sand pounds sterling. They were each one hundred and twenty feet long, sixty broad, and the poles sixty feet high. The walls of the tents were ten feet high, parts of them being cut into lattice-work for the ladies of the monarch's seraglio and the principal nobility to see through. Asuf-ud-Dowlah received his guests (among whom were many English) in a dress covered with jewels to the amount of a least two millions sterling. From thence the guests were invited to enter the Shumeana, which was illuminated by two hundred girandoles imported from Europe, as many glass shades with wax candles, and several flambeaux, the glare and reflection of which were dazzling, even to pain. All being seated under this extensive canopy, over a hundred dancing-girls, richly dressed, went through their graceful, but voluptuous dances, and sang several soft Persian and Hindoo Persian airs, until about seven o'clock in the evening, when the bridegroom (the young Nabob) made his appearance so absurdly loaded with jewels that he literally staggered under their weight, accompanied by his bride (a child of ten years old), who was like himself of a dark complexion, and far from being handsome. The next scene in this wonderful performance was the grand procession from the tents to a beauti- | ful and extensive garden, about a mile distant, which was grand beyond description. It consisted of about twelve hundred elephants, drawn up in a regular line, like a regiment of soldiers. About one hundred of these huge animals in the centre had houdas (or castles) covered with silver; and again in the midst of these appeared the Nabob, on an immense elephant, within a houdah covered with gold and richly set with precious stones, the elephant himself being caparisoned in cloth of gold. The the dark night into a brilliant day. procession moved very slowly to give time for the fireworks to go off, and the entire grand spectactle was farther lit-up by more than three thousand flambeaux carried by men hired for the occasion. In this manner, surrounded by all this stately pomp, Nabob, bridegroom, and bridal guests, moved on to the garden which, although only a mile away, took them two hours to reach. When they arrived at the gate of the garden all descended from the elephants and entered the garden, which was illuminated by innumerable paper lamps and lanterns of various colours suspended to the branches of the trees. In the centre of the garden was a large edifice, to which the company all ascended, and were next introduced into a grand saloon adorned with girandoles and pendent lustres of English mauufacture, lighted with wax candles, where a sumptuous repast of European and Indian dishes, with wines, fruits, and sweetmeats, awaited them, at the same time that numbers of the dancing girls once more sang their native airs and performed their national dances for the amusement of the guests as they regaled themselves at their elegant banquet. The time passed in this manner until dawn, when all returned to their homes wonderstricken at the seene they had beheld and which had exceeded in splendour anything ever before imagined, even in gorgeous India; the delighted Nabob himself declaring with Asiatic, and one would say pardonable vanity, that so splendid a spectacle was never before witnessed in Oude and never would be again. This magnificence was repeated three successive nights at a cost of over three hundred thousand pounds sterling. Vizier Ally was on this occasion publicly recognized as his successor, to the On his right hand was the British resident at bitter indignation of his own family, who gave Lucknow; on his left the bridegroom. The the arrangement all the opposition in their English gentlemen and ladies, and the native power. However, at the old king's death, nobility, were intermixed on the right and left. which took place not very long afterwards, his On both sides of the road from the tents to the chosen heir was upheld by the strong arm of garden was raised artificial scenery of bamboo-England and placed by it firmly on his throne, work, very high, representing bastions, arches, minarets and towers covered with glass lamps, which made a grand display. On each side of the procession in front of the line of elephants were dancing-girls, superbly dressed, on platforms supported and carried by bearers, who danced as they went on. These platforms numbered a hundred at least on each side of the procession, all covered with cloth of gold or silver, with two girls and two musicians on each. The ground from the tents to the garden along which the procession moved was inlaid, so to speak, with fireworks; at every step trod heavily by the elephants the ground seemed to open before them, casting up myriads of artificial stars to heaven, emulating those on high created by the All-powerful hand. Innumerable rockets and hundreds of shells bursting high in the air shot forth thousands of fiery serpents winding through the atmosphere illuminating the sky, and aided by the lights along the bamboo scenery, turning and he would possibly have ended his days surrounded by all the riches and luxuries in which he had been brought up; but that almost immediately after he commenced to reign the cruelty which had peeped out so early in his character now displayed itself in all his acts. He