her heart. A sad, melancholy smile played for a moment across her pale
wrinkled face, and her glazed eyes kindled into a fleeting expressing of
frightful gladness, as she feebly exclaimed, "Do you feel? One!--one!--one!
--and hardly that--I breathe only from here," she continued, pointing to
her throat. "Feel!--feel!--one!--one!--another!--how I gasp--see!--see--"

She ceased to speak; the hand which retained Peverell's relaxed its
hold--her head dropped--one long-drawn sigh was heaved--and poor Madge
resigned a being touched with sympathies and feelings not often found
in natures of nobler quality, in the world's catalogue of nobility. If,
among the thousand doors which death holds open for mortal man to pass
through, ere he puts on immortality, there be one, the rarest of them
all, for broken hearts, this hapless creature found it. A self accusing
spirit bowed her to the earth, with the sharpest of all griefs--a
mother's anguish for an only child--lost to her, as gamesters lose
fortunes--thrown away by her own hand.

* * * * *


FITZMAURICE THE MAGICIAN.


"_I have lived three hundred years!_ In that time--in all that time, I
have never seen the glorious sun descend, but followed still its rolling
course through the regions of illimitable space. I have shivered on the
frozen mountains of the icy north, and fainted beneath the sultry skies of
the blazing east: the swift winds have been my viewless chariot, and on
their careering wings I have been hurried from clime to clime. But, nor
light, nor air, nor heat, nor cold, have been to me as to the rest of my