The utter destitution to which she was thus suddenly reduced, crushed the feeble remnant of that spirit which had so long buffeted with adversity. In his first terror, Mr. Cranfield (who had a sort of animal affection for his offspring) professed his eagerness to indemnify her loss, as it had been sustained in consequence of her compliance with his own wishes. But when he found that his son was beyond danger, that no halter in England was long enough to reach him, and that paying the money would benefit neither him nor himself, he offered her the loan of fifty pounds, with an assurance that he would never "trouble her," though "for mere form's sake he would take a bill of sale of her furniture." Necessity must accept, not stipulate, conditions. Mrs. Coventry, scarcely knowing what she did, and anxious only to meet present exigences, thankfully closed with what, in the humility of her indigence, she deemed the almost generous proposal of Mr. Cranfield. It was sufficient for her remaining wants in this world! Three weeks after the dreadful shock, she breathed her last.

Mr. Cranfield kept his word. He did not "trouble" the wretched sufferer. Nay, the day after her death, he employed a broker to value the furniture; and upon his estimate, gave orders, at his own cost, for a decent funeral. When this was over, he completed the sale; paid himself, (with a month's interest); paid the undertaker, (with a discount of five per cent); gave the poor orphan a guinea for pocketmoney; and calculated, that the balance would nearly liquidate the

Charles Coventry was only fourteen when his mother died. He felt his loss, and lamented it, with more sorrow than is incident to that age; for home and mother were equivalent terms in his mind, and in losing one, he had lost both. All his thoughts, all his affections, all his wants, his pleasures, his hopes, had hitherto moved within that little circle, and revolved round the being that was its centre. There was a dreary void, a blank, a valued thing gone forever, which his young heart felt; which every moment recalled; which in sleep lay heavy upon his spirit in dim dreams; which oppressed him when he awoke ; but which no reason he was yet master of could make level to his comprehension. A deep sense of his forlorn state, of his having no human creature whom he could call sister, brother, or kinsman, possess ed him; and, it rose to a feeling of despair almost, when he entered the rooms which were once his mother's, saw them stripped of their furniture, and looked upon the bare walls, which seemed to bid him depart, for there was his home no more!

But whither should he go? Young as he was, the meal which pity set before him was bitter on his lips. The bed whereon he lay was not the place of rest his own had been. The neighbors were kind, most kind; tears would often come into his eyes at what they did for him; but there was a feeling swelling at his heart which warned him he could not be, and be that which his departed mother's prophetic fears had pictured, a "thing for charity's cold smiles." Even at this early age, a haughty, impetuous spirit of independence was kindling, and silently becoming the monitor of his actions. "Is there no work that a boy can do, to get his bread?" was the question he put one day, half angrily, half proudly, to two or three benevolent persons, whom he

heard consulting about the best means of disposing of him.

Mr. Cranfield was applied to on his behalf. "I will provide for him, for the present," said he ; "send him to me."

Charles was delighted, and went with alacrity. Mr. Cranfield was upon the point of engaging with a copying clerk at a guinea and a half per week, when he was spoken to about young Coventry. It immediately occurred to that thrifty philanthropist, he could confer two benefits at once-one upon Charles, and another upon himself. Instead of giving him a guinea and a half per week, he only gave him board and lodging, his cast-off clothes, and five shillings a month to spend or hoard, as he might choose; save that two out of the five were to be deducted for washing, which would be done at home," at much less expense to Charles, and at no expense to his master.

In the drudgery, the servile drudgery, of Mr. Cranfield, (for such he made it,) the noble-minded youth remained three years. There was nothing his generous master could put him to, however menial or fatiguing, at which he repined; and there was nothing too fatiguing, or too slavish, with which to task him. Indeed, the more labor he gave, the better he was satisfied, for then he knew he earned his food, clothes, and lodging-a reflection precious to his proud nature. "I have a RIGHT to them," he would often mentally exclaim; and that sense of right would have given to a mouldy crust and a drop of water, a flavor which not the delicacies of a palace could have had for him without it. In the midst of all his toil, too, he still found time, while others slept, to lay in a store of various knowledge; devoting his three shillings a-month, not to buying books, which would have poorly fed his eager appetite for them, but to subscribing for their perusal at a large circulating library in the neighborhood.

It was to be supposed, that a mind like his, as its energies ripened, would find the vassalage of Mr. Cranfield's service insufferably irksome; and the more so, because of an increasing contempt for his sordid character. He longed for a wider and a better sphere of action; but in all his aspirations, he traced as its boundary the sturdy principle, that he would have his worth, and no more.

"A million should not content me," he would sometimes cry, when meditating on the future, "if something within told me my pricc was greater; but, by the same rule, less than the least that ever satisfied a human being shall suffice me, if so it ought to be."

