sanguinary feeling which in blood would quench those rivals. If such times come, which God avert, we shall have to seek a refuge and a home with those of our reformed church, who have gone before us, in that country which has ever been the asylum of miseryin that clime, which, peopled by those who would surrender no part of their enthusiastic devotion, can yet receive into its bosom those who will fight, and having fought the good fight, will retire with their faith strong, and their religion pure and unspotted, as from their Master it was received.

We envy not the feelings of the ma who can refuse his assistance to this society, who will coldly deny his cooperation with those who have devoted their time and talents to the forwarding of this good work. There are men who will with apathy listen to the cry and petition of a starving orphan, and go in to their meal, and with hardened heart, return their polluted thanks for the load of luxury before them, and with such would we rank the man who with the name of a Protestant in his mouth, would refuse his mite to the upholding of his religion-religion, did we say why the man must be an infidel who professing one set of tenets, yet upholds by practice the dogmas diametrically opposed to them. It is not too late to retrieve this foul disgrace; but if the Protestant population do not come forward at once and in earnest, and by acts not words, shew their intention to support that reformed church, by whose name they are called, and to aid those men who in this instance are really anxious for its support; then we must still hold that it is better that the Protestant farmer should leave Ireland for ever, to settle in a land where he may worship his God in open profession of his creed-than to remain in this unhappy, misguided country, where such profession would mark him out for the deadly hate of those who do God honour, by defacing his image in their peaceable Protestant neighbours.There is yet another reason for the ardent support of the Protestant Colonization Society of Ireland; when this most meritorious society was founded, the framers drew upon themselves the eyes of all such in Britain, as took an interest in upholding the Established church, in the very strong hold of Popery, and we much fear that the cold

and indifferent manner in which the members of this church have regarded this society, has given cause to our brethren in England and Scotland to esteem us as lukewarm in the defence of our religion, and to our enemies to rejoice in our seeming despair, when Heaven knows we are to a man ready to forfeit wealth, competency, aye, our very lives, if we can but uphold our religious liberty; and yet, these sneerers have but too much reason to revert to this biting accusation; when they see this society, formed for such important purposes, suffered to languish and pine away for want of the pitiful sum which their occasions require. On the Protestants of Ireland both clergy and laiety, rich and poor, lies the duty of wiping out this blot; on them does it lie in a twofold manner-as a political remedy for a political evil, and as a Christian method of upholding what they are bound to believe is the true church. Not only to this society in particular are they bound to contribute, but to each and all that have the same glorious end in view: without such support, they will have no church of which to be pastors, no religion by whose name they may be called; unless such contribution be made, they will have no riches, with which to enjoy their own happiness, or add to the precarious comforts of the poor. The Protestants of Ireland are by their too general apathy committing a political felo de se, by their misdeeds we would suppose them to be a weak, crushed, paralysed body, and but for the noble pre-eminence of the stand made by the Conservative phalanx, which indeed has retrieved our name, we would be tempted to treat the members of the Established church of Ireland with such epithets as are more properly applied to the foolish, misguided, blind, and headstrong whigs and liberals. Let us hope that this stand is but the commencement of such a display of Protestant strength, that it may alike strike terror to the recreant hearts of our foes, and arouse the dormant courage and spirit of our friends. Nor let it be thought merely visionary dreaming of the founders of this Colonization Society, who hope to arrest the progress of the Protestant Emigration they have located already some families who were on the point of embarkation; and from a club formed in Belfast for the express purpose of as

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Reader! have you altogether forgotten the details, which, in a former chapter, I laid before you, or has your interest been sufficiently excited, to make you desire a continuance of them. Have you read the narrative, as an amusing tale that might while away a tedious hour, and then thought no more upon it? or have you felt, that in all its dark and dismal scenes, there was a something in which you might feel a deeper concern than the false and imaginative excitement produced by the mere fictions of romance. It has been but a history of passion— passion such as still is doing its work of misery and death throughout the world.

