

"Well; he is, ma'am, pretty well always about there. The weather's too bad for him to be much about the farm now, and he's very handy indoors."

Half an hour afterwards, when the girl came to take the tray, she found the tea untouched; and her mistress told her to remove the teathings, as she had no inclination either to eat or drink.

The ceaseless and monotonous rain seemed to Jenny as if it were bent on flooding the Grey Farm that evening. The cold wind crept under the door of her room till the stiff folds of the heavy damask bed-curtains rustled. The sashes of the windows rattled every now and then, as if an angry hand had been beating at them from without.

The shaded lamp by the bedside left the corners of the room in obscurity, and Jenny's disordered fancy conjured up the glittering eyes of the bailiff leering at her out of the shadow.

"Oh, this dreary, dismal place!" she said, over and over again. "Why does Dudley leave me here to die alone?"

She could see her face in an oval mirror hanging upon the wall opposite to her bed. The dim reflection in the depths of this glass showed her a wan, pale, wasted face, and hollow, fever-bright eyes. It seemed strange to her; and she shuddered to know it was her own. "I shall look like that in my coffin," she said, "except that my eyes will be closed."

Eleven o'clock struck before her husband came to his room. He had slept during Jenny's illness in an apartment adjoining hers.

She had in the course of the evening fallen several times into a feverish slumber, and could hardly help fancying she had slept for hours, and that the night must be far advanced. As the clock struck eleven, she fell asleep once more-but her rest was broken by troubled dreams.

She dreamt that she was out upon the river-bank, with the rain falling upon her uncovered head, and drenching her thin night-dress. She was watching for Dudley, as she had watched for him upon the night of the bailiff's return. Suddenly she found that she had a child in her arms—a poor, pitiful, baby, that clung to her convulsively, and twisting its tiny hands in the lace about her throat, seemed as if it were trying to strangle her. She strove to release herself, but it hung about her with a heavy leaden weight that almost dragged her to the ground.

The rain beating in her face blinded her; her naked feet slipped upon the river bank; the low wail of the child rose to a shrill scream of terror,— and she awoke, with the cold perspiration streaming down her forehead, to hear the Olney clock chime the quarter—and to hear, in the direction of the servants' rooms, the same pitiful wail she had heard from a child in her dream.

What did it mean? There were no children at the Grey Farm; and there never had been since her marriage.

The house was said to be haunted. She had heard a dozen ghost stories attached to the dismal pile of building; but she had laughed at them as absurd. What if one of them were true?

A strange, mad desire to encounter the supernatural terror—if terror there were took possession of her. She crept out of her bed, wrapped herself in a shawl, and stole into the corridor. She was so weak that she could scarcely stand, but she supported herself by clinging to the wall, and contrived to reach the landing of the principal staircase, on the other side of which was a door communicating with the servants' rooms.

This door was ajar, and she could hear that the child's cries proceeded from the other side.

She passed into the servants' corridor, and traced the sound to the little sitting-room that had once been occupied by Ralph and his sister. A light shone through the crevice under the door of this room, and through a keyhole which had been roughly cut in the wood.

There had never been a lock to the door, which was only fastened by a latch and an iron bolt.

She could hear the low, pitiful wail of the child, and the voice of a woman trying to hush it to sleep. She fell on her knees at the top of the little flight of steps leading to the door, and looked through the keyhole into the room. Her husband was seated, writing, at a small table, by the light of one candle. Behind his chair, and looking over him as he wrote, stood Ralph Purvis, the bailiff. A woman dressed in a black gown and a thick grey shawl sat by the little fireplace with a child in her arms-a pale-faced, puny baby, that kept up an incessant wail. The woman had taken off her bonnet, and fastened it by the strings to the back of her chair. Jenny knew this woman, by her likeness to the bailiff, to be his sister Martha, Dudley's old housekeeper.

Neither of the three uttered a word, and the silence was only broken by the scratching of Dudley's pen over the paper, and the suppressed crying of the child. When Dudley's pen had reached the bottom of the page he stopped, glanced over what he had written, and then signed his name.

"Now, your signature as witness!" he said, handing the pen to Ralph.

"I shan't sign!" answered the bailiff.

"Because, I tell you again, it won't do."

"Have you read it ?"

"Yes. You settle this place on your lawful son and heir, Dudley Carleon, junior, crying there in the lap of his mother, your lawful wife, Martha Carleon. You settle this property on my sister's child, provided we renounce all claim upon you and keep your secret, and you go off to Australia with that curly-haired Miss who calls herself your wife! I tell you it won't do. It's not enough. I want the farm: but I want money to improve the farm-I want that three thousand pounds; and I'll have that, or nothing."

"Three thousand pounds!" Jenny mechanically repeated the words with a shudder. It was her fortune, no doubt, that this man wanted. Her fortune, which, should she die childless, would go to Dudley Carleon.

The woman sitting over the fire never once looked up during this brief dialogue. Dudley buried his face in his hands with a groan, and let his head fall upon the writing before him.

Ralph, the bailiff, standing over his master, struck his clenched fist upon the table, and said—

"Look ye here, Muster Carleon! Go back a bit; go back to four, or nigh upon five year ago, when you was a stripling just come home from College, and Muster Martin was alive, and well and strong, and promising to make older bones than you any day. Do you remember moping about the place, looking miserable; or making believe to be happy, and looking