perhaps darker, but the affection of Eliza was greater than ever. Such was the unadorned sincerity of his manners, and the disinterested path he pursued, that Augustus, who often regretted there was no prospect of Eliza ever seeing Colin, now rejoiced there was some hopes of rendering agreeable the future life of his sister; for the idea had never forsaken his mind, that there was more than ordinary civility on Eliza's part to Colin; but the distress, the joy, and affection of the young lady, were not now to be measured by the cool rules of arithmetic; in the billows of affliction, and the transports of joy, the power of numbers loses all its force. The sympathy and interest raised by the fate of St.Clyde's family, gave a new elevation to sentiments of the most noble and devoted affection; and the misfortunes of Ellen and Colin left nothing in the breast of Mr. Stuart's fa

mily, but the communion and consolation of long-established and muchtried friendship.

The very mention of the Laird St. Clyde brought strings of pearly drops from the eyes of Eliza; the afflictions of Colin gave him a relation to every branch of Mr. Stuart's family, and endeared him to Eliza much beyond the general tone of sympathizing nature.

Mr. Stuart now lived in the house of his son Augustus, and he asked Colin if he would not make his son's house his home whilst he remained in Edinburgh. The reply in the affirmative produced a sensation in the breast of Eliza, which her elegant manners and good sense served well to develope. But those who have seen, with a discerning eye, the form of beauty sorrowing through a smile beyond the power of language; those in whose breast, in all the bloom of youth, there have been

deeply sown affliction's bitterest thorns; those who have seen an elegance of strong attractive grief or mien that masked inexorable anguish ; those who have heard the whispering friend disclose with tremulous eloquence her boundless confidence in Heaven's ample goodness; those who have seen a humble and resigned soul succumbing to the impenetrable ways of Providence; these are they who can paint to imagination's fertile eye, the object on whom with wondrous gaze St. Clyde now looked, and looking loved.

The evening was spent in a manner that the votaries of folly could not envy, for they could have no participation in it. There the sympathizing mind, the recollections of the wrongs of fate, the woes of St. Clyde's family, called into exercise every charm of wisdom and of worth; for the softening soul of Eliza, that had learned with what energy the

hand of virtue and of friendship should mingle in the bitter tide of passion swelling with distress and pain to mitigate the sharp with gracious drops of cordial pleasure, now showed itself by the kindest looks that turned St. Clyde's heart to rapture, and produced that endearment which nature gives to mutual friendship.

When St. Clyde retired to rest that evening, the transitions of his mind were as quick as the sweeping gale on the land, and on the deep; and thought crowded upon thought, and image piled upon image, and persons and places, though far asunder, the dead and the living, past afflictions and prospective bliss, all rushed upon his mind in undistinguished precedency, each thought brushing over with successive dark oblivion all traces of its predecessor. But the name of Villejuive, the letter Levingstone hinted at, the impervious

conduct of his uncle, bade defiance to St.Clyde's efforts to get one night's solid sleep; and he arose in the morning tired by watching, and chafed in mind by the bitterness of his thoughts, and the horror to which he was reduced by the inferences he drew from a close examination of the things that had transpired in Bute since his visit to Mull.