Look at the scenes I have presented to you, and at those which are acted in the theatre of life-look abroad among your fellow-men, and see if vice does not still array herself in all the borrowed lustre wherewith she would conceal her foul and hideous formlook if the shrine of passion be not still wet with the tears of the deserted and the injured, and the unholy flame upon her altar bedewed with human blood, and the walls of her temple covered with the black catalogue of human suffering.-Look then into your own heart, and see if in its dark recesses, there lurk not all those feelings, which need but the magic call of some new

and powerful excitement, to evoke them from their hiding-place, to join in the wild and fiendish revel of cursed and unrestrained excess. Say not, as one of old, "Am I a dog that I should do this thing?" In the bosom of every fallen child of mortality are the elements of passion wilder than what imagination ever yet pourtrayed.

Check then each rising throb of your heart that beats with an unholy pulseRemember what the wisest of men hath said, "He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city."

I now must return to the task I have begun, and complete the melancholy narrative that tradition has handed down, through the generations that have gone by since the period of its events. Many years have elapsed since first, in my childish days, I listened to this tale, and still it is fresh upon my memory, as if I had but heard it yesterday, and its details are vividly present to my mind, as though I had been an eye-witness to them all, and my heart mourns as I take up my pen to write them downchequered as they are by sin and sorrow. Oh! I can never write upon the guilt and misery of my fellow-men, without a tear blotting my paper, as I

think of the evil and wretchedness that spreads throughout God's fair world, that world which once its Creator pronounced to be "very good." Once was

it all lovely and fair, and purity and happiness claimed it as their abode, but now all is changed; the roses and the lilies are withered in that which once was the garden of the Lord; the enemy has been there, and desolation marks his traces; and it is now but a howling wilderness. The cries of the fatherless and orphan are borne upon every breeze, and the groans of those who are racked by sickness, or torn by remorse, and the sighs of the slave in his prison-house, and the captive in his dungeon, all attest the bitter consequences of the rebellion of man against his Maker.

Months had rolled on from the evening on which M'Naghten parted with Julia, under the promise of returning in a few hours, and never had they met since.

Colonel K- was violent, but changeable. His anger was easily excited, but was seldom of long duration. Enraged at his daughter's opposition to his desire, that she should unite herself to Lord S the nobleman already alluded to, he had taken his daughter away from those scenes with which were associated her recollections of affection for M'Naghten, in the vain hope, that when absent from these, she might forget him. In obedience to her father's wishes, she returned to him all those pledges of affection which he had bestowed on her, but she could not bring her heart to part with that ring which was the token of his plighted faith. She kept it secretly, and many a bitter tear did she shed over it. Her father loved her ardently and sincerely -and when he saw that the damask had fled from her cheek, and that sorrow was preying upon her soul, he could no longer bear to thwart her wishes. He returned to Glenarm, his beautiful residence near Derry, determined to sacrifice his own ambitious projects to her peace of mind, and resolved, if his daughter should still retain her affection for the object of her former love, to present no further obstacles to their union.

It was almost immediately after his return, that Edmund and Margaret unexpectedly met in the ball-room, and it was with no little surprise, that, on following his daughter to a room where she had been carried in a faint, he found her pale and agitated, and M'Naghten gazing on her with an ex

pression of the most tender solicitude. M'Naghten's brow darkened as he entered, and Margaret trembled with excess of agitation. The veteran was moved. He held out his hand, and with a voice almost choked by emotion, he said, M'Naghten, can you forgive?" The young officer grasped the proffered hand, and a "soldier's tear" dropped upon it, as he warmly shook it.

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Yet, even at this melting moment, there was in Edmund's breast a contest between his feelings and his sense of what was right, and to Colonel K's invitation to his mansion, fidelity to Julia at first made him answer in the negative, but when Margaret seconded her father's request by looks more eloquent than angel's words, he could no longer resist the tide of passion that swelled within his soul. He hesitated for a moment, and thought of her whom he had left alone and ruined, and he wavered still-but just while his resolution was undecided, he perceived on Margaret's finger the brilliant token that reminded him of his vow. It was enough-he yielded to her father's repeated invitations, and that very night, he accompanied them home.

Yet was it not in premeditated infidelity to Julia, that he thus acted-he went to enjoy, as he imagined, the pleasing vision that soon must vanish for ever-to enjoy the society of his beloved one for a few short days, and then, bidding her an eternal farewell, resign himself to one whom he felt he did not love, but to whom a destiny he could not control, had bound him by indissoluble ties. Ah, how often do we charge on our fate those misfortunes, which are the result of our follies, and excuse ourselves by believing, that we acted under influences beyond ourselves

while, in truth, the demon that draws us on in our reckless course, is but the power of our own ungovernable passions.

