prayers of his mother, recovered after a time,
and rose in the church; but he never smiled
again; and the only recreation he ever
allowed himself was to wander about the
gardens of the castle, where, unknown to her
parents, he had been formerly, before he went
to Quimper to study, in the habit of seeing
the young lady of Naour. He passed most of
his time when disengaged from his duties, in
praying on her tomb. Some years afterwards,
he was found one morning lying there,
dead: embracing the stone which covered her
remains.

"A ballad relating the history of these
unfortunate lovers, was composed in Breton,
and is still popular both in Tréguier and in
Cornwall, and those who have heard it, do
not doubt that the spectres occasionally seen
among the ruins of the Castle of Rustéfan,
are those of Ivan and Géneviève."

I passed some hours of a beautiful
moonlight night, after listening to this legend, in
the scene of the tragedy; but, except the
lustrous eyes of a large grey owl, nothing
startled me in the deep shadows of the
towers; and, except the sighing of the breeze,
no sound disturbed the solitude.

MODERN HUMAN SACRIFICES.

Upon the "radiant moors" of the great
ocean, shone a winter sun. Over the surface
of the deep, there floated a long wreath of
mist that glittered in the morning light. I
watched it, stretched upon the sands with
my head pillowed on the broken rudder of
a mouldering old boat, and with the full tide
at my feet hushing me to silence. A distant
light-house was the only dwelling to be seen;
a flock of gulls and one stray crow were all
the living creatures within ken.

I had gone out for a long ramble, taking
the newspaper in my pocket, and had sat
down by the old boat to read a narrative
with the heading in large letters: Dreadful
Shipwreck. The mist that seemed to float
before my eyes was perhaps illusion, sickened
as I was with horror. The illusion growing
on a sick mind soon became a waking
dream.

Dimly shapen in the mist, and as it
were creatures of mist, I saw strange figures
sweeping in a train over the wide sea, as
pilgrims on the way to Mecca trail over the
sand-waves of the desert. A low, hoarse
moaning in my ears seemed to proceed from
the huge conchs blown by misty seamen,
whom I knew for Tritons. Behind them
followed, in a chariot drawn by three horses
which scattered foam about the water upon
which they half-careered, half-floated,
Poseidon—Neptune—the old sea-god of heathen
times. He was surrounded by the songs of
Sirens, and was followed by a train of shadows
that made all the mist seem terrible with faces.
Among them, ghastlier than any, was a face
that I had kissed a thousand times. It had
smiled up at me from the cradle; it had
nestled to me from the knee; it had looked
aside for me from many a book or piece of idle
needlework, when it was the face of a daughter
growing into womanhood, sunning all chills
out of the heart of a dull widower, who had
no home but where she sat down by his side.
I saw that face last, beautiful with caressing
laughter, when we parted for a few days on
board the ship that was to take her to her
uncle's house in Dublin. The ship was a strong,
large vessel, and she sailed out on a short
voyage in fine weather. The captain hugged
the shore to make a short voyage shorter, and
the ship was wrecked in a calm sea under a
cloudless sky. My child and my brother were
among the drowned. The summer moonlight
shone over the last wild up-flinging of their
arms.

When I saw in the mist that beloved face,
I knew well in what company it went;
I knew well that it went among the shadows
of the drowned. They were not spirits, as I
fancied, floating there, but unsubstantial
images, such perhaps as the images of roses
—form and nothing else—which some
philosophers of old professed that they were able
to create.

The train of mist rose from the surface of
the ocean, and hovered over a tongue of
sand on which, as I knew, a schooner had
been lately wrecked. Suddenly a jet of
blood reddened the waves, and laving his
chariot, kissed Neptune's feet. Six bloodless
faces rose out of the sea, and upon them
the mist descended. Six more forms were
added to the heathen train. The procession
floated onward, but my spirit clung by the
dead image of my daughter, and methought
we journeyed side by side. She did not speak
to me or know me. All the images sped on
as dead leaves that are hurried in a cloud,
before the gale. The songs of the Sirens
magnified their king and the possessions he
had come to visit, but what his royal
progress meant I needed not to hear. Wherever
a wreck fatal to life had been, blood
rose, and ghastly figures came to join our
company.

The blood did not soon sink again, and there
are so few pieces of English coast two or
three miles in length on which no vessel has
been wrecked, that as we travelled on we
seemed to be encircling Britain with a broad
red ring.

When we came near a seaport town, we
visited its shipping, made an unseen crowd
upon its quays, or drifted idly through its
streets. In all such places Neptune had
business. The heathen deity looked for the
men from whom his sacrifices were received,
and sealed them with his mark. He would
board a vessel while the dreadful forms of
the drowned people who attended him filled
all the deck and rigging, would look at the
chief officers, and at the captain; and if any