fered by your victims ! A whole life passed in tears, is not too much for the expiation of such a crime. Yet the treasures of divine mercy are immense. Relying on your repentance, and full of confidence in the exhaustible goodness of God, I think I can assure you of his pardon.'

The priest then rose up. The beggar, as if animated by a new life, got out of bed and knelt down. The Abbé Paulin de Saint C. was going to pronounce the powerful words which bind or loosen the sins of man, when the beggar cried out:

"Father, wait!" before I receive God's pardon, let me get rid of the fruit of my crime. Take these objects, sell them, distribute the price to the poor." In his hasty movements, the beggar snatched away the crape which covered the two pictures. "Behold!" said he,- -"behold the august images of

my masters !"

At this sight the Abbé Paulin de Saint C. let these words escape:-" My father! my mother!"

Immediately, the remembrance of that horrible catastrophe, the presence of the assassin, the sight of those objects, seized upon the soul of the priest, and yielded to an unexpected emotion, he fell upon a chair. His head leaning on his hands, he shed abundant tears; a deep wound had opened afresh in his heart.

The beggar, overpowered, not daring to lift up his looks on the son of his masters, on the terrible and angry judge, who owed him vengeance rather than pardon, rolled himself at his feet, bedewed them with tears, and repeated, in a tone of despair-" My master! my master!”

The priest endeavoured, without looking at him, to check his grief. The beggar cried out :

"Yes, I am an assassin, a monster, an infamous wretch! M. Abbé, dispose of my life! What must I do to avenge you?"

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Avenge me!" replied the priest, recalled to himself by these words" avenge me, unhappy man!"

"Was I not then right in saying that my crime was beyond pardon! I knew it well, that religion itself would repulse me. Repentance will avail nothing to a criminal of so deep a dye; there is no forgiveness for me-no more pardon-no forgiveness !"

These last words, pronounced with a terrible accent, reached to the soul of the priest, his mission and his duties. The struggle between filial grief and the exercise of his sacred

functions ceased immediately. Human weakness had for a moment claimed the tears of the saddened son. Religion then stirred the soul of the servant of God. The priest took hold of the crucifix, his paternal inheritance, which had fallen into the hands of this unhappy man, and presenting it to the beggar, he said, in the strong accents of emotion :

"Christian, is your repentance sincere?"

"Yes."

"Is your crime the object of profound horror?" "Yes."

"Our God, immolated on this cross by men, grants you pardon! Finish your confession."

Then the priest, with one hand uplifted over the beggar, holding in the other the sign of the redemption, bade the divine mercy descend on the assassin of his whole family!

With his face against the earth, the beggar remained immoveable at the priest's feet. The latter stretched out his hand to raise him up-he was no more!

The violet peeps from its emerald bed,
And rivals the azure in hue overhead:

To the breeze, sweeping by on invisible wings,

Its gift of rich odour the young lily flings,

And the silvery brook in the greenwood is heard

Sweetly blending its tones with the song of the bird

The swallow is dipping his wing in the tide.
And the aspect of earth is to grief unallied;
Ripe fruit blushes now on the strawberry vine,

And the trees of the woodland their arms intertwine;
Forming shields which the sun pierceth not with his ray-
Screening delicate plants from the broad eye of day.
Oft forsaking the haunts and the dwellings of men,
I have sought out the depths of the forest and glen;
And the presence of June, making vocal each bough,
Would drive the dark shadow of care from my brow:
The rustling of leaves, the blithe hum of the bee,
Than the music of viols is sweeter to me.

When the rose bends with dew on her emerald throne,
And the wren to her perch in the forest hath flown;
When the musical thrush is asleep on its nest,
And the red bird is in her light hammock at rest;
When sunlight no longer gilds streamlet aud hill,
Is heard thy sad anthem, oh sad whip poor-will!

Brightest month of the year! when thy chaplet grows pale,

I shall mourn, for the bearer of health is thy gale:

The pear! that young Beauty weaves in her dark hair,
In clearness can ne'er with thy waters compare ;

Nor yet can the ruby or amethyst vie

With the tint of thy rose, or the hue of thy sky!

THE VIRGINS OF THE VALHALLAH.

THE largest lake in Asiatic Russia is situated in the southern part of the province of Irkutsk, and is called by the inhabitants, the Baikal. This immense reservoir, no less than one hundred and fifty miles in length, and of unfathomable depth, is bordered on every side by ranges of rugged mountains, inhabited only by monsters of the forest that roam in their native solitudes unmolested by man. The outlet of this inland-sea which is fed by many considerable streams, is the river Enissey, that discharges its waters into the Arctic ocean, and on the banks of which, not many miles from its source in the Baikal, stands the city of Irkutsk, capital of the province of the same name.

It is in cousequence of the seclusion of this city, and the loneliness of those inhospitable regions of untrodden wilderness which surround it, rather than any accidental circumstance, that the czars of Muscovy, from the time of Peter the Great, have selected this spot as the place of exile for those unfortunate individuals who chance to incur the displeasure or suspicion of the emperor.