became turbulent, restless, and intriguing, and finally broke his faith so frequently with the British Government, that wearied by his duplicity they withdrew their support from him; the consequence of which was that he was deposed, and Sadut Ally, the brother of the late Nabob, was elected in his stead. A pension was however assigned him of two lacs of rupees, or twenty-five thousand pounds sterling per annum, but as he was considered on all sides to be utterly untrustworthy it was made a condition of his retaining it that he should reside near the Presidency, where he would be more under the eye of the Government. He, in consequence, removed from Lucknow to Benares, one of the sacred cities of India, where the company's resident was to make arrangements for his proceeding to the Presidency. Shortly after his arrival this gentleman, a Mr. Cherry, unfortunately for himself, sent him an invitation to breakfast, which he accepted with great apparent graciousness, and on the appointed day came, attended by a very large armed retinue. Mr. Cherry had been previously warned that his intentions were hostile, that his smile was even more dangerous than his frown, and that he should be on his guard; but he unhappily disregarded the caution and received his treacherous guest without making the slightest protective preparation. During the repast Vizier Ally complained bitterly of the company's treatment of him, spoke insultingly to his host, and finally, on his giving some preconcerted signal, several of his attendants rushed in and cut Mr. Cherry and his secretary, Mr. Graham, to pieces. They then rushed off with the intention of proceeding to the house of another European gentleman, holding a high office under Government, named Davis, determined to murder him also; but fortunately he got some intimation of his danger in time to get his family to the top of the house, and then posting himself at he head of the narrow circular stone staircase which led to it, armed with a long hog spear, he defended himself for a long time, and killed several of his assailants, beside wounding many more, until a party of the company's troops stationed at the time in Benares, came to his assistance and rescued him from his perilous position. The followers of the exNabob also in escaping through the streets of Benares cut down a private gentleman, who had nothing to do with the Government at all, in the mere wantonness of cruelty. After this Vizier Ally succeeded in reaching the territory of the Rajah of Bezar, a powerful and independent prince, who refused to give him up unless under a promise that his life should be spared. This the English Government considered it polite to accede to, and he was accordingly handed over to them and brought down to Calcutta where, enclosed in a sort of iron cage in Fort William, he was held a prisoner until his death, a period of seventeen years three months and four days; half his life, in short all to about eight months, as he was only thirty-six years old when he died. Thus perished this strange shuttlecock of fortune, the poor Forash's son, the darling of the eccentric old Nabob, the hero of the gorgeous wedding feast, the victim of his own treachery, the deposed monarch, the prisoner of the Government, once so friendly to him, alone and uncared for, stripped of all his magnificence and penned up like a wild beast in a inenagerie. AN ORPHAN'S RECOLLECTIONS. BY ADA TREVANION. Is it the house where I was born A quiet garden blooms around, A quiet place, where, year by year, I recollect so long ago, It seems almost a dreamThat someone kissed my baby brow, And praised my soft hair's gleam. And smiling lips and gentle eyes Were round my cradle-bed; I ask, but no kind voice replies, Some hand placed fondly round my neck, It was saved, with me, from the wreck, TESTS OF CHARACTER.-A great many admirable actions are overlooked by us because they are so little broken slumber, if any at all, with the nursing baby, and common. Take for instance, the mother who has whose wants must not be disregarded; she would fain sleep awhile when the breakfast hour comes, but patiently and uncomplainingly she takes her timely seat at the table. Though exhausted and weary, she serves all with a refreshing cup of coffee or tea before she sips it herself, and often the cup is handed back to her to be refilled before she has had time to taste her own. Do you hear her complain-this weary mother that her breakfast is cold before she has had time to eat it? And this is not for one, but for every morn ing, perhaps, in the year. Do you call it a small thing? How does woman shame us by her Try it and see. forbearance and fortitude in what are called little things! Ah, it is these little things which are tests of character; it is by these "little" self-denials, borne with such self-forgotten gentleness, that the humblest house is made beautiful to the eyes of angels, though we fail to see it, alas! until the chair is vacant, and the hand which kept in motion all this domestic machinery is powerless and cold! THE TAXIDERMIST, (By an American Contributor.) I. THE OLD MAID'S CHAPTER. "Die, if dying I may give Life to one who asks to live, Dying thus, resemble thee!" "Ciel! Zat is ze true heroique! Zat is ze very far finest ting in all ze literature anglaise ! Zere have not been made vun more sublime poesie by your immortel Villiams Shakyspeare! Glorieux! Vat a grandeur moral of ze woman who vill vonce die for her love!" "Once? I knew a woman who died thrice for hers." The enthusiastic admirer of Longfellow was a French Professor in one of our American colleges, by name Gautier Bonenfant. The person who met this panegyric with such a strange response was Orloff Ruricson, by birth a Swede, by adoption a New-Yorker, and by trade the proprietor of a Natural History Museum: these two, with myself, were sitting on the west piazza of the little inn at Kaaterskill Falls. All of us hard-working men in the hard-working season; but on this Tenth day of July, Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-nine, soaking the dust out of our brains in a bath of sunlight and mountain air, forgetting in company that life was not all one sweet vacation. Bonenfant and I looked at Ruricson with puzzled faces. Though a good fellow, and a wisely humorous one, he seldom said anything while the cleverness of which lay in a double-entendre. "Pray, who is that remarkable woman?" said I. "It is my wife," replied Orloff Ruricson, soberly. "And she die, von, two, tree time?" asked Bonenfant, with uplifted eyebrows. "And she died three times for her love," repeated Orloff Ruricson. "Perhaps you would have no objection to tell us exactly what you mean?" said Ỉ. "None at all, to you two, with this provisoI know that you, John Tryon, write for the magazines. For aught I know, Bonenfant here may be a correspondent of the Constitutionnel." "Mais non! I anı ze mose red of Red Republican!" "Perhaps you are Ledru Rollin, then, travelling in disguise to hunt materials for a book. At any rate I must exact of both of you a promise that, if a single lineament of the story I am going to relate, ever gets into print through your agency, it shall be represented as fictitious, and under assumed names." "C'est fait !" "It's a bargain!" "You see I live by my Museum; and if the public once suspected that I was a visionary man, the press and the pulpit and general opinion would run me down immediately. I should be accused of denying the originality of the human race inferentially, through my ourangoutang; of teaching lessons of maternal infidelity through my stuffed ostrich; of seducing youth into a seafaring life by my preserved whale. No more schools, at half-price, on Saturday afternoon, accompanied by their principal; no more favourable notices by editors'who have been with their families'-for you, Orloff Ruricson ! "And what I am going to tell you will seem visionary, even to you. Nevertheless, it is as real as any of the hardest facts in my daily life. Take my solemn word for it. "When I was ten years old my parents emigrated from Sweden to this country: at the age of twelve I lost my father: at thirteen I was apprenticed to a man who stuffed birds in Dutch-street; at fourteen I was motherless: at twenty my term was out, and I began to think of setting up as a taxidermist on my own hook. There ! The Biographical Dictionary can't beat that summary of ten years for compact ness! "I made a very liberal offer to my master, in fact proposed to take him into partnership. He nobly refused to avail himself of my generosity. Bird-stuffing, even in New York, was not a very lucrative business, and would hardly support two, he suggested. What did I think of one of the river towns? Albany, or Hudson, or Poughkeepsie, for instance? I did not tell him what, but in reality I thought so little of them, that, within ten days after my indenture was cancelled, I had taken a little nook in the Bowery, with window enough to show off three blue-jays, a chameleon, and a very young wild cat (whose domesticity I may, at this day, acknowledge to have been slandered by that name), and sufficient door to display the inscription, Orloff Ruricson, Taxidermist and Aviarian Professor.' Even at that day, you see, Bonenfant, we impostors had begun to steal your literary title." "Sacrebleu! I do very moshe vish zat ze only ting ze plenty humbug professors now-adays stuff vas ze birds!” 66 Well, I may have stuffed the public a little too. At any rate they patronized me far better, than I had any reason to expect. By the time I was of age I had moved my business one door farther up, to a shop treble the size of the first; and instead of sleeping under and eating on top of my show-case, as I began, I occupied lodgings with a respectable cutler's widow, second story front of a brick-house on Third Avenue, and came down to my store every morning at nine o'clock, like any wholesale grocer. "I had been installed in my comfortable quarters only six weeks, when a new lodger came to the boarding-house. The first thing that I knew of it was my beholding, directly opposite me at a Sunday dinner, the most preternaturally homely face I had ever seen. As I took my seat, and opened my napkin, the cutler's widow inclined her head in the direction of the apparition, and uttered the words Miss Brentnall.' I cast a glance and a bow in the same quarter, pronouncing the name after her. Mr. Ruricson,' said the landlady and nodded, toward me. Mr. Ruricson,' repeated the miracle of plainness, in a voice so sweet that I could not rid myself of the impression that it must be the ventriloquism