About this time, the second son of Mr. Cranfield left school; and as his father considered that he must find him in board and lodging, clothes and washing, it would be an economical arrangement to put him in the place of Charles. The advantages were so obvious, that hesitation was out of the question.

"I shall not want you, Mr. Coventry, after next Friday," was all the notification he thought it necessary to give one Monday morning.

Very well, sir," was Charles's reply, as he continued the writing he was upon, while the curl of his lip spoke more scorn than his tongue could have uttered.

"We'll say nothing about the washing for this month," observed Mr. Cranfield, when Friday night came, and he put half-a-crown into his hand.

"It wants a fortnight of the month, sir," replied Charles calmly, as he laid the half crown upon the table. "Take your shilling, and give me my eighteenpence. To that I have a right."

an

Mr. Cranfield was struck with admiration. He took back the half crown, and gave him eighteenpence. "You are honorable young man," said he, shaking him warmly by the hand. "Your heart is in the right place; you'll be a shining character yet. I trust I know how

to appreciate such delicacy of feeling. You have my best wishes for your welfare, go where you may. God bless you, and good night."

With these words the door of Mr. Cranfield was closed upon him; and with the eighteenpence in his pocket, a small bundle under his arm, and his "heart in the right place," as the worthy Mr. Cranfield observed, did Charles Coventry turn from it to "go where he might."

It was summer time; the weather sultry in the extreme; the moon shining brightly; and without knowing whither he bent his steps, without indeed thinking where he was going, for his mind was a chaos of tumultuous thoughts, he found himself in the midst of the fields. He followed the path that lay before him. It brought him into a narrow lane, with lofty trees on each side, which interlaced their branches at the top, forming a verdant canopy too thick for the moon to penetrate. He paused a moment to consider whether he should go to the right or left. He had no motive for choice, but turned mechanically to the right. He soon perceived he was ascending a somewhat steep hill, and when he gained the summit, seated himself on the trunk of a tree to take breath.

And now was the first moment he began to think. All, till now, had been a rapid succession of dreams; one unbroken series of visionary abstractions, which had passed through his mind. He burst into a loud laugh; clapped his hands, and chuckled like an over-joyed child.

"Let me ask counsel of you, my friends," he continued with a laugh, "Will you buy me a bed to-night? Aye, say ye, if I will go without a dinner to-morrow. But when tomorrow comes, there will still be a to-morrow, and another, and another, to the end of time; while thy ending will be with the to-morrow's sundown and then "

He paused suddenly; he examined closely the money he held-he chinked one piece against the other

and then burst into a louder and longer fit of laughter.

"Does the devil hoodwink his own?" he cried. "Yea, doth he; for only by such a trick could this have happened. I said right when I called it a golden beginning. It is a guinea I look upon; twenty-one shillings and sixpence; and so, twenty times a more precious philosophy than I took it to be. Now, had a man who knew the honest value of a guinea been self-cheated thus, I would retread every step I have taken to do him right; but it would be a sin to steal from so poor a wretch, in virtue, as is he who was my master, the blessings he will purchase from every want of mine which his involuntary bounty shall relieve. So to your hiding place again-and now, God speed me!"

It was very true, that Mr. Cranfield had given a guinea instead of a shilling. It is no less true, that when he discovered his mistake, he set the matter right, by withdrawing his subscription for one year from a lying-in charity to which he belonged, for the benefit of having his wife's poor relations delivered at their own houses.

without a friend; without the means to procure the first; almost without the wish to possess the second. From the moment when Mr. Cranfield's Spartan annunciation rung in his astonished ears-" I shall not want you after next Friday "--he had determined in his own mind, that that "next Friday" should be to him the hegira of his life-his point of departure in the world's voyage :-and though he knew he was to set sail without chart or compass, a sort of reckless fascination, suited to his romantic spirit, seemed to dwell upon his resolve. "I can live where there are men to serve," was his frequent exclamation during the interval and with this feeling at its climax, he turned his back upon the door of Mr. Cranfield.

But there is a difference, which only experience discovers, between romantic intentions, and romantic performances. When we revel in the former, we are like the simple country wench, who reckoned up all the things she would buy with the produce of her pail of milk; and when we begin the latter, we very often give the untoward kick which scatters our anticipated delights in the dust. Our hero was already approximating towards such a catastrophe. Tired, drowsy, with an inconvenient appetite, (all of them mere common propensities of vulgar mortality,) the poetical qualities of his situation were fast losing their hold upon his imagination. There was no picturesque bank of violets upon which he could repose; no woodbine bower, the haunt of Dryads or of fairies, with a crystal stream purling through it, which invited him to seek silvan slumbers in its cool recess; no cottage chimney,sending up its wreaths of pale-blue smoke, (the fragrant vapor of turf or greenwood bough,) between two aged trees,

"Where Corydon and Thyrsis met,
Are at their savory dinner set,
Of herbs, and other country messes,
Which the neat-handed Phyllis dresses."
In short, he was wandering some-

where on the confines of Middlesex and Berkshire, than which the desarts of Arabia are hardly less productive of the romantic in adventure, and he would fain have had his supper and gone to bed, than which there are no two conditions of existence less conducive to the romantic in feeling.

