do you fly from me? Is it just to preserve
feelings of animosity when both are reduced
to such misery?"

The princess on this turned, and soon
discovered in the wretched being who accosted
her, the elder Prince Olgoruki, exiled, with
his family, by the Czarina Anna Yvanowna,
whom his intrigues had placed on the throne
after the death of the young Czar Peter the
Second, which occurred when that prince
had only reached his fifteenth year—so rapid
had been the events which had agitated the
court during the short period of the disgrace
of Mentchikoff.

Meantime, the news of Mentchikoff's
death reached St. Petersburg, and relieved
the ministers of all uneasiness respecting
him; at the same time they felt the inutility
of inflicting further punishment on his children,
and were the first to advise the Czarina
to recal them. All the possessions of the
disgraced prince had been seized by the
crown; but large funds, which he had placed
in the banks of Venice and Amsterdam, in
spite of every application, were retained by
the bankers, who represented the impossibility
of their delivering up the moneys
entrusted to their care, except to the prince
himself or his heirs. Thus, an immense revenue
was lost to the country, and it was considered
politic that it should be restored. No difficulty,
therefore, stood in the way of the pardon
of the orphans; and their return was
accordingly commanded to be arranged with
as little delay as their previous exile. They
left to his once greatest enemy, the charge
of their father's tomb.

They appear to have profited by the severe
lessons of their childhood, and to have
corrected what was evil in their minds by the
experience forced upon them. The son had a
fiftieth part of his father's possessions restored
to him, which gave him a sufficiently large
income; and the Czarina Anna took charge
of the daughter, whose dower, when she
married her to M. de Biron, son of her Grand
Chamberlain, was furnished by the sums
placed by Prince Mentchikoff in the banks
of Venice and Amsterdam. It is said that the
treasure most prized and guarded by the
princess, as a memorial of past days, was the
peasant's garb she had worn when she stood
by the bedside of her dying father in Siberia.

THE WRECK OF 'THE ARCTIC.'

On! bark baptised with a name of doom!
The distant and the dead
Seem speaking to our English ear
Where'er that word is said!
It tells of landscapes on whose hills
The forest never grew,—
Where light lies dead, and palsied winds
Have fainted as they flew,—
And, far away, through voiceless gloom,
Of a mystery and an unfound tomb!

By waves that in their very dance
Have fallen fast asleep,
It summons forth our English heart
A weary watch to keep:
On pulseless shores, where Nature lies
Stretched in a mute distress,
And the meteor gleams like a funeral light
O'er the cold dead wilderness,—
And our dying Hope has a double shroud,
The pall of snow and the pall of cloud.

Why carried the bark that name of doom
To the paths of a southward sea,
Where the light at least is a living thing,
And the leaping waves are free,—
Where sound is struck by the minstrel deep
From its beat on the lonely shore,
And scents from the saddest gales that blow
O'er the desolate Labrador,—
Where the land has grass and the sky has sheen,
And the hill is climbed by the column green!

Ah! one of the Spirits, old and gray,
Whose home is the Arctic strand,
Hath a haunt of his own where the waters play
On the shores of the Newfoundland:—
Where ships that looked like things of life
When their sails by the sun were kiss't,
Like spectre barks go gliding on
Beneath their shrouds of Mist:—
And the Arctic name is a name of fear
When a ghost of the northern world is near!

She left her port—that gallant ship—
The master of the seas,
With heart of fire to quell the wave,
And canvas for the breeze:—
Gay, happy hearts upon her deck
Left happy hearts behind;
The prayers that speed the parting guest
Went with her on the wind,
As, like some strong and spirit thing
The vessel touched it with her wing.

She left her port—the gallant bark
That reached it never more,—
The hearts have never met again.
That parted on that shore.
Ere long she was a riven thing,
The good ship and the free,
The merry souls that sailed her, gone
Across a darker sea;—
And Ruin sat—without a form,
Where Wreck had been—without a storm!

For the wind, whose voice was a long, low sigh
To the eve, without its stars,
Had in many cars that day been song,
As it played round the vessel's spars.
But, ah! how many another voice
That mingled with its strain,
On loving hearts, in sigh or song,
Shall never fall again!—
How many a soul o'ertook ere night
The prayer it poured in the morning's light?

And, oh! the fond and yearning thoughts
That mingled with despair,
As lips that never prayed before
Sent up the spirit's prayer!
The faces of the far-away
That smiled across that sea,
And low sweet tones that reached the heart
Throuch all its agony!
The hopes for others poured like rain,
When for themselves all hope was vain!