of some one else. At the same moment she smiled. The smile was as incongruous with the face as the voice; and for that glancing half-minute, Miss Brentnall was a dozen shades more endurable. "Cruikshank, acting as collaborator with Salvator Rosa, would fall short of any thing more ambitious than a slight sketch of the woman's unearthly homeliness. I dare hardly attempt describing her in words, but, for your sake, let me try. "Her hair was like Bonenfant's Republicanism, the most red of red,' but without the usual characteristic of that colour, silky fineness. In fact, unless you have been through a New-England corn-field in the dog-days, and noticed the very crispest of all the crisp tassels which a brazen sun has been at work baking for a month previous; unless you have seen some peculiarly unsheltered specimen, to the eye like dried blood, and to the fingers like dust and ashes, you cannot imagine the impression produced by Miss Brentnall's hair. I really trembled lest our awkward waiter's sleeve should touch it in serving the vegetables, and send it crumbling from her head in the form of a crimson powder. Her forehead was in every respect immense-high, broad, and protuberant enough for the tallest man who ever prided himself on his intellect; still, it might have been pardoned if it had been fair withal, instead of sallow, wrinkled and freckled. A nose, whose only excuse for its mammoth maturity of size and its Spitzenberg depth of colour, lay in the fact that it was exposed to the torrid glare of the tresses, depended, like the nest of the hanging-bird, between a pair of ferrety eyes, which seemed mere pen-knife gashes in a piece of red morocco. At that day, I could not swear to the pupils; but a profane man of sensitive mind might have sworn at them, for they seemed to be a damp not a swimming, but a coaked damp-pale blue. Flanking the nose, imagine an inch and a half on either side of dingy parchment, stretched almost to tearing, and you will get the general idea of the sides of Miss Brentnall's face; I will not travesty the word 'cheeks, by calling them that. Below the nose, a mouth which would have been deformedly small for a child two weeks old; below that, a chin which hardly showed at all in front, and, taking a side-view, seemed only an eccentric protraction of the scraggy neck to which it was attached. Now for the figure. High, stooping shoulders; a long, flat, narrow mannish waist; the lower extremities immoderately short; immense feet: group these in one person, and you have a form to which I know only two parallels out of the world of nightmare-a German wooden-doll and Miss Brentnall." "Diable de laideur! You see zat viz your own eyes?" "Yes, Bonenfant." "And yet you be yourself not vare ugly, after all!" "So I have heard, Bonenfant. You will be still more suprised to feel that this is the case when you know that I lodged in the same house with Miss Brentnall a whole year. Indeed, she occupied the very next room to me. I was second-story front, she second-story back, during all that time; and do you know that I became very well acquainted with her?" "Ah! It is pos-sible for a gentleman to be vare polite to vare ugly woman!" "Yes, but from preference, I mean. I could shut my eyes and hear her voice, or open them at the transient moment when she was smiling, and forget that she was homely at all. I discovered that she was the only remnant of a large family: that awakened my pity. In addition, that she was very well-informed, thought and conversed well that aroused my respect. And when, in spite of a face and figure, which, by poetic justice, should have belonged to Sin itself, I perceived that she had the kindest of hearts, and the most delicate of sensibilities, I am not ashamed to confess that I soon became attached to her." "Attach? You have fall in love viz zat escary-crow? You have marri-ed her?" Hear me through, Bonenfant, and you will find out. In the present instance, I mean, by the word ' attached,' nothing but a pure Platonic friendship. I do not make acquaintances easily. I visited nobody in New-York at that time. There was no one whose cheerful fireside I could make my own for an evening; and my nature, tastes, to say nothing of any other feeling, kept me away from drinking-saloons. Moreover, I had an insatiate longing to make something of myself. I wanted the means for buying books, for travelling, for putting myself into what I considered good society. Accordingly, I often brought home, at evening, the specimens I had been working upon all day, and continued my labours long into the night. While I was busily engaged with the knife or the needle, the gentlest little tap would come at the door, so . gentle, so unlike any other sound, that, however absorbed I might be, I always heard it, knew it was Miss Brentnall, and said: 'Walk in!' So, in hopped that little eighth-world wonder of ugliness, now with an orange for my supper, now with some pretty ornithological engraving, of which, by the merest chance, she always had a duplicate copy, and whose effect she would like to see on my wall. When she went out, She always forgot to take it with her; and, in a few months, my room, through such-like little kindnesses, became quite a portrait-gallery of celebrated birds. Sometimes Miss Brentnall spent the whole