down stairs, gave the monk a strong cup of coffee to get him awake, and, between the four of them, they got poor Fiametta into the litter, drew the curtains tenderly around, and deposited her safely in the bottom of the gondola. Lightly and smoothly the winner of the pig pulled away with his loving burden, and gliding around the slimy corners of the palaces, and hushing his voice as he cried out "right!" or "left!" to warn the coming gondoliers of his vicinity, he arrived, like a thought of love to a maid's mind in a sleep, at the door of St. Girolamo. The abbess looked out and said, "benedicite!" and the monk stood firm on his brown sandals to receive the precious burden from the arms of Pasquali. Believing firmly that it was equivalent to committing her to the hands of St. Peter, and of course abandoning all hope of seeing her again in this world, the soft-hearted tailor wiped his eye as she was lifted in, and receiving a promise from Father Gasparo that he would communicate faithfully the state of her soul in the last agony, he pulled, with lightened gondola and heart, back to his widower's home and Turturilla. For many good reasons, and apparent as good, it is a rule in the hospital of St. Girolamo, that the sick under its holy charge shall receive the visit of neither friend nor relative. If they recover, they return to their abodes to earn candles for the altar of the restoring saint. If they die, their clothes are sent to their surviving friends, and this affecting memorial, besides communicating the melancholy news, affords all the particulars and all the consolation they are supposed to require upon the subject of their loss. Waiting patiently for Father Gasparo and his bundle, Pasquali and Turturilla gave themselves up to hopes, which on the tailor's part, (we fear it must be admitted,) argued a quicker recovery from grief than might be credited to an elastic constitution. The fortune of poor Fiametta was sufficient to warrant Pasquali in neglecting his shop to celebrate every festa that the church acknowledged, and for ten days subsequent to the committal of his wife to the tender mercies of St. Girolamo, five days out of seven was the proportion of merry holidays with his new betrothed. They were sitting one evening in the open piazza of St. Mark, in front of the most thronged café of that matchless square. The moon was resting her silver disk on the point of the Campanile, and the shadows of thousands of gay Venetians fell on the immense pavement below, clear and sharply drawn as a black cartoon. The four extending sides of the square lay half in shades half in light, with their innumerable columns and balconies and sculptured work, and, frowning down on all, in broken light and shadow, stood the arabesque structure of St. Mark's itself, dizzying the eyes with its mosaics and confused devices, and thrusting forth the heads of its four golden-collared steeds into the moonbeams, till they looked on that black relief, like the horses of Pluto issuing from the gates of Hades. In the centre of the square stood a tall woman, singing, in rich contralto, an old song of the better days of Venice; and, against one of the pillars, Polichinello had backed his wooden stage, and beat about his puppets with an energy worthy of old Dandolo and his helmeted galley-men. To those who wore not the spectacles of grief or discontent, the square of St. Mary's that night was like some cozening tableau. I never saw anything so gay! Everybody who has "swam in a gondola," knows how the cafés of Venice thrust out their chequered awnings over a portion of the square, and fill the shaded space below with chairs and marble tables. In a corner of the shadow thus afforded, with ice and coffee on a small round slab between them, and the flat pavement of the public promenade under their feet, sat our two lovers. With neither hoof nor wheel to drown or interrupt their voices, (as in cities, whose streets are stones, not water,) they murmured their hopes and wishes in the softest language under the sun, and with the sotto voce acquired by all the inhabitants of this noiseless city. Turturilla had taken ice to cool her and coffee to take off the chill of her ice, and a bicchiere del perfette amore to reconcile these two antagonists in her diges tion, when the slippers of a monk glided by, and in a moment the recognised Father Gasparo made a third in the shadowy corner. The expected bundle was under his arm, and he was on his way to Pasquali's dwelling. Having assured the disconsolate tailor that she had had unction and wafer as became the wife of a citizen of Venice like himself, he took heart, and grew content that she was in heaven. It was a better place, and Turturilla, for so little as a gold ring, would supply her place in his bosom. The moon was but a brief week older, when Pasquali and Turturilla stood in the church of our Lady of Grief, and Father Gasparo within the palings of the altar. She as fair a maid as ever bloomed in the garden of beauty beloved of Titian, and the tailor was nearer worth nine men to look at, than the fraction of a man considered usually the exponent of his profession. Away mumbled the good father upon the matrimonial service, thinking of the old wine and rich pasties that were holding their sweetness