of Lilian, singing a simple sacred song which I
had learned at my mother's knees, and taught to
her the day before: singing low, and as with a
warning angel's voice. By an irresistible
impulse I dashed the wand to the ground, and
bowed my head as I had bowed it when my
infant mind comprehended, without an effort,
mysteries more solemn than those which
perplexed me now. Slowly I raised my eyes, and
looked round: the vaporous hazy cloud had
passed away, or melted into the ambient rose
tints amidst which the sun had sunk.

Then, by one of those common reactions from
a period of over-strained excitement, there
succeeded to that sentiment of arrogance and daring
with which these wild, half-conscious invocations
had been fostered and sustained, a profound
humility, a warning fear.

"What!" said I, inly, " have all those sound
resolutions, which my reason founded on the wise
talk of Julius Faber, melted away in the wrack of
haggard dissolving fancies! Is this my boasted
intellect, my vaunted science! I—I, Allen
Fenwick, not only the credulous believer, but the
blundering practitioner, of an evil magic! Grant
what may be possible, however uncomprehended
—grant that in this accursed instrument of
antique superstition there be some real powers—
chemical, magnetic, no matter what—by which the
imagination can be aroused, inflamed, deluded, so
that it shapes the things I have seen, speaks in the
tones I have heard—grant this, shall I keep ever
ready, at the caprice of will, a constant tempter
to steal away my reason and fool my senses?—or
if, on the other hand, I force my sense to admit
what all sober men must reject—if I unschool
myself to believe that in what I have just experienced,
there is no mental illusion, that sorcery is
a fact, and a demon world has gates which open to
a key that a mortal can forge—who but a saint
would not shrink from the practice of powers by
which each passing thought of ill might find in a
fiend its abettor? In either case—in any case—
while I keep this direful relic of obsolete arts, I
am haunted—cheated out of my senses—unfitted
for the uses of life. If, as my ear or my fancy
informs me, grief—human grief—is about to befal
me, shall I, in the sting of impatient sorrow,
have recourse to an aid which, the same voice
declares, will reduce me to a tool and a slave?
—tool and slave to a being I dread as a foe!
Out on these nightmares! and away with the
thing that bewitches the brain to conceive
them!"

I rose; I took up the wand, holding it so that
its hollow should not rest on the palm of the hand.
I stole from the house by the back way, in order
to avoid Lilian, whose voice I still heard, singing
low, on the lawn in front. I came to a creek,
to the bank of which a boat was moored, undid
its chain, rowed on to a deep part of the lake,
and dropped the wand into its waves. It sank
at once: scarcely a ripple furrowed the surface,
not a bubble arose from the deep. And, as the
boat glided on, the star mirrored itself on the
spot where the placid waters had closed over the
tempter to evil.

Light at heart I sprang again on the shore,
and hastening to Lilian, where she stood on the
silvered shining sward, clasped her to my breast.

"Spirit of my life!" I murmured, " no enchantments
for me but thine! Thine are the spells
by which creation is beautified, and, in that
beauty, hallowed. What, though we can see not
into the measureless future from the verge of the
moment—what though sorrow may smite us
while we are dreaming of bliss, let the future
not rob me of thee, and a balm will be found for
each wound. Love me ever as now, oh my Lilian;
troth to troth, side by side, till the grave!"

"And beyond the grave," answered Lilian,
softly.

A WORD ABOUT SERVANTS.

Servants of the present day are a very
different class from the servants of a century
or two ago, when, according to all accounts, the
town servants were an exceedingly unpleasant
and turbulent class. They went to masquerades
dressed in their masters' clothes, and would
sometimes even go so far as to borrow the
master's sword or wig. They were the retailers of
all the scandal of the town, and were very
noisy and insolent. They claimed vails as a
matter of right, and rioted desperately when
they were refused or opposed. Vails were
presents of money made to them by visitors.

One amusing custom of the servants was to
assemble at some public-house, and, calling each
other by their masters' titles, to converse about
the affairs of the nation and the doings in high
life. Addison, in No. 88 of the Spectator, gives
the following amusing example:

"My obscurity and taciturnity leave me at
liberty, without scandal, to dine if I think fit at
a common ordinary, in the meanest as well as
the most sumptuous house of entertainment.
Falling in the other day at a victualling house
near the House of Peers, I heard the maid come
down and tell the landlady at the bar that my
lord bishop swore he would throw her out of
window if she did not bring up more mild beer,
and that my lord duke would have a double mug
of purle. My surprise was increased in hearing
loud and rustick voices speak and answer to
each other upon the public affairs by the names
of the most illustrious of our nobility, till of a
sudden one came running in and cryed the
house was rising. Down came all the company
together and away! The ale-house was immediately
filled with clamour, and scoring one mug
to the marquis of such a place, oil and vinegar
to such an earl, three quarts to my new lord for
wetting his title, and so forth. It is a thing too
notorious to mention the crowds of servants
and their insolence near the courts of justice
and the stairs towards the supreme assembly,
where there is an universal mockery of all order,
such riotous clamour, and licentious confusion
that one would think the whole nation lived in
jest, and there was no such thing as rule and