"Intimately," answered Mr. Pen

darvis.

66

Then," said he, "he is in the house now, having arrived in a ship of ours from Boston a few hours ago; he has followed me up here from my office; and this note is to announce his coming up stairs."

On hearing this, I uttered a low cry; it might have been joy; it might have been surprize; it might have been deep thanksgiving to my Heavenly Father; and, rising from the table, I turned and walked away to the uncurtained window to look out upon the dark street. Directly a heavy step was heard upon the landing place, the door opened, and the dear familiar voice of my friend was heard one moment in exchange of cordial welcome and greeting among the parties. The next minute Montfort spoke in a rapid and anxious tone: "My great object now is to find my friend young Nugent, and to defeat the conspiracy which has dispossessed him of his right. I only heard of the matter on my arrival from the Chippewas Territory and the Red River, just a week before I sailed; and I came off at once, determined that if I can trace him as having left this country, I will go after him, be he where he may, and bring him back."

I had turned from the window on his saying this, and advancing towards my friend I stretched out my two arms, and cried in a loud voice, yet almost choked with emotion, "He is here, dear Montfort"--The strong heart was on mine in a minute, as he locked me to his bosom, murmuring, "Dearest, dearest Walter. Oh! God be thanked! God be thanked!"

Oh!

it was a moment to me of great happiness. When I had disengaged myself from Montfort's kind embrace, Mr. Pendarvis came forward, and giving me both his hands, said how delighted he was to perfect with Mr. Nugent the friendship which had begun with Mr. Basset. "And now," said he, "you can no longer deny me as your kinsman.”

The merchant congratulated me too, and then Miss Pendarvis timidly advancing, gave me also her two hands with a simple and graceful frankness, and said, with a smile which shone through her tears like the glory of an April day, "And I too rejoice, sir, for your sake, that your friend is by

your side; and may God protect your right!"

And then Mr. Hodgson having taken his leave, we all sat down quietly, and at Montfort's request I commenced a rapid recital of my adventures from the day I heard of my uncle's death at Heidelberg; Montfort interrupting me from time to time with exclamations expressive of surprize, disapproval, or approbation -such as, "There you acted with great weakness, Walter" or, "What a consummate villain and hypocrite is that Kildoon !"—or, "Well done! well done! That was like your uncle." But when I began to narrate concerning my late discoveries through Murellos, the attention of my auditors was intense and rivetted; and Montfort, who had been pacing the room, sat down before me and drank in every word. When I had concluded, both gentlemen expressed their conviction that my traitor cousin would never stand a public trial. Montfort wanted at once to go over to Ireland, but Mr. Pendarvis thought it better to wait till I had an answer from Mc Clintock, to whom I had written after seeing Murellos. Meanwhile I was to return to my office in the morning as Mr. Basset, and wait patiently the explication of my affairs.

Montfort had entirely regained his health; he had been hunting bears and bisons, and I know not what kind of animals, ursine and bovine. He was thinner than ever I had seen him, tanned and baked brown like a Red Indian, and had the same sound, loving heart, and sturdy manner as ever.

I dined and spent all my evenings with these dear friends, but on the fourth morning after Sir John's arrival, I received a letter from Mc Clintock. It was as follows, and very characteristic of him who penned it.

"My dear Mr. Nugent,

I hasten to tell you how things are getting on with us here, and am happy to add that all is now smooth for your return. Our Dublin Counsel judged right, for Mr. Kildoon has evacuated the Darragh, and is noninventus and nowhere to be seen, and I do not think that you are the man to disturb him in investigating his whereabouts, whatever Sir John Montfort might do, at whose return I was most indubitably rejoiced.

Well, sir, the day after my return from Dublin, I drove out to the Darragh, taking Edward Darcy the police sergeant with me, disguised as my servant, for I assure you I consider Mr. Kildoon in his present condition as highly dangerous. I met him, however, half way, just at the cross roads by Roddy's Gate. He was walking, and looking dreadfully ill and haggard, but as wicked as you please. I got out of the gig, telling Darcy to keep near us, and accosted him. He was haughty, but civil. I told him I was going to him on business connected with my client, Mr. Walter Basset Nugent's claim on the Darragh property; that the Will under which the estate was now held was believed to be a forgery; that José Murellos had confessed all, and had made a solemn affidavit before a magistrate.- -Up to this he was inarticulate with rising anger, and I twice thought he would have struck me; but, looking round, I saw Darcy with his determined face and steady eye-all right, and prepared to spring at him if he touched me. So I was going on, but he burst out into a torrent of furious black rage; said it was all a lie; that you had never disputed the Will, because you could not and dared not; that Murellos was a low scoundrel; that he defied us all ; and that if I, or that young beggar-meaning you ever dared to come into his grounds, he would sue us as trespassers, or hunt us out with his dogs as thieves. Then, shaking his fist in my face, and scowling savagely at me like an angry madman, he walked away toward home, muttering maledictions. I now considered that indubitably we must go on with a regular suit at law, and was next morning getting up to go into A