under cork and crust only till he had done this ceremony, and quicker by some seconds than it had ever been achieved before by bishop, he arrived at the putting on of the ring. His hand was tremulous, and (oh unlucky omen!) he dropped it within the gilded fence of the chancel. The choristers were called, and Father Gasparo dropped on his knees to look for it but if the devil had not spirited it away, there was no other reason why that search was in vain. Short of an errand to the goldsmith on the Rialto, it was at last determined the wedding could not proceed. Father Gasparo went to hide his impatience within the vestiary, and Turturilla knelt down to pray against the arts of Sathanas. Before they had settled severally to their pious occupations, Pasquali was half way to the Rialto. Half an hour elapsed, and then instead of the light grazing of a swiftsped gondola along the church stairs, the splash of a sullen oar was heard, and Pasquali stepped on shore. They had hastened to the door to receive him-monk, choristers and brideand to their surprise and bewilderment, he waited to hand out a woman in a strange dress, who seemed dis posed, bridegroom as he was, to make him wait her leisure. Her clothes fitted her ill, and she carried in her hand a pair of shoes which, it was easy to see, were never made for her. She rose at last, and as her face became visible, down dropped Turturilla and the pious father, and motionless and aghast stood the simple Pasquali. Fiametta stepped on shore! In broken words Pasquali explained. He had landed at the stairs near the fish-market, and with two leaps reaching the top, sped off past the buttress in the direction of the goldsmith's, when his course was arrested by encountering, at full speed, the person of an old woman. Hastily raising her up, he recognised his wife, who, fully recovered, but without a gondola, was threading the zig-zag alleys on her way to her own domicile. After the first astonishment was over, her dress explained the error of the good father, and the extent of his own misfortune. The clothes had been hung between the bed of Fiametta and that of a smaller woman, who had been long languishing of a consumption. She died, and Fiametta's clothes, brought to the door by mistake, were recognised by Father Gasparo and taken to Pasquali. The holy monk, chop-fallen and sad, took his solitary way to the convent, but with the first step he felt something slide into the heel of his sandal. He sat down on the church stairs and absolved the devil from theft-it was the lost ring, which had fallen upon his foot and saved Pasquali the tailor from the pains of bigamy. THE LAST ARROW. THE American reader, if at all curious about the early history of his country, has probably heard of that famous expedition, undertaken by the vicegerent of Louis the Fourteenth, the governor general of New France, against the confederated Five Nations of New York; an expedition which, though it carried with it all the pomp and circumstance of an European warfare into their wild-wood haunts, was attended with no adequate re sults, and had but a momentary effect in quelling the spirit of the tameless Iroquois. It was on the fourth of July, 1696, that the commander in chief, the veteran Count de Frontenac, marshalled the forces at La Chine, with which he intended to crush for ever the powers of the Aganuschion confederacy. His regulars were divided into four battalions of two hundred men each, commanded respectively by three veteran leaders, and the young Chevalier De Grais. He formed also four battalions of Canadian volunteers, efficiently officered, and organised as regular troops. The Indian allies were divided into three bands, each of which was placed under the command of a nobleman of rank, who had gained distinction in the European warfare of France. One was composed of the Sault and St. Louis bands, and of friendly Abenaquis; another consisted of the Hurons of Lorette and the mountaineers of the north; the third band was smaller, and composed indiscriminately of warriors of different tribes, whom a spirit of adventure led to embark upon the expedition. They were chiefly Ottawas, Saukies and Algonquins, and these the Baron De Bekancourt charged himself to conduct. This formidable armament was amply provisioned, and provided with all the munitions of war. Besides pikes, arquebusses, and other smallarms then in use, they were furnished with grenades, a mortar to throw them, and a couple of field pieces; which, with the tents and other camp equipage, were transported in large batteaux built for the purpose. Nor was the energy of their movements unworthy of this brilliant preparation. Ascending the St. Lawrence, and coasting the shores of Lake Ontario, they entered the Oswego river, cut a military road around the falls, and carrying their transports over the portage, launched them anew, and finally debouched with their whole flotilla upon the waters of Onondaga lake. It must have been a gallant sight to behold the warlike pageant floating beneath the primitive forest which then crowned the hills around that lovely water. To see the veterans who had served under Turenne, Vau ban and the great Condé, marshalled with pike and cuirass beside the halfnaked Huron and Abenaquis; while young cavaliers, in