evidently been dreaming, seeing me as he awoke, suddenly started and inquired, "Are you the man?" "What man, William, dear? who do you mean?" said the wife, bending over him; "this is our good clergyman, and as you were ill, I thought you might like to talk to him." "Thank you, Ellen," said the prisoner faintly," I thought it was your "What, William?" asked the wife gaspingly, as if fearful of what was coming. 66 Oh, I must have been dreaming, dear," was the evasive answer. "Ellen, did you not say this gentleman was a clergyman?” "Yes, and happy if he can afford you consolation in your sad illness," rejoined I. "Thank you, Sir, thank you, I know I must die soon, and I do stand in need of consolation. Oh, that horrid dream! " The prisoner paused. "Ellen, dear," resumed he, " I should like to take the sacrament? will you receive it with me?" "I am a Catholic, William," said the wife with a faint smile. "Ah! I forgot; then, Sir, I will take it alone," said he, turning to me; "but, Ellen, bring our children to my bed-side, and do you sit by me; I would have you all see that I trusted in Christ to the last." The woman turned away her head-the tears rolled rapidly over her cheeks and she for a moment hid her face in her handkerchief. Then she bent over the mattress on which her children lay, and the little boy smiled, and asked "What is it mother ? " The poor woman now uttered a sob, and the girl woke. She then motioned her to approach with the infant. The girl advanced. The doctor sat himself in her vacant chair. The prisoner watched me as I opened a small pocket Prayer-book; moved towards the cupboard for the fragment of bread upon its shelf-poured into a glass some wine which had been sent to him medicinally, and consecrated both in the customary solemn manner. During this time the mother had taken the infant from her daughter's hands, and laid it by the side of its father. She had placed the young boy kneeling at the foot of the bed (on it); and the child, as all children are taught, closed together the palms of his little hands, and held them up towards Heaven. The wife herself knelt down by the bed, with one daughter on either side of her, and the doctor raised his hat from his head, and held it over his face. With a tone, as solemn as I could command, I commenced the sacred duty which I had to perform, with a short, but earnest exhortation to the dying man. I then chose from the service a few of those passages which I thought would apply most consolingly. "Godliness is great riches, if a man be content with that he hath for we brought nothing into the world, neither may we carry anything out."-1 Tim, vi. There were one or two sentences which I avoided, fearful of raising in his mind an angry feeling towards those who had imprisoned him. Such as, "Whoso hath this world's goods, and seeth his brother in need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?"-1 St. John, iii. During the time I went through the service, there was not the slightest interruption,-from the unsleeping smiling infant by the sufferer's side, to the agonized mother by his bed, all were mute listeners; and when the Sacrament was administered, the prisoner took the bread, and drank of the wine, with the fervent earnestness of a Christian, who put all trust in God, and who hoped to be redeemed by his Son! When it was all over, he seemed much comforted, but his serenity was suddenly disturbed, and by an incident the most affecting I ever beheld. His little boy, who had remained kneeling with his hands clasped in most lamb-like innocence at the foot of his bed, as if glad to be released from his cramped position, let fall his arms upon the couch, and crawling over to his father, kissed him on the cheek, and asked, "Father, are you going to die?" The poor man pressed the boy to his bosom, and sobbed out "Yes!" The effect was electric,-the young half-conscious child burst into tears, the mother buried her face in the bed-clothes,-the younger girl ran to her mattress on the floor, and flung herself upon it in hysteric grief. I found my own fortitude failing, and the doctor, unable to control his emotions, ran out of the room. I followed hastily, and called him back. "What can you do for him?” said I. "Nothing! he is dying gradually, and is beyond the reach of medicine. I would help him if I could, but he is your patient now, not mine, and such scenes I cannot stand." The words had scarcely passed his lips, when a clap of thunder, the loudest I ever heard in this country, burst over the prison,-and went roaring round the walls with the strange strong echoes which they return to all loud sounds. A shriek followed, and we both ran back into the room. Wild fulfilment of a fearful destiny! Strange closing of a The prisoner was in loud, strong, screaming hysterics. The wife snatched the children from the bed, and laid them upon the ground-and they all huddled together upon their mattress-in silent, but deep terror. "Oh, dear! Oh, mercy! It's all me," cried the woman despairingly, as she hurried to the water-jug, for the usual remedy for hysterics. The doctor held her back,-" Water will not do now," said he, "you must let nature take its course." "Oh, God! oh, God! I fear I have killed my husband. Oh, my poor William!" She turned back to the couch. Meanwhile some dozen prisoners, men and