evening with me. On such occasions, it was her greatest delight to stand by my table and see some poor, shrivelled lark or canary grow plump and saucy again, through the transformations of my art. She called it bird resurrection.' For an hour at a time she would stay close at my elbow, perfectly quiet, holding a pair of glass eyes in her hand. When I asked for one of them, she gave it to me with all the happiness of a helpful child; and, when at last both eyes were fixed in the specimen, I have seen her clap her hands and jump up and down. In process of time she became of real assistance to me. So apt a mind had she, that, from merely witnessing my methods, she learned to stuff birds herself; and one evening, when I called 'come in' to the wellknown tap, I was surprised by seeing a parrot in her hands, prepared and mounted almost as well as I could have done it myself. It was a little present to the Professor, she said she had been at work upon it for the last two days. From that time her voluntary services were in my constant employ whenever I worked of evenings. "I was not so ungallant, however, as to let Miss Brentnall do all the visiting. Whenever a lazy fit took me and I could not have worked, or studied, or walked, if I had been offered ten dollars an hour for those exertions, I always forestalled her coming to my room by going to hers. She had a large rocking-chair, which always seemed to run up to the fire-place of its own accord, and hold out its arms for me the moment I came in. I would drop into that, shut my eyes and say, 'Please talk to me,' or, Please read to me,' with as much abandonment as if I were speaking to my own mother. It never felt like exacting impertinent demands of a stranger, I was so marvellously at my ease in Miss Bretnall's room." "Ze man of mose mauvaise honte be not embarrass, I have observe, viz ze vare ugly lady." I don't think it was that, Bonenfant. I used to ask myself if it might not be. But I always came to the conclusion that I should feel the same were Miss Brentnall the most beautiful person in the world. There was something in her mind, especially as expressed in voice and style of talking, that lulled me when I was most irritable, that lifted the weight of self and pride quite off me for the time being. I knew that we both liked to be together; that was enough: I did not care, indeed I never once thought how we either of us seemed to anyone else. "I could not help being aware that the other boarders talked about us. Having a pair of tolerably good ears, likewise of eyes, it was difficult not to know that old Mrs. Flitch, my landlady's half-sister, smelt a match in my intimacy with Miss Brentnall ; that she considered it ill-advised, on the ground that I was twenty-one and the lady at least forty; that she could imagine no possible motive in my mind except a view to Miss Brentnall's snug little property; that, as a consequence of these premises, she regarded one of us as a very mean knave and the other a doting fool. It was difficult not to understand the meaning of Miss Simmons, an acid contemporary of Miss Brentnall's, possessing all her chances of celibacy, half her homeliness, and one-thousandth of her mind, when, as I took my seat next her at the breakfast-table, she asked me with a pretty simper if I had spent the last evening as pleasantly as usual. It was difficult to avoid seeing the gentlemen wink at each other when they passed us talking together in the entry: it was also difficult, as I perceive from Bonenfant's face he would like to suggest, not to pull their noses for it; but reflection suggested the absurdity of such a course. This is one of the few objections I have to your native and my adopted country, Tryon, that notwithstanding the great benefit which results from that intimacy between man and woman, in which each is mere friend, and neither present nor expectant lover, our society will not hear of such a thing without making indelicate reference to marriage. Still, I suppose, they would have talked about us anywhere. "Miss Brentnall knew this as well as I, and like me, never gave it a thought after the momentary demonstration which recalled it. We passed one whole delightful year together in the Third Avenue boarding-house. I felt my own mind growing, becoming richer in all sorts of knowledge, freer and clearer in every field of thinking with each succeeding day. And as for Miss Brentnall, she was so kind as to say, and I knew she sincerely meant it, that to her, all lonely in the world, our friendship was in all respects inestimable. At the end of the year Miss Brentnall was taken ill. For the first few days neither she nor I felt any serious alarm with reference to her case. The doctor pronounced it a mild type of typhoid fever. It proceeded, so he said to me in private, more from mental causes than any tangible physical one. Had she been unfortunate in any way? he asked me. I could only reply that, as her intimate friend, I was unaware of the fact. Probably she read late, then, he suggested. I said that might be. At all events her mind had been very much overtaxed: what she needed was perfect quiet, good nursing, and as little medicine as possible, Upon his giving me this view of the case, I sought out the most faithful di cious woman within reach, and hired her on |