his endeavours to obtain fortune and preferment by one of the dearest and purest motives which can incite the buman bosom. Here Margaret turned round with a something of dignified displeasure, which seemed to reprobate this little delicate allusion to her past history. I proceeded as though I marked not her emotion.—Francillon was under an engagement to a young and lovely compatriot, whose image was the idol of his bosom, but whose name, from natural and sacred feelings, had never passed his lip to human being. Here I thought Margaret seemed to breathe again. So I told my history simply and feelingly, and painted my grief on hearing of the death of Margaret with such depth of colouring, that I had well nigh identified the narrator with the subject of his biography. She said, in a peculiar tone, with which an assumed carelessness in vain struggled, 'It is singular that a married man should have thus grieved over the object of an unextinguished attachment.'—'Captain Francillon,' I observed, 'was not married until five years after the period we speak of,—when he gave his hand to one of whom I trust he has too much manly feeling ever to speak save with the tender respect she merited, but to whom ho candidly confessed that he brought but a blighted heart, the better half of whose affections lay buried in the grave of her who had first inspired them.'
I continued my history—brought myself to Malta, and placed myself on board an English vessel. Here, I confess, my courage half-failed me; but I went on.—'Francillon,' I said, 'now began to realize his return to his native land. On the first night of his voyage, he threw himself, in meditative mood, on the deck, and half in tbought, half in dreams, recalled former scenes. But there was one form which constantly arose before his imagination. He dreamed, too, of somethbing—I know not what—of a pilgrimage to tbe lone grave of her he had loved and lost; and tben a change came upon his slumbering fancy, and he seemed to be ploughing some solitary and dismal sea; but even there a form appeared to him, whose voice thrilled on his ear, and whose eye, though it had waxed cold to him, made his heart heave with strange and unwonted emotion. He awoke—but oh!—the vision vanished not. Still in the moonlight he saw her who bad risen on his dreams. Francillon started up. The figure he gazed on hastily retreated. He followed her in time to raise her from the fall her precipitate flight had occasioned, and discovered that she whom he beheld was indeed the object of his heart's earliest and best feelings—was Margaret Cameron!' I believe my respiration almost failed me as thus ended.