women, alarmed by the shrieks, had gathered in the room, and now stood round the bed. The thunder without continued rolling over the building-growing more appalling as its echoes grew fainter, and its sounds diminished, until they likened the groaning away of the human spirit. More than one start and shudder and scream did it awaken in the chamber; but none screamed like the dying man. He still remained in convulsive hysterics; his shrieks shrill and loud at first, seemed to exhaust themselves-growing fainter and fainter, until they died away in a sort of gurgle, which brought the white foam to the sufferer's lips. Then it frothed for a moment, and its bubbles burst and disappeared; and at the same time the pulse stopped in his heart; and the sense left his spirit; and light was extinguished in the prisoner's brain. His wife stood there a lonely widow, while his children were left orphans to the protection of the Lord. When the room was cleared of its idle guests, and the poor woman who had long been prepared for her husband's death, although not for its coming in so awful a form, had in some measure regained her composure, I inquired of her why she had charged herself with being the cause of the prisoner's last strong fit. 'Oh, sir," she replied, "it was very unfortunate, and quite furtherst from my heart to think he would have been so strangely affected; but you know, sir, he said he had had a dream, and it seemed to hang upon his mind, so when you left the room with the docther, I just asked him what it was, and he told me. Ellen, dear,' said he, I dreamt that old Wentworth Stokes was not dead, but that he had come home from over the seas and '-' My own dream, William! My very own dream last night;' said I hastily; and then the loud clap of thunder came; and my poor husband, who was, like all sailors, superstitious, took it, I think, as some fearful confirmation of his vision-for he started, and shrieked, and fell into those wild dreadful hysterics, which took him out of the world." The poor woman's tears flowed afresh; and I left her for a time, telling her that I would return in an hour or two-and first bidding her pray to God, according to the dictates of her own heart and conscience, to calm for her the troubled waters of affliction, and enable her to support her trials! I then sent the nurse from the Prison Infirmary, to pay the requisite attentions to the dead, directing her to leave the room as soon as she should have performed her sad duty. I deemed it well that the sacred sorrows of the widow and the orphans' first tears of mourning should be suffered to flow undisturbed. Still was my curiosity unsatisfied as to the cause of the prisoner's hysteric shock, and it had been little enlightened by the dream that "Old Wentworth Stokes had come home from over the seas." The mystery enveloped in this sentence was afterwards cleared up; and I shall unfold it to the reader in the following narrative. The father of Ellen Maurice (the widow's maiden name) had been many years back a clothes-salesman in a respectable way of business in Dublin; and much of his trade consisted in the outfit of sailors leaving or coming into port. He was a widower, and Ellen being his only child he did not suffer her to be much away from him. In young girlhood she used to play about the shop; and when she began to ripen into the woman, it was part of her occupation to wait behind the counter. Old Maurice was doubtless fond of her, so far as his notions of affection went; but he was by nature a fierce, harsh man, and his daughter lived more in fear of him than love. But young warm spirits do not long endure loneliness of heart; there is a well of sympathy in the human soul, that in youth does not remain long unstirred; feelings fresh and early, spring up in the fervour and loveliness of affection;-feelings "that bind The plain community of guileless hearts Ellen Maurice could not love her father as she longed to love, but she soon felt that she must love somebody. She could not endure to live, and think, and feel, in the selfishness of the heart's solitude. Moreover she was not without opportunities of choice, if in truth she had not been rather fastidious. Many a joyful and jolly tar would buy a jacket or a neckcloth at her father's shop, for the sake of being served and smiled upon by Ellen ;— but then a common sailor was below her in station; and as yet none of them had made what is called an impression." But by-and-by her heart had to undergo a regular course of siege from the attacks made upon it, not by a common sailor, but by William Moystyn, the handsome and good-tempered mate of one of the government transports in the bay. He was of good courage too, and he reduced the fortress so, that poor Ellen yielded at, or rather without discretion. And so William Moystyn and Ellen Maurice were now fairly betrothed to each other by their own promises, and in their own hearts; but the poor girl feared her father too much to ask his consent; and their innocent wooing was carried on in secret. At last troops were ordered for embarkation on board the transport, and the vessel herself was put under sailing orders for the West Indies. William sailed in her, having first bought his outfit of Ellen, and promised to return a captain, and ask her father's consent to their marriage. And in this I