and all, and carried it in that way for half-a-
night's march."

"That must be a slight exaggeration,"
remarked the president, now feeling horribly
uncomfortable. "Nevertheless, I should
like to be quite sure that he had reached the
inside of the prison walls. They are very
long about it; they ought to be back by this
time."

"Do you wish that I should go and
see?" asked Ben Safi, pitying his friend's
uneasiness.

"I shall be much obliged to you."

At the moment when Ben Safi was leaving
the court, a distant clamour was heard from
without, followed by several successive gun-
shots. A sound of many footsteps was
audible, as if a crowd of men were approaching.
The doors were thrown open violently,
and Djilali made his appearance. His clothes
were torn and soiled with dirt, and his right
eye seemed to have suffered severely.

"Ouf! "he puffed out, "my back is
broken! May Sidi Abd-Allah burn me, if
he is a man."

"Explain yourself. Tell me!" said the
court, on thorns. "Ben Serraq?—"

"Ben Serraq, indeed? If ever you
contrive to get him into prison, I will consent to
be roasted alive."

"He has escaped, then?"

"How should it be otherwise: he is the
devil in person?"

"Have the goodness to tell me how you
could have been so stupid as to let a single
man break away from ten of you."

"The thing was very simple, and he was
not long about it. When we got to the
prison, at the instant when they opened the
door, he unceremoniously seized the sentinel's
gun; he twisted it round like the sails of a
windmill, and threw down three-fourths of
our number flat on our backs. I immediately
rushed upon him; together with the rest who
were still on their legs, and you see"—here
he exhibited his exterior, including his black
and swollen eye—"what I got by it. After
having nearly felled me by putting his
doubled fist into my eye, he seized me by
the skin, and threw me, like a bundle of
old clothes, on the top of my comrades.
We were all left rolling pell-mell together;
and, when I got up, I saw that demon
already landed on the other side of the river.
The guard came out and fired more than
thirty musket-shots at him while he was
climbing up the bank; but, bless me! they
might just as well have dusted his back with
pepper and salt. The bullets were flattened
without hurting him."

"The thing is prodigious!"

"After he got to the other side of the river,
no one knows what became of him. Some
say that he burrowed into the ground,
whilst others declare that he took flight with
a couple of great black wings that suddenly
grew out of his sides and unfolded wide. The
soldiers belonging to the guard will have it
that he laid hold of a horse that was grazing
there, that he jumped on its back, and set off
at full gallop."

LANGTHWAITE.

LANGTHWAITE was in a state of excitement;
its morals were perturbed, and its ideas
confused; its old landmarks were being swept
away, and it did not approve of its new
landmarks. Langthwaite notions were being
assaulted, and Langthwaite's morality was put
to shame. Madame Floriani, the Italian widow,
had dared to defy the authority and disturb the
influence of Mr. Bentley, the young incumbent.
Was Langthwaite to be ruled over by a
strange woman who introduced foreign
customs, and upset the existing institutions,
or was its government to be a virtuous
hierarchy as before? Was the cousin of a
dean, or the widow of an Italian count, to be
considered the first personage of the vale?
This grave question was what Langthwaite
was called on to decide; and the quiet valley
in the heart of the mountains lashed itself into
a state of perturbation, strongly suggestive of
the famous tempest that was brewed in a
teapot.

The origin of the evil was this:—

When old Jacob White the miser, who
built Whitefield House of stone and marble,
and furnished it with painted deal and
calico—died, he left all his wealth to a certain
niece of his, his sister's child, who had been
born and bred and married in Rome, and
who was now Count Floriani's widow. She
was his only relative; and, although it went
sorely against him to leave his wealth to one
who was more than half a foreigner, yet family
pride at last conquered national prejudice,
and Madame la Comtessa Floriani was made
the heiress of Whitefield House and the lands
circumjacent. This good fortune brought that
Romanised young Englishwoman from the
blue skies and rich light of Italy, to a remote
village in the heart of the Cumberland
mountains.

The society of Langthwaite was peculiar,
and beyond measure dull. Dull, because
bigoted. The ideas of the denizens ran in the
narrowest of all narrow gauges, out of which
not a mind dared to move. The peculiarity
of Langthwaite was its power of condemnation.
Everything was wicked in its more
than puritanic eyes. Life was a huge snare;
the affections were temptations; amusements
were sins; pleasure was a crime;
novel-writers "had much to answer for," and
novel-readers were next door to iniquity; an
actor was a being scarcely less reprehensible
than a murderer; and an artist was lost to
all moral sense—if, indeed, it ever chanced
that artists were spoken of at all, for the
Langthwaite intellect did not penetrate far
into the regions of art. No one ''living in
the world" had a conscience, and no foreigners