XIV.
Awhile the elder child still drowsed, and like a dove
         in June,
Cooed from his little downy nest unto his mother's
        tune,
A ship that bore a foreign flag rode calmly with the
        tide,
And dropp'd its anchor in the port, by the fair city's
         side.

                                     XV.
Before the mother's voice had ceased its chanting,
         fond and sweet,
A distant footstep echoed through the silence of the
         street;
And when the boy's blue dreamy eyes sought for
         her face no more,
A shadow flecked the window panes, and paused
         without the door.

                                    XVI.
A shadow of a human form, but oh, so white and
         wan!
As if the strong vitality of manhood must be gone;
Then came a low breathed, tender voice, it only murmured
        " Wife!"
And heart to heart the two were clasped, called back
         to new glad life.

                                    XVII.
For hours they hardly spoke a word, but shedding
         blessed tears,
Poured out their prayers of thankfulness to One who
         always hears;
Those tears fell on their sleeping babes.  O children,
        ye receive
Such pure baptismal rite as Church or Priesthood
         ere can give.

TIMOUR THE TARTAR.

BEFORE Shakespeare was,Tamburlaine stormed
lustily through Marlowe's mighty line. I hear the
people of old England shouting in the open yard
or pit, and see the exquisites as they sit on the
rushes of the sceneless stage, brighten into
enthusiasm as Tamburlaine that sturdy Scythian
thief— " perhaps not altogether so famous in his
own country of Tartaria as in England"— enters
among them in his copper-laced coat, and crimson
velvet breeches, on a chariot drawn by harnessed
kings with reins in their mouths, and a whip
flourishing over their backs. He cracks his
whip, and almost cracks his throat, as he enters
with his shout,

"Holla! Ye pampered jades of Asia!
What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day,
And have so proud a chariot at your heels,
And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine?"

And peace to thy soul, dear Mat Lewis! didst
thou not teach my infant lips to lisp magniloquence,
what time the fame of Timour the
Tartar from the boards of Covent Garden, spread
to toyshops and survived in nurseries? How
was the pasteboard Timour agitated, as a piping
childish voice exclaimed, " With the blood of
their chiefs have I deluged my scaffolds; with
the blaze of their burning towns have I
crimsoned the heavens; and have I still left them
spirit enough to groan? Go! bear my orders
for instant vengeance— to death with the
assassins!"

Delicious nursery theatricals! Now-a-days
children never approach in dreams to the delight
of cutting out grand tournaments in cardboard,
and mounting caves and fortresses upon a mimic
stage. Alas, that the days are gone when Zorilda
the Amazon, weighing together with her
magnificent courser very much under half an ounce,
was my beloved; when with lavish hand I gave
Timour himself, decorations of gold stars and
silver crescents on his crimson fly, and yellow
satin shirt, his red trousers and his green boots,
his turban and his dagger. He cost me an
entire halfpennyworth of those little mixed
spangles which no toyman sells for the use of
the small generation that now is.

I was yesterday at Timour's court again,
having gone thither, travelling by the last
volume of the publications of the Hakluyt
Society, in company with an old Spanish knight,
named Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo. He was sent
by Henry the Third of Castile upon an embassy
of compliment and observation, to the presence
of the earth-shaking Tartar, when his power had
attained the highest pitch. It was a little while
before he died, a frostbitten old man, on his way
to the empire of China, which he was on the
point of adding to his own estate. The Spirit
of Winter met him then, says Ahmed ben Arabshah,
one of his old Eastern biographers, and
talked to him in his own vein, thus: " Halt in
thy swift career, false tyrant! How long art thou
to run as fire over a wailing world? We are both
old, both of us bind with chains. Root up men's
homes, make the earth cold, and then learn that
my blast is colder. Against thy countless bands,
that vex and kill, I set my army of wintry days,
that also are destroyers; and by the Lord that
liveth, I will have no mercy upon thee! With
my fury thou shalt be encompassed. All the
fire thou kindlest shall not save thee from the
gripe of the cold howling tempest and the ice
cold death." Mat Lewis should have introduced
that Spirit of Winter in the last scene of
his melodrama.

Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo was a knight and a
teetotaller, who ventured to drink water at the
feasts of Timour himself, when his whole court,
his wives, and the great Tartar himself,
indulged in potations pottle deep. As an early
traveller, he joins the company of Marco Polo
and our own Sir John Mandeville. His
companions were, a knight of Madrid, a Master
of Theology, a return envoy of Timour's who
had come to Spain with two Spanish ambassadors
previously sent to observe politics in the East,
who had happened to be present at the battle in
which Timour overthrew the great Turk, Bajazet.
Clavijo was a conscientious man, who knew how
to astonish Timour with great Spanish braggadocio
that should not be untrue.  " There is a
bridge," he said, " in Spain, forty miles broad,
on which a thousand head of sheep find pasture."
Timour opened his eyes, but the cunning
knight had in his mind the land under which the
Guadiana dips. " There are a lion and a bull in
Spain fed daily by the milk of many cows." He
meant, the cities of Leon and Toro. "There