suppose there would have been no difficulty; old Maurice would have allowed his daughter to marry a captain; but he would have been enraged at the thought of her being in love with a mate. Ellen could not see the wisdom of this. And so Ellen continued in her love-though somewhat in sorrow-on account of the absence of its object; a sort of memory of fondness once indulged; flowers of affection which it was the duty of constancy to keep in bloom. "Dai bei rami scendea, Dolce ne la memoria." Soon after Moystyn's departure, an accession of fortune accrued to Ellen and her parent. A relative in England had died and left between father and daughter a neat independent income; whereupon the pride. of old Maurice became mightily raised, and he sold off his old clothes, packed up his traps, and, with characteristic patriotism, left his country the moment he found himself in a condition to live comfortably in it. Away he started in the first steamer, without bothering himself to bid good-bye to his friends; and having passed the ordeal of a rough sea and a longish journey through Holyhead, &c. (every Irishman knows the route,) he found himself, one fine evening, just in time to dine with his daughter at the Swan-with-two-Necks in Lad-lane. Once in London, old Maurice set himself down in peace, as he said, to enjoy his prosperity; and, having nothing else to do, he thought of busying himself in finding a husband for Ellen, whom he now considered an heiress. The first requisite for his daughter's spouse, in his idea, would be money, the next, a sociable power of companionship; in short, a person who had wherewith to pay for his grog,-the will to drink, and the wit to relish it in evening conversations with old Maurice. Maurice had brought with him an introduction to a person who was to him described as a "respectable merchant," residing in the borough of Southwark, and by name Mr. Wentworth Stokes. This Mr. Went worth Stokes was a gentleman who might have said to his forty-ninth year what Kennedy the poet said to the year 1833 "Thou art gone, old year, to thy fathers, In the stormy time of snow." It was near Christmas, and Mr. Stokes was fifty! So much for his age in other respects he was such a man as Maurice wanted for his daughter. He said he had money; he proved he had a pleasant, plausible tongue; and all that Christmas he drank gin-and-water with old Maurice during the long evenings. Poor Ellen! as her heart was not much engaged in these proceedings, I have not forced her to make a frequent personal appearance; but when New Year's-day came, she was united in the bands of matrimony to Mr. Wentworth Stokes, in St. George's church in the Borough first, and afterwards by a priest of her own religion. Almost immediately after her marriage her father died; and Mr. Wentworth Stokes, having at his disposal the property both of parent and child, and being, as before described, "a respectable merchant,' immediately applied it to the purpose of freighting a ship to the West Indies, of which he determined to be supercargo himself. Either there must have been something wrong in Mr. Stokes' character, or else a merchant of fifty feels less compunction in leaving a newly-married bride than would a young high-born gentleman. Certain it is, that, as soon as he had engaged an active and intelligent captain to take charge of his vessel, he conveyed Mrs. Stokes to Herne Bay, and having procured her a first floor in a row of houses facing the sea, bade her farewell, and proceeded to Gravesend, there to embark on board his own ship for a tropic clime. Strangely indeed runs the current of human destiny. Poor Ellen was now alone in the world; left as no other young and attractive child of nature was ever, perhaps, forsaken in her inexperience before. She felt no grief for her husband's absence; her heart was too often artlessly-and, as she believed, almost innocently-wandering after her early love but she found herself desolate,-a flower with no shelter from the storm,—a reed that might be shaken in the wind. For the first few days after her husband's departure, she whiled away her time in watching, from the window of her apartment, the vessels that were continually passing the bay. It was an occupation that more than any other filled her mind with thoughts in which she ought not to have indulged, but it seemed thrown in her way, and she could not resist. Often it awakened tears for the love and memory of a being for whom they should no longer have dared to flow. One morning, after a fitful night, in which poor Ellen's dreams had been hardly less stormy than the bellowing waves that ever and anon wakened her as they dashed under the windows, the lonely and unhappy girl approached her casement and gazed upon the ocean before her raging like an angry lion, with a sudden and mysterious foreboding that those turbulent billows had been working out a passage in her destiny, and were by some wild agency commingled with her future fate. As she cast her eye over the waters, all unstilled as they tossed, and ever bristling with their white foam, she saw numerous vestiges of wreck, and knew that more than one noble fabric of human industry had been shattered, and that many lives must have been lost. One vessel had been within sight totally wrecked, and boats of such as dared venture were now putting |