to catch the Dublin mail, when the two Joyces knocked at my door, and asked to see me, bringing me extraordinary but very welcome news from the Darragh. It appears that on the day you had been there, your cousin had gone to Galway, and it is supposed purchased or chartered a yacht belonging to one of the Persses, and advertized for sale. He was not home till midnight, and in two days afterwards the yacht came round, and dropped her anchor in the mouth of the Trasnagh. Well, sir, Kildoon spent all yesterday, after his meeting

with me, between his bedroom and the admiralty, packing some trunks, and the imperials and boxes of his new yellow carriage. He said he had to make a journey to Dublin in the morning; and the servants' report of him was, that he was terribly cross. The skipper of his yacht dined with him, and they drank punch together and smoked till nine o'clock, when the sailor went away on a hired car, and at eleven o'clock Mr. Kildoon ordered his carriage to be got ready. The imperials and boxes had all been strapped on before sundown, and the coach house locked by Kildoon, and the key put in his pocket. He was very odd all the evening, and seemed to have had too much brandy and water. Now he said he would go to A to-night, and sleep there. On going away he gave Joyce the enclosed letter for you, which I am rather curious to learn the contents of, but forward unopened. On turning out of the avenue gates, he let down the front window and roared to the posttillion, 'Drive me down to where my yacht is.' This was done; a large boat was in waiting at the little pier, with three or four sailors who jumped out, and unstrapping all the trunks and boxes from off the carriage, carried them into the boat; Mr. Kildoon following, and saying to the footman that he was going to sail to Dublin, the weather was so fine, and he wanted to try his yacht. He then went on board, and the vessel stood out to sea with a light but fair breeze. When the carriage came back, the house was all in confusion. Every book had been dragged out of the admiralty library, and tossed on the floor; one very long deal box was found lying empty on the carpet; and a note was found on the drawing-room table addressed to Mrs Doxey, the housekeeper, and saying, You, Bridget Doxey, may shut up or burn the old house if you like, for I will never come back-G. N. K.' All this news the Joyces brought me. I will recommend your immediate occupation of the Darragh; a hundred hearts wish for you, and a hundred voices will welcome you. If Sir John would accompany you, it would add to our strength.

"Yours, dear Sir,
"faithfully,
"JOHN MCCLINTOCK."

The enclosed letter ran thus:

"Cousin Walter,

"I always hated you-you were ever in my way, and your presence made me little better than an upper servant in my uncle's house, where as a boy I was domesticated fully three years before you and your sister were taken in from charity; had you not come, I should have been the heir. I had every right to the property. My mother was senior to your father in years, as I was to you. You always crossed me-lowered me in the eyes of the woman I loved, and degraded me with the menials; and now you would drag me into the dock for taking my own. Farewell for ever. I hate you and I leave you. G. N. K.”

"This note," said Mr. Pendarvis, appears to be written by an insane person; yet there's method in his madness. How different is the letter of that honest John McClintock, your Irish attorney. Depend upon it, Kildoon is now self expatriated, and has, I strongly suspect, taken with him all the property he could lay his hands on, and which combined value with portableness, in those well packed portmanteaus and imperials."

And this was but too true; letter after letter now poured in upon me in a daily post office shower from McClintock, giving an account of the abstraction of money, much of the plate, and some articles of costly bijouterie, all swept away in the coffers of my caitiff cousin. I cared not; I was too happy to regard such losses in any other light than mere trifles in comparison of my great gain in the reacquisition of my place, my property, and my social position.

I might now spin out the web of my history in a longer tissue; but this would be a task to myself and a needless tax on my reader's patience.

might describe at length my return to the Darragh, which was effected in the quietest fashion, my uncle's death being too recent to allow me to permit anything of an ovation. I might tell of the legal proving of the true Will, and my establishment in my property. I might tell of a delightful Christmas party, consisting of Montfort and the whole tribe of Gaystons, married and single, and the extravagant and boyish spirits exhibit

VOL. XLVIII-NO. CCLXXXVI,

ed by Edward during his visit; and then I might dwell for whole chapters on a delightful visit I paid at Pendarvis Castle, and the great boon and blessing which God gave me there, in the deep and true love of her who has been the mistress of my heart and house for many a smiling year-the joy and pride of my youth-the companion and counsellor of my manhood

the solace and sweetener of the cares of coming old age; and, above all, the instructor of my spirit in the great undying matters of futurity, and one who sweetly and wisely herself "allured to brighter worlds and led the way." I might tell of the rapture of the Joyces, the noisy delight of my nurse, and the grim satisfaction of the corporal at my restoration; but these are things which the reader can well imagine without the trouble of writing or reading on my part and on his.

Of Mr. Kildoon I heard nothing for five years. Then I received a letter from a strange gentleman, dated Montreal, informing me of his death by a brain fever; he died unmarried, and, as far as I could learn concerning his end, the victim of habits of intemperance acting on an excitable temperament, and a mind disorganized by hereditary predisposition, and beaten down by remorse, disappointment, and shame. I often thought over his conduct-so strange, so unprincipled, and so productive of evil to his own interests and I felt assured that he had acted more or less under aberration of mind, which idea I loved to encourage-though both Montfort and McClintock would smile at it for it made me half pity him, and wholly forgive him.

