the blood rushed tingling to his temples! He dashed the jewel into the river.

"Vivian! why Vivian!" exclaimed his friend; "why, what do you do that for? are you mad?"

"MAD!" answered the student, with a piercing shriek; "MAD!-what did you say that word for ?"

Vivian walked that night in the fields leading to Grantchester. They were then, as now, the most picturesque ramble which the University-man can enjoy. The evening was a beautiful one; twilight had again descended upon the world, and had shrouded in her "sober livery" the lovely forms and flowers of the earth. Vivian walked over the fields to Grantchester.

It is a fearful thing to dread madness-to watch it coming slowly, but surely on to loll out the parched tongue, and shrink at the touch of a drop of water-to feel the head swim giddily, giddily, and the temples burn, and the eye-balls strain in their sockets.

Grantchester itself, at that period, was not the pretty village which it now is. There were tall trees, it is true, that overshadowed the church-yard, and ivy had grown up, and had spread its mantling arms round the ancient edifice, and the graves were here and there surrounded with flowers; and old houses-quaint enough in their architecture-and rustic cottages, which have been long pulled down, were standing. It was a pretty place, though, even then.

Grantchester is a locality with which every man who has been educated at Cambridge is well acquainted. The fields which lead to it are said to have been Lord Byron's favourite walk, when at Trinity. Many a genius, hardly less famous than the noble poet, has trodden that "slight pathway before and since his day. There, perhaps, Bacon and Newton walked, and Ben Jonson, and Churchill, and Grey, and even Milton-we had almost forgotten the "proud bard of song "—if the road was formed in their time. And there, in later periods, strolled Kirke White, the "martyr student," as Professor Smythe has called him, with his heart full of piety, and his brain full of poetry; and Byron, and Wordsworth, and Coleridge. It is one of those beautiful rambles which make us to love the country, and the green fields, and the tall elms, flinging their shadows upon the pathway; and the sweet flowers springing beneath the feet, and the young daisies basking in the hedge-rows.

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Vivian reached the church-yard. It was spring, and the violets threw up an odour which gave luxuriance to the atmosphere, impregnated with their balmy utterance," as the enthusiast Keats has it. It was spring, and the soft moss yielded to his tread, and the golden buttercup bent beneath his footstep.

Hark!

It was but the nightingale singing her evening song in the depth of the sweet silence, making the air to tremble with the loveliness of the harmony.

Vivian leant over the iron-railings which surrounded a tomb, and, in the agony and loneliness of his spirit, he wished himself beneath that sod, sleeping his last sleep, and slumbering his last slumber. It is fearful for the man of carelessness and gaiety to meditate upon the grave's deep solitude. There arises a shrinking of nature of his nature at least-from familiar communion with the cold and slimy earth-worm.

It is not thus with all. The being of blighted hopes and bitter disappointments has his "bourne" in the grave, and his dwelling in the sepulchre. The weary are at rest there, they hear not the voice of the oppresThe man of wretchedness, the poor and the afflicted, the desperate and the distressed,-all have a home there; a place of retreat from the scorn and calumny of the world, the voice of malice, and the sneer of contempt and pity.

sor.

"The storm that wrecks the wintry sky
No more disturbs their deep repose,
Than summer evening's latest sigh,
That shuts the rose.

"I long to lay this painful head
And aching heart beneath the soil,
To slumber in that dreamless bed
From all my toil.

"For misery stole me at my birth,
And cast me helpless on the wild;
I perish Oh, my mother-earth,

Take home thy child!"

Vivian leant upon the iron-railings, and gazed upon the moon. There was no cloud in the sky, no mist to obscure her brightness, and she was bright--she was beautiful-she was holy: Vivian gazed upon her thoughtfully, and as he gazed, recollections of past and fondly-cherished years came rushing, thick and crowd-like, upon his brain,-thoughts of home and dreams of infancy; and then there were whisperings-loud and startling whisperings of evil, and the tones of silvery voices, long since choked in dust.

He remembered when he was a child, when his mother stroked his flaxenhair with her soft, delicate hand: and he remembered, too, sitting in her lap, and listening to the sweet songs she used to sing him in the night-fall of a summer evening, when the cool breeze came in at the open lattice. Then there followed a long blank-a dim, desolate void which he could not fill up; there were indistinct recollections of death, and a black hearse, and a weeping father, and a newly-dug grave:-the traces were confused, he could not arrange them in their proper order.

Again his remembrances returned; but he had no mother now-her soft, delicate hand no longer stroked his hair, and she no longer sang him the pretty songs which she was wont to sing. Vivian had grown into boyhood,

but he had no mother.

There is a something in the want of a mother, when we first miss her accustomed endearments, which defies the power of human pen to describe; those little kindnesses, only valued when lost for ever,-those cares, apparently trivial, but only to be treasured up in our bosoms when the beloved of our hearts is departed from amongst us.