the less warlike garb of the court of the magnificent Louis, moved with plume and mantle amid the dusky files of wampum-decked Ottawas and Algonquins. Banners were there which had flown at Steenkırk and Landen; or rustled above the troopers that Luxemburgh's trumpets had guided to glory when Prince Waldeck's battalions were borne down beneath his furious charge. Nor was the enemy that this gallant host were seeking unworthy of those whose swords had been tried in some of the most celebrated fields of Europe. "The Romans of America," as the Five Nations have been called by more than one writer, had proved themselves soldiers, not only by carrying their arms among the native tribes a thousand miles away, and striking their enemies alike upon the lakes of Maine, the mountains of Carolina and the prairies of the Missouri; but they had already bearded one European army beneath the walls of Quebec, and shut up another for weeks within the defences of Montreal, with the same courage that, a half a century later, vanquished the battalions of Deskau upon the banks of Lake George. Our business, however, is not with the main movements of this army, which, we have already mentioned, were wholly unimportant in their results. The aged Chevalier De Frontenac was said to have other objects in view besides the political motives for the expedition, which he set forth to his master the Grand Monarque. Many years previous, when the Five Nations had invested the capital of New France and threatened the extermination of that thriving colony, a beautiful half-blood girl, whose education had been commenced under the immediate auspices of the governorgeneral, and in whom, indeed, M. De Frontenac was said to have a paternal interest, was carried off, with other prisoners, by the retiring foe. Every effort had been made in vain, during the occasional cessation of hostilities between the French and the Iroquois, to recover this child; and though, in the years that intervened, some wan dering Jesuit from time to time averred that he had seen the Christian captive living as the contented wife of a young Mohawk warrior, yet the old nobleman seemed never to have despaired of reclaiming his "nut-brown daughter." Indeed, the chevalier must have been impelled by some such hope when, at the age of seventy, and so feeble that he was half the time carried in a litter, he ventured to encounter the perils of an American wilderness, and placed himself at the head of the heterogeneous bands which now invaded the country of the Five Natians under his conduct. Among the half-bred spies, border scouts, and mongrel adventurers that followed in the train of the invading army, was a renegade Fleming, of the name of Hanyost. This man, in early youth, had been made a serjeant-major, when he deserted to the French ranks in Flanders. He had subsequently taken up a military grant in Canada, sold it after emigrating, and then, making his way down to the Dutch settlements on the Hudson, had become domiciliated, as it were, among their allies, the Mohawks, and adopted the life of a hunter. Hanyost, hearing that his old friends, the French, were making such a formidable descent, did not now hesitate to desert his more recent acquaintances; but offered his services as a guide to Count de Frontenac the moment he entered the hostile country. It was not, however, mere cupidity or the habitual love of treachery which actuated the base Fleming in this instance. Hanyost, in a difficulty with an Indian trapper, which had been referred for arbitrament to the young Mohawk chief Kiodago, (a settler of disputes,) whose cool courage and firmness fully entitled him to so distinguished a name, conceived himself aggrieved by the award which had been given against him. The scorn with which the arbitrator met his charge of unfairness, stung him to the soul, and fearing the arm of the powerful savage, he had nursed the revenge in secret, whose accomplishment seemed now at hand. Kiodago, ignorant of the hostile force which had entered his country, was off with his band at a fishing station, or summer-camp, among the wild hills about Konnedieyu; and when Hanyost informed the commander of the French forces that, by surprising this party, his long-lost daughter, the wife of Kiodago, might be once more given to his arms, a small, but efficient force was instantly detached from the main body of the army to strike the blow. A dozen musketeers, with twentyfive pikemen, led severally by the Baron De Bekancourt and the Chevalier de Grais, the former having the chief command of the expedition, were sent upon this duty, with Hanyost to guide them to the village of Kiodago. Many hours were consumed upon the march, as the soldiers were not yet habituated to the wilderness; but just before dawn on the second day, the party found themselves in the neighbourhood of the Indian village. The place was wrapped in repose, and the two chevaliers trusted that the surprise would be so complete, that their commandant's daughter must certainly be taken. The baron, after a careful examination of the hilly passes, determined to head the onslaught, while his companion in arms, with Hanyost, to mark out his prey, should pounce upon the chieftain's wife. This being arranged, their followers were warned not to