Dedication to the Queen.

NOR was any information received of her, or any light thrown upon her mysterious disappearance, for many years afterwards. The deep gloom that settled over the village, when further search was abandoned, and all rational hope extinguished, gradually wore away, save in the family thus bereft of its idol. The heart-broken parents were carried to the grave in rapid succession, and a deep and settled melancholy rested upon the disappointed Rosencrantz, who from that day forward was scarcely known to smile. The grief with which he was

VOL. I.

at first overwhelmed sunk into his soul and preyed like a canker upon his bosom. And if the soothing hand of time had allayed in some measure the bitter poignancy of his affliction, it was only that the partially cicatrized wound might be torn open afresh.

Such was the fact: and the circumstances were in this wise. While the surveyors were engaged in the exploration of a route for a turnpike-road through a rocky region not many miles from the Hudson, some time after the close of the revolutionary war, being a

period of ten or twelve years subsequent to the painful occurrence which I have described, the skeleton of a female was discovered at the bottom of one of those deep rocky glens of which there are many in that wild section of country, near the old Albany post-road. The skull had been fractured, as if by striking against the pointed fragment of a rock near which it lay; and, on a close examination, a cut was found remaining upon one of the ribs near the region of the heart, as of some sharp instrument. This discovery was soon noised abroad -the recollection of the long-lost Susan Hazleton was revived-further investigations were made by those who had been her friends, including her loverand, strange as it may appear, upon a finger of the skeleton hand, the joints of which seemed not to have been disturbed, but lay together in the spot where the hand must have originally fallen, was found the diamond ring of the bride, sparkling as when presented by Rosencrantz, on the morning of the happy day appointed for the wedding! The gush of feeling which succeeded this discovery must be pictured by the imagination of the reader. One feature of the dark mystery was now solved. No doubts could longer remain, that the loved object so long wept by him to whom she was betrothed, and over whose sweet remembrance there was an odour of sanctity, rich as the dews of Araby, had been cut off, in the moment of her highest and brightest hopes, by the foulest murder! Still, with the exception of a single circumstance, which will appear presently, there seemed no possible clue by which the homicide could be detected, although her virtues pleaded "like angels trumpet-tongued, against the deep damnation of her taking-off." The man who had at first been suspected, in consequence of Gilbert Dawson's communication to Charles Montgomery, had never since been seen or heard of, even by his own relations; and it had long been supposed that Gilbert, who had perished in the Jersey prison-ship, might have been mistaken in the identity of the muffled stranger. There was, however, a strange and unaccountable resident in a lone hut among the mountain crags, over whom a slight shade of suspicion had ever been cast, and which was now transiently

revived. Her rude dwelling was not quite half a mile from the glen in which the skeleton had been discovered. Elsie Hallenbake, the beldam of whom it is now necessary to speak, was an old woman at the time our tale commences. Her whole life and character had ever been shrouded in a dark cloud of mystery. She had been resident in that vicinity for many, many years, and simple-minded people did not scruple to declare her little better than a sorceress, who practised devilish incantations, and held familiar converse with spirits of darkness. Her form and figure were tall and masculine; her features sharp, sallow, and wrinkled; her nose high and hooked, like the beak of an eagle; while her sunken, coal- black eyes, whenever crossed in her purposes, or otherwise angered, flashed with the piercing and terrible glances of the basilisk. For more than fifty years she had lived within a few miles of Hazlewood, in the midst of the wild region already mentioned, which was too rugged for cultivation. Sometimes she was in the village, or prowling about the adjacent settlements, practising as a fortune-teller, by way of paying for supplies of food, which from fear would never have been denied her; but, for the most part, her time was occupied in wandering about the woods and among the hills, climbing from crag to crag over the rocks, and traversing the glens and ravines of the neighbouring highlands. Many were the wild and startling tales told of Elsie in the neighbourhood, which it would not be edifying to repeat.

Had she been mistress of the whirlwind, she could not have been more delighted with storms. She had been seen, her tall form erect, and with extended arm, standing upon the verge of fearsome precipices, in the midst of the most awful tempests, conversing as it were with unseen spirits, her long, matted hair streaming in the wind, while the thunder was riving the rocks beneath her feet, and the red lightning encircling her as with a winding-sheet of flame. A projecting rock hanging over the chasm in which the bones were discovered had formerly been a favourite seat of hers when watching the black and angry clouds as they rolled up from the west; but this haunt had long been forsaken, and all her