Again he seated himself by the road-side to rest, and sleep came over him. It was broad-day ere he awoke. He found he had not been, as he had imagined himself in his soliloquy on the top of the hill, "unseen of man," or "unheeded by him. His hat and bundle were gone.

"They would have taken my money too, I warrant, if it had not been for the fear of disturbing me.'

There was this fear, and therefore due precaution had been employed to do it without disturbing him. There was neither guinea nor sixpence in his pocket! The then possessor of both, as well as of his hat and bundle, was a Scotch pedlar; no thief by profession; one who would not go out of his way to pick a pocket; but one who had no virtue in his soul strong enough to resist picking up whatever came in his way.

Charles was confounded! The color fled from his cheek, his lip quivered, and tears of vexation, rather than of grief, stood in his eyes. He who was light-hearted, and not without hope, with a fancied eighteenpence only, as his sum of worldly wealth, felt, for the moment, as if he had lost an inheritance, because now he had not a farthing; so little capable are we of putting their true value upon either the frowns or the smiles of fortune. Despondency, however, was as foreign to his character, as it generally is to his time of life. As a matter of choice, he would rather have had his hat, his wardrobe, and his money;

as a

matter of necessity, he submitted to the privation with a very good grace, after he had done what older and wiser heads are apt to do in like

cases, adopted the prudent resolution of never running the same risk again. But could he have scen himself, he would, at least, have confessed there was now something wild, romantic, and picturesque enough in his appearance. Charles Coventry was tall for his years, perhaps about five feet nine; slim, graceful in his carriage, and his figure a perfect model of symmetry; his hair, raven black, hanging in profuse natural curls over his forehead; his features decidedly handsome; of a manly cast of beauty; and their general expression denoting a haughty firmness of mind, softened only by a bewitching smile, that seemed to play perpetually round his mouth. In his gait he was erect, carrying his head far back, and stepping along with a bounding, elastic tread, as if the earth yielded to its pressure, but returned again, with force, to give it a more vigorous spring.

Such a rover, unbonneted, unattended, wandering the highways, like a denizen of their vagrant liberties, could not be expected to pass along and rouse no wonder; fortunately for him, he roused something more than wonder in one who saw him. He came to a small village, after a walk of nearly fifteen miles, so faint with hunger, that further he felt he could not go, and sat down upon a large stone, which seemed the fragment of some ancient cross, just at the entrance of it. He had wholly forgotten the singularity of his appearance, till it was recalled to his recollection by observing a group of children gazing at him from behind a barn-door, and by noticing the blacksmith, who had left his forge, and now stood midway between it and the footpath, with a horse-shoe, half red hot, in his pincers; the said horse-shoe therein not at all resembling the blacksmith's curiosity, which was at a white heat, to make out Charles, and his business. Charles beckon ed him to approach. He advanced with a lazy, loitering step, as if he

wanted a little more time for obser vation at a distance.

"Is it possible to get employment in this place?" was his first question.

"Yes, possible enough, I take it, for we have plenty of idle poor here, who will rather starve than work."

"I would work that I may not starve," replied Charles.

"Aye," responded the blacksmith, looking at him with a dubious eye, as though he thought he was likely enough to starve, notwithstanding, if he had nothing but his work to trust to for a dinner.

"I have been robbed on the road," continued Charles. "Indeed! as how?" interrupted the Cyclops.

"While I slept."

"While you slept? Why, that's a bad look-out, young fellow; but you might expect as much, I think, in these parts, if you make the highways your bed; for we find enough to do to keep ourselves from being robbed with our eyes open."

"I am pennyless, and in want of food," added Charles; "but," fixing his eyes earnestly on the man, "I seek no charity-whatever hand supplies my necessities shall be repaid by my labor."

"I daresay it's all very true what you say; however, as you are a stranger to me, you'll not take it amiss if I don't interfere."

With these words the blacksmith hastened back to his forge, and began to ply his anvil with redoubled diligence. Charles covered his face with his hands, and felt at that moment more anguish of mind than he had ever known. He remained in this attitude, bitter forebodings crowding fast upon him, until he was roused from it by a soft female voice.

"Young man! If you please, my mistress wants to speak with you."

He looked up. A rosy-cheeked lass, with dove-like eyes, in a mob