injure the female captives while cutting their defenders to pieces, and then a moment being allowed for each man to take a last look at the condition of his arms, they were led to the attack. The inhabitants of the fated village, secure in their isolated situation, aloof from the war parties of that wild district, had neglected all precaution against surprise, and were buried in sleep, when the whizzing of a grenade, that terrible, but now superseded engine of destruction, roused them from their slumbers. The missile, to which a direction had been given that carried it in a direct line through the main row of wigwams which formed the little street, went crashing among their frail frames of basket-work, and kindled the dry mats stretched over them into instant flames. And then as the startled warriors leaped all naked and unarmed from their blazing lodges, the French pikemen, waiting only for a volley from the musketeers, followed it up with a charge still more fatal. The wretched savages were slaughtered like sheep in the shambles. Some, overwhelmed with dismay, sank unresisting upon the ground, and covering up their heads after the Indian fashion when resigned to death, awaited the fatal stroke without a murmur; others, seized with a less benumbing panic, sought safety in flight, and rushed upon the pikes that lined the forest's paths around them. Many there were, however, who, schooled to scenes as dreadful, acquitted themselves like warriors. Snatching their weapons from the greedy flames, they sprang with irresistible fury upon the bristling files of pikemen. Their heavy war-clubs beat down and splintered the fragile spears of the Europeans, whose corselets, ruddy with the reflected fires mid which they fought, glinted back still brighter sparks from the hatchets of flint which crashed against them. The fierce veterans pealed the charging cry of many a wellfought field in other climes; but wild and high the Indian whoop rose shrill above the din of conflict, until the hovering raven in mid air caught up and answered that discordant shriek. De Grais, in the meantime, surveyed the scene of action with eager intentness, expecting each moment to see the paler features of the Christian captive among the dusky females who ever and anon sprang shrieking from the blazing lodges, and were instantly hurled backward into the flames by fathers and brothers, who even thus would save them from the hands that vainly essayed to grasp their distracted forms. The Mohawks began now to wage a more successful resistance, and just when the fight was raging hottest, and the high-spirited Frenchman, beginning to despair of his prey, was about launching into the midst of it, he saw a tall warrior who had hitherto been forward in the conflict, disengage himself from the melée, and wheeling suddenly upon a soldier, who had likewise separated from his party, brain him with a tomahawk, before he could make a movement in his defence. The quick eye of the young chevalier, too, caught a glance of another figure, in pursuit of whom, as she emerged with an infant in her arms, from a lodge on the farther side of the village, the luckless Frenchman had met his doom. It was the Christian captive, the wife of Kiodago, beneath whose hand he had fallen. The chieftain now stood over the body of his victim, brandishing a war-club which he had snatched from a dying Indian near. Quick as thought, De Grais levelled a pistol at his head, when the track of the flying girl brought her directly in his line of sight, and he withheld his fire. Kiodago, in the mean time, had been cut off from the rest of his people by the soldiers, who closed in upon the space which his terrible arm had a moment before kept open. A cry of agony escaped the high-souled savage, as he saw how thus his last hope was lost. He made a gesture, as if about to rush again into the fray, and sacrifice his life with his tribesmen; and then perceiving how futile must be the act, he turned on his heel, and bounded after his retreating wife, with arms outstretched to shield her from the dropping shots of the enemy. The uprising sun had now lighted up the scene, but all this passed so instantaneously that it was impossible for De Grais to keep his eye upon the fugitives amid the shifting forms that glanced continually before him; and when accompanied by Hanyost and seven others, he had got fairly in pursuit, Kiodago, who still kept behind his wife, was far in advance of the chevalier and his party. Her forest training had made the Christian captive as fleet of foot as an Indian maiden. She heard, too, the cheering voice of her beloved warrior behind her, and pressing her infant in her arms, she urged her flight over crag and fell, and soon reached the head of a rocky pass, which it would take some moments for any but an American forester to scale. But the indefatigable Frenchmen are urging their way up the steep; the cry of pursuit grows nearer as they catch a sight of her husband through the thickets, and the agonising wife finds her onward progress prevented by a ledge of rock that impends above her. But now again Kiodago is by her side; he has lifted his wife to the cliff above, and placed her infant in her arms; and already, with renewed activity, the Indian mother is speeding on to a |