Again there was a long and dreary blank:-there were scenes constantly changing, and the whispering of friendly voices, and the greetings of relatives, and the songs of young and beloved sisters. Again, and again the scene altered, and Vivian was now at College. The schoolboy was forgotten in the undergraduate; the short jacket was exchanged for the manly coat, the green school-bag for the cap and gown of the collegian. But here the tablet of his remembrance grew darker :-Vivian was no longer the young and ingenuous boy; no longer were there merely whisperings of evil-the catalogue became gloomy: friends had fallen off; deeds had been committed at which Vivian would once have shuddered; the deserted companionthe injured female—the fearful array of dark reminiscences all marshalling themselves in order. Vivian could not recal them :-he dared not.

He leant upon the tomb and wept. What tears are like the tears of penitence? The moon fell softly on the earth around him, and the stars were looking forth like angels' eyes from heaven; and the breeze passed gently by, like the melody of departed spirits. The air was odorous with the breath of the balmy flowers, the primroses and the violets which sprang up in the hedge-banks; and the perfume of those flowers recalled the scenes of his boyhood-the green fields and the fertile pastures; and Vivian leant upon the tomb, and wept.

There was a noise in the church-yard. It was the village sexton, preparing to finish a grave in which a corpse was to be interred on the following morning. He was a merry-hearted man, and he began to whistle to enliven his employment. The tall trees which grew around the old church, cast their lengthened shadows upon the spot where Vivian was standing. The sexton continued to whistle, and Vivian remained silent. There was something in the fellow's mirth, unsuited as it was to the sombre character of the place and the stillness of the hour, that diverted the student from the contemplation of his own wretchedness. "I must join this man," he thought to himself: "his merriment may gladden me. You're jovial to-night, friend."

The man stood bolt upright. Had a ghost arisen from one of the neighbouring graves, and appeared suddenly before him, he could not have been more startled than at Vivian's unexpected intrusion. "Aye, aye, merriment is merriment, though it be in a church-yard, although it is not a place, as one may say, to be merry in. You are here after your hour to-night, if I may be so bold."

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I am late out of my college," replied the student; "but the night is fair, and the walk to your village is pretty."

"The trees have shot up since I was a boy," continued the sexton; "they were but small then: my father had the planting of them, poor soul; they overshadow his own grave now.'

"Ah! and do you follow your father's occupation?"

“I do; man and boy he worked, as sexton and grave-digger, here sixty years and I have taken his trade up, as they say: we have shared it a hundred years between us."

"It is a long time," replied Vivian, "to have turned over one piece of ground; you have buried many a proud heart, and many a broken heart, in your day."

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Why, as for that, many's the proud heart, 'tis true, that I've buried,it is'nt every haughty person that wears fine clothes; poverty can be high as well as riches, as my father used to say;-but broken hearts, I buried one broken heart; the grass has'nt grown over her grave yet." "Indeed, did she belong to this village?"

"She did, poor girl: I knew her, sir, from a child, and a fine young thing she grew up. First there came the carpenter that lives down yonder, with his round face and his spruce Sunday-coat, but Mary Gray had nothing to say to him; then there was the young farmer would take it into his head to see her into church every Sunday, but she shook her head at him too,―more's the pity! And then came Bill Dackets, and poor Mary had soon no heart of her own to lose. It was a weary day when that happened."

"Were they married?" demanded Vivian.

Never," returned the man. "Bill died, and the poor girl drooped: she sank, sir, by degrees; day after day we watched her; and her parents, it would have wrung tears from a stone to have seen them; she broke her heart, sir, and we buried them side by side."

"And what ailed her lover? did he die suddenly ?"

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No, sir, no! he became strange : used to walk about the fields and this church-yard by night; and then would tell us he had seen his mother's ghost, and that she had come to warn him that he had been leading a wicked life, he, poor fellow, that had never in his life done an infant's harm; and then he took a dislike to water, and they could'nt get him to drink. terrible to hear him shriek when they brought it where he was."

It was

A slight tremor ran through the student's frame. "What was his illness?" he asked of the sexton.

K

"It was not illness," replied the man; "it was no illness, sir,—it was worse than that, poor Bill was mad."

“Damnation!" shouted the student. "What did you say that word

for?"

The man looked up in surprise: Vivian had dashed over the graves, and disappeared.

Eleven o'clock; how the hours fly away when we are afraid of some approaching calamity! There's nothing on earth like it—on they go—on -on-on-with the rapidity of a steam-coach, or Mr. Wordsworth's "little crescent boat," tossed up and down in a hurricane. Pardon the simile, ye admirers of "Peter Bell.”

Eleven o'clock, and Vivian was seated by the side of a good blazing fire in his little room, in the old court of Trinity College. The empty glass stood by his side upon the table, inviting him to replenish it: he filled a bumper, and smacked his lips as he set down the bottle. "Pshaw! 'tis all foolery-confounded nonsense-I am not mad--am I? pshaw! not I!" and he drained off the wine; "'tis glorious good stuff, by Bacchus!"

And it was undoubtedly, for five glasses more set Vivian to singing most merrily. He got up from his chair, danced about the room, shouting at the highest pitch of his lungs, and finally, being wearied by the exertion, he flung himself into an easy chair, and fell fast asleep.