But did he keep the resolution he had formed? did he tear himself from the idol of his soul, and sacrifice his feelings on the shrine of honour, and fidelity and truth? Need I answer, he did not? A few short days, he had fixed as the limit to his enjoyment of Margaret's society, and then he was to leave her never more to meet on this side the grave, but in those few days his passion gathered strength, until it became his master. As he sat beside

her, and gazed upon her pale cheek, from which love for him had chased the rosy hue, and as she poured, in the simplicity of confiding love, into his ear the tale of her anxieties and her sorrows, while she pined in absence, and as she explained every thing that might have seemed strange in her conduct, and dwelt upon the love that never once had cooled within her breast, he felt his soul to burn as with fire. And how could he bring himself to say farewell! They know not how potent is the spell of love, who vainly deem that they can quaff the witching cup by measure, and dash, when they please the draught of enchantment from their lips. The pleadings of passion, like the Siren's melody, must not be listened to, or they will too surely and too fatally be obeyed.

Autumn had deepened into winterand the days were nearly at their shortest. It was the dusk of a December evening-the dark clouds fled heavily along the sky, and the blast was whistling through the naked branches of the old trees that surrounded Glenarm. Edmund and Margaret were standing together in the windowed niche of an apartment looking across the waters of the Foyle, as they sullenly reflected in their bosom the blackness of the heavens. Their marriage-day was fixed, which M Naghten had long put off from some undefined dread that rested on his mind-the gloom of a guilty conscience; but all was now settled, and in one short week, they were to enter on the tenderest relation of which humanity is capable, and Edmund was now standing with his arm round the waist of his betrothed onelooking out on the dreary gloominess of the scene. The withered leaves, the relics of last Autumn's wreck were whirled in wreaths by the eddies of the wind, and here and there a solitary deer was seen bounding across the lawn, and seeking in the nearest thicket a cover from the piercing blast. They observed a horseman riding at a rapid pace along the avenue-with a cloak buttoned across his throat, and his face almost entirely concealed. He dismounted at the door, and handing a small packet to the servant, he remounted, and rode off as rapidly as he had come. His motions hardly excited their attention further than as his appearance served to diversify the dull

monotony of the scene. But a short time after his departure, a summons came to Margaret, to attend her father in his study, and M'Naghten was left to solitude and his own reflections. A considerable time elapsed, and the usual hour of dinner passed unnoticed. M'Naghten paced the room, and wondered what could be the cause of her long absence; the shades of night closed deeper in around, but just under the window, he perceived a groom leading his own horse, saddled and bridled, and ready for the road. He threw up the window, and eagerly enquired the cause-the man answered, that it was by his master's directions. He was confounded, but soon accounted for it by the supposition, that some domestic calamity had occurred, of which intelligence had been brought by the rider he had seen, and that his services were required perhaps to go on some errand as the friend of the family. With a beating heart he hurried to the door of Colonel K's study, and as he knocked, he distinctly recognised inside, the well-known tones of Margaret's voice in earnest expostulation; he knocked again and louder, without an answer, but on his third knock, the door was opened, and he met, just on the threshhold, Margaret, leaning on her father's arm, her eyes streaming with tears; he attempted to grasp her hand, Colonel K— dashed his arm aside, and, in a commanding tone, said, "Sir, your business must now be with me, my daughter can no longer meet you as she has done, until you satisfy my mind upon some points which I shall mention to you in private," and with these words he passed rapidly on. Edmund attempted to stop him, but in vain.

He then determined upon following them, and not surrendering even to a father, her whom he now regarded as his own. With a heart throbbing with the pulses of the most violent emotion, he walked quickly after them along the corridor, until they turned off by a door which led to a different wing of the house. Almost in phrenzy, he made a struggle to rush in by the same passage, but here too he was foiled; the nervous arm of the veteran with ease repelled his effort, and before he could recover himself from the effects of the impulse he received, the door through which they went had closed, and he heard the shooting of a ponderous bolt