With an exclamation of impatience, but with
his unchangeable face, the Marquis looked
out.

"How, then! What is it? Always petitions!"

"Monseigneur. For the love of the great
God! My husband, the forester."

"What of your husband, the forester?
Always the same with you people. He cannot
pay something?"

"He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead."

"Well! He is quiet. Can I restore him to
you?"

"Alas no, Monseigneur! But he lies yonder,
under a little heap of poor grass."

"Well?"

"Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps
of poor grass."

"Again, well?"

She looked an old woman, but was young. Her
manner was one of passionate grief; by turns
she clasped her veinous and knotted hands
together with wild energy, and laid one of them
on the carriage-door—tenderly, caressingly, as if
it had been a human breast, and could be expected
to feel the appealing touch.

"Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear
my petition! My husband died of want; so
many die of want; so many more will die of
want."

"Again, well? Can I feed them?"

"Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I
don't ask it. My petition is, that a morsel of
stone or wood, with my husband's name, may be
placed over him to show where he lies. Otherwise,
the place will be quickly forgotten, it will never
be found when I am dead of the same malady,
I shall be laid under some other heap of poor
grass. Monseigneur, they are so many, they
increase so fast, there is so much want.
Monseigneur! Monseigneur!"

The valet had put her away from the door,
the carriage had broken into a brisk trot, the
postilions had quickened the pace, she was left
far behind, and the Marquis, again escorted by
the Furies, was rapidly diminishing the league
or two of distance that remained between him
and his château.

The sweet scents of the summer night rose
all around him; and rose, as the rain falls, impartially,
on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn
group at the fountain not far away; to whom
the mender of roads, with the aid of the
blue cap without which he was nothing, still
enlarged upon his man like a spectre, as long
as they could bear it. By degrees, as they could
bear no more, they dropped off one by one, and
lights twinkled in little casements; which lights,
as the casements darkened, and more stars came
out, seemed to have shot up into the sky
instead of having been extinguished.

The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and
of many overhanging trees, was upon Monsieur
the Marquis by that time; and the shadow was
exchanged for the light of a flambeau, as his
carriage stopped, and the great door of his
château was opened to him.

"Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he
arrived from England?"

"Monseigneur, not yet."

TOO MUCH FREEDOM ON THE SEAS.

THE time should be gone by when we look
for an outlaw in the bold sea captain; but there
is still a restricted sense, and that a very painful
one, in which the master of a trading vessel on the
high seas is an outlaw. He may be an outlaw,
just, honest, and merciful, whose right mind is his
sufficient lawgiver and judge. Happy are they
who row in the same boat with him! He may
be unjust, dishonest, and merciless: one who
can be terrified only by the horsehair of the law,
and punished only by suffering and loss. When
such a man has others beneath his control, and
is himself subject to no control, woe to his
victims! Men rougher than the seas they
traverse, and more pitiless, are among those
who command, in merchant vessels trading
between England and America, as masters; or,
more commonly have power as mates. These
men are not types of the true American
or English sailor. Honest Saxon seafarers
born on either side of the Atlantic must
and do contemn them; must desire that they
shall not disgrace by their atrocities a great
national calling, and escape swift retribution.
There is no difficult and narrow question
between English and American of mutual rights in
this matter. What question there is, can readily
be settled to the full content of all people who
speak the English language.

A Liverpool Merchant, in a published letter,
calls attention to " Unpunished Cruelties on the
High Seas." At Liverpool they excite particular
attention, because there is visible and
constant evidence of their result. One or two
hundred hospital patients who have been struck
down by cruelties endured on board American
ships, are every year under medical or surgical
care, as " consul's cases." Into the den of
London there comes much of the same kind of
suffering; but its cry cannot so well be heard.
It does, we believe, happen that cruelty is
more common in the mercantile marine of the
United States than in that of England. But, on
board the merchant ships of the United States,
hardly one man in five is a native American. Of
the last ten cases of cruelty sent back to the
United States for trial, not one had an American
for defendant, and, in five of them, the criminals
were natives of Great Britain. This is no
discussion, therefore, about purging others of
offence. The Bogota, in which a demoniacal
cruelty was inflicted, was an English vessel.
But it happens that the part of the case which
presents itself in the form most available for
purposes of explanation concerns merchant ships
of the United States trading with Liverpool.

If an offence be committed in a foreign ship
while actually lying in an English river, it is
punishable by the English law; but, if it be
committed in an American ship some four miles from
the shore, all that can be done is this: the