How long he continued to sleep is not recorded; but the wick of the candle began to lengthen, and by-and-bye to be surmounted with a thick, black-looking mushroom top, and the fire in the grate grew lower and lower; the coals, ever and anon, sending forth that ominous crackle which warns us of their departing heat. A loud knocking at the door aroused the student at length from his slumber: "Who in God's name wants me at this time of night ?” was his first exclamation, as he arose from his chair and indulged in a good yawn. Knock! knock! knock!" There it is again— stop-stay a moment, don't hammer the door so furiously,—what do ye bang it so for?"

Vivian arose, and having snuffed the candle, proceeded to open the door. He undid the latch cautiously, for he was fearful of some trick about to be played upon him by the intruder, whom he supposed to be his old acquaintance and fellow-student, Philip Forester. “Aha! Philip, a late greeting to night," he exclaimed, as he set open the door of his study and gave free ingress to his companion. But his eyes opened to the fullest extent their lids would allow, on beholding the form, shape, and universally quaint appearance of his unceremonious visitant. Vivian's heart sickened to its core, on beholding the precise counterpart of the miraculous being who had accosted him upon the Gog-Magog Hills, and whose fatal gift had been that day the cause of such extreme mental agony and excitement.

“Ha! ha! ha!" said the being, "we have met again then." Vivian replied not, but his knees trembled, and his lips quivered; an ashy paleness overspread his face: he made way for the old man, and then tottered to a chair which stood by the window. "You will be cold out there-draw your seat nearer to the fire," said the being, who had already comfortably seated himself by the side of the nearly extinguished embers: he stirred them, however, and they blazed up astonishingly. "A merry blaze that," he exclaimed; "come here, young man-you remember our bargain; you are senior wrangler then, are you not?"

Vivian gave a convulsive start.

"Senior wrangler-ha! ha! a merry honour that! 'tis something to see all the rest of your College looking up to you, as to the branch from which their own laurel is gathered -is it not, Vivian ?"

Vivian had approached the old man, and with a determination to be as

firm as his nerves would allow him, he drew his chair immediately opposite the object of his extreme dread. The latter seemed to enjoy his trepidation, for he smiled marvellously as the student turned away his eyes from his glance. "Have you got the watch?" he demanded.

"I have not," was Vivian's reply.

"I thought as much-in fact I knew it," returned the being, "and I have troubled you with my company to night, that we might settle the dif ference. You remember the stipulation?"

"I do ;" and Vivian shuddered again as he spoke.

"And I am still willing to give you another chance of avoiding the fulfilment of it. Are you content to accept any further conditions ?" continued the old man.

"Oh! for God's sake," cried Vivian, in the highest pitch of agony, "for God's sake, demand nothing further-it was an unholy, an infernal compact. I have bound my soul already to the powers of darkness."

"Of your own free will. It was a glorious watch!" and the creature chuckled as he spoke.

“It was a foul invention of the Unholy One; it was the workmanship of Satan, whose emissary thou art, if thou art not the very demon himself,' replied Vivian.

"Ha! ha! the moon rose earlier than usual to-night," continued the being, in a most provoking strain.

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"God of Heaven!" ejaculated the half distracted student, why didst thou suffer my vanity to lead me into this distress. Oh! Vivian, even honours may be too dearly purchased.

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'It was a glorious watch," chuckled the wretch, "a most beautiful jewel, rare, costly; there was not another like it in the University—no, that there was'nt. Your old grandfather gave it you, and the man who made it was dead; nobody else could make such a one. Ha ha! what a good grandfather!"

Vivian did repress the oath that rose to his lips, but his rage for a moment overcame his fear. "You blackened scoundrel, you perfidious wretch!" he shouted; "if you are a human being, you shall pay for your audacity. Help, help-here! hallo!" and he darted to the window as he spoke, with the intention of throwing open the shutters, and calling some one to his assistance. But before he could undo the bolt, the tones of such diabolical laughter pealed upon his ear, that his whole frame seemed paralysed with dread. "Ha ha ha!" the sounds came ringing along, till the student was petrified with terror. "Ha! ha! ha!" a thousand echoes seemed to reverberate the peal, till at length Vivian was fairly stunned, and sunk half senseless upon the floor.

For a few moments only was he allowed to lie there. The voice of the being was heard summoning him to arise, and Vivian could not disobey: he got up, as it were, instinctively. The creature's eyes gleamed like fire: never had the student beheld such dreadful orbs; they rolled about-burning and sparkling horribly. "Ha ha ha!" the first sounds that greeted Vivian's ear were the same notes of infernal laughter that had alarmed him before.

"Do you know this jewel?" demanded the being.

He laid it upon the table-it was the watch, the very watch which Vivian had received from his hands on the Gog-Magog Hills, and which, in the delirium of his excitement, be had flung into the river. Yes, there it was, the same identical watch, lying upon the table, and sparkling before his eyes. How the blood rushed tingling to his brain, as his glance fell upon it! "Do you know this jewel?" repeated his tormentor, with a most sarcastic smile.