Peter, the hermit of the Baikal, was one of those ill-fated victims of despotic power, distinguished from the rest more by his birth and education, his intellectual and moral endowments, his love of truth and his practice of virtue, than by any extraordinary severity in the circumstances of his banishment. He was permitted to pursue any mode of life as his taste might direct him, with the single limitation that he must never return to his native country, nor even quit the province of Irkutsk, on penalty of instant death.

A small portion of the avails of his confiscated estates had been allotted to him for the purpose of sustaining existence in the barren region of his exile, without the necessity of labourfor he was totally unacquainted with all the arts of life, having been educated in the very palace of the czar. With this little income, which was transmitted to him annually from St. Petersburgh, he contrived by the aid of economy to purchase food and raiment, and moreover to provide himself with a small boat, a fowling-piece, and other implements necessary for hunting in the mountains and fishing upon the lake. furnished, and supplied with provisions for a longer voyage than had ever before been attempted on the dark waters of the the Baikal, he left the city early in the month of June of the year preceding the destruction of the armies of Napoleon by

Thus

the fires and the snows of Russia. And yet the exiled hunter was so remote from the scenes of his childhood, that he had never heard, when he launched his little boat on the waters of the lonely lake, that the ancient capital of the empire had been consigned to the flames by the well-judged patriotism of the self-immortalized Rothtopschin, governor of Moscow. He was not wholly unacquainted with the navigation of the lake in the neighbourhood of Irkutsk, for he had made one or two short excursions with an old fisherman along its rocky shores, and had learned the method of taking several species of excellent fish that abounded in its waters. But to launch a frail skiff on the boisterous Baikal, with the rash design of seeking his solitary fortunes along its unknown shores, far from the abodes of men, was an undertaking suited only to the feelings of a being of cultivated intellect, stimulated to utter recklessness by the cruelty of his fellow-man.

It was only when the sky was serene and the surface of the lake in comparative repose, that he found in the scenery around him a painful contrast to his own mental condition, as he plied the slender oars that were urging him onward to the scene of some untried adventure; but when the breath of the tempest came down from the summits of the mountains, to dash the tumultuous waves into the deep caverns of the shore-when the sun was darkened by storms, and the responsive thunders talked together angrily in the clouds-then it was that the wandering exile felt a sympathy with nature, while his bounding bark rocked him to repose amid the foam of the billows.

During eight days and nights had he pursued his perilous voyage along the northern shore of the lake, without discovering a solitary spot where he could moor his skiff and effect a landing. One unbroken front of perpendicular rock, not less than three hundred feet in elevation in the lowest parts, and frequently rising to five hundred and a thousand, presented an obstacle that no animal but the feathered tribes could surmount. Sometimes he rested on his oars, for the purpose of shooting the large birds of various curious species that flew in thousands around his boat; sometimes he amused himself with his fishing-line, and found no difficulty in supplying himself in this manner with abundance of food in the absence of vegetables and fruits, which he always preferred to every form of animal sustenance; sometimes, when the weather was calm, he wrapped himself in his blanket, in the night season, and indulged himself in the luxury of a few hours' sleep on the bottom of his boat; but at all other times he plied his oars to the

utmost of his strength, as if to remove himself as far as possible from the habitations of men.

Towards evening on the eighth day of his pilgrimage, a bright sun revealed to him, a little ahead of his boat, one of those remarkable freaks of nature which render the Baikal so interesting an object to the man of science, and a place of superstitious dread to the unlettered vulgar.

Near the summit of the cliff that overhangs the margin of the lake, he discovered two human heads of gigantic dimensions, formed from the solid rock, having all the prominent features of the human countenance, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and even hair. The two images differ considerably in magnitude, but agree in this one particular, that among all the rocky formations of our globe there is not known to exist elsewhere, in any country, so striking a natural resemblance to the head and face of man.

When the exile first discovered this twin prodigy of nature, he withdrew his oars from the water, placed them by his side in the boat, and rose upon his feet to gaze upon what he thought a supernatural phenomenon.

As his boat glided past before a light breeze, he became convinced that these effigies of his species had been cut in the imperishable rock either by the hand of time or by its eternal Author, for such a work was evidently superior to all the efforts of the human race. On approaching nearer by the aid of his oars, he perceived that the mouth, eyes and ears of each of the images were great caverns in the rock, and that what he had thought the hair, was a covering of forest-trees waving in the wind. The last rays of the setting sun fell warm upon these vast palisades of stone, extending on either hand as far as the eye could range, and enabled the admiring visitor to perceive that the mouth of the larger monster afforded a passage for vast numbers of those large sea-fowls that live upon the fish of the Baikal, in the same manner as the inhabitants of palaces and cities depend for subsistence on the patient labours of the industrious tenantry of the country, and as the idle and useless master battens on the muscles and sinews of his bleeding and starving slave.

These voracious birds were about retiring to rest in the crevices and caverns of the rocks, and had collected in vast numbers along the shore, screaming their hoarse farewell to the departing day. The exile took his gun, loaded it deep with double ball, and discharged it at random into the noisy flock. The effect was soon evident, for a large bird, wounded in the