Murellos lived for many years, principally at Malaga, driving his trade chiefly among the English. I believe he never again played the rogue, which Mr. McClintock ascribed to a wholesome fear of the gallows, from which he had so barely escaped. His daughter was married to my tall honest friend Diaz, who is now a thriving wine merchant in some part of Australia. She makes him a loving and an excellent wife, and I believe there is no measure to the number of olive plants which already grow around their pleasant hearth and table, or the number which may be expected.

Major Clitheroe is now a general,

father and all her family, in my many sterling friends, in my restored independence; happy among the woods, and streams, and cliffs, and mountains of my beloved Darragh; and happy amidst the warm hearted peasantry by whom I am surrounded and beloved; I walk calmly on, fulfilling my destinies, and endeavouring to perform my duties. I take no open or active part either in politics or polemics, whatever my opinions on these matters may be. My tastes are more of a literary and domestic nature.

Two brave sons of mine sat in cavalry saddles at the charge of Balaclava, and escaped with with a very slight hurt each; they have been with me and their mother to day up Glenroe, and among the iron cliffs which form the roots of Slieve-naQuilla as it breaks down to meet the sea. My wife loves the crags, and the mountains, and the wild beach air, and the solitude of the sea as much as I do, and our children have all our tastes as heirlooms from great nature.

Meanwhile, when I look abroad, I am proud and happy to mark the steady advance of MY COUNTRY in enterprize, in industry, and in success; and I rejoice to see her hastening to take her rightful and acknowledged position among the nations. I was with her in the bleak night of her famine, and I hope to live to be with her in the bright morning of her fame; and I cannot but hope that our God will yet do great things for her, whereat all who love her as truly as I do will be glad. Adieu.

WALTER BASSET NUGENT. The Darragh, September, 1856.

THERE are not a great many ideas in M. De Tocqueville's present volume which will be new to the English student of political philosophy. In France we should suppose it is calculated to create a wide and startling

sensation. Since the French Revolution of 1789, England has been far more unlike the continental nations of Western Europe than she ever was before. That event, in its effect upon society, may be likened to the

Reformation in its effect upon religion. It broke up a great dominant class into fragments. In the days of Louis the Fifteenth, "the gentlemen of Europe" were a caste, with an esprit du corps pervading the whole body from Copenhagen to Palermo, from the Land's End to Trieste. They had traditions and usages of their own, wholly distinct from the peoples among which they lived, and independent of nationality and origin. From the table land of gentility, as Sir Walter calls it, they looked down upon the rest of Europe with a feeling of perfect security; and Voltaire and La Fayette no more foresaw to what a complete change their doctrines would lead, than Luther, when he first denounced indulgences, could have foreseen the disrupture of the Papacy, and the separation of ties which had bound mankind for a thousand years. In England, owing to her position, the effect of these two great human storms was only very partially felt. Her church is still Catholic, her institutions are still feudal. Her manners change, but her traditions linger. The general tone of society is not materially different. There is still the same mixture of freedom and loyalty which excited the admiration of Burke; still the same external symbols of authority, the preservation of which at our own Revolution has been rightly eulogised by Macaulay; still the same friendly intercourse between gentle and simple which so favourably impressed the judgment of Mr. Washington Irving. All over the continent, if we are not very greatly mistaken, whether thrones or dynasties have been preserved or not, much of this sort of thing has completely passed away; and England, which in the eighteenth century was the least feudal of all the great western kingdoms, is in the nineteenth century probably the most so. Seeing, therefore, this practical contradiction before their eyes--that those institutions and customs which are vulgarly supposed the most injurious to liberty, do nevertheless flourish most in that country where alone liberty has been preserved, the English have been constantly prompted to draw certain practical conclusions from the facts which in reality have seldom

failed to coincide with M. De Tocqueville's own. His present volume will not therefore strike upon the English mind with the enlightening effect of a revelation. But its value will still be enormous. It is the first time that public attention has been specially directed to the cardinal points in the history of that great convulsion; the first time that its truest and deepest lesson has been formally proclaimed. The manner is excellent. Loose threads are gathered up, and the whole state of the case laid before us with an exhaustive accuracy, a most lucid arrangement, and a pregnant brevity that reminds us of the Greeks. The essence of modern history is extracted, and compressed within the limits of one goodsized octavo volume.

M. de Tocqueville has himself divided his work into two books. For our present purpose it will perhaps be more convenient to divide it into three parts. The first is taken up with discussing the object and scope of the French Revolution; the second, the system of administration; the third, the condition of society and the state of the people.

The five chapters of the first book are occupied in demonstrating the mistake of those who imagine that the Revolution was a movement towards anarchy and atheism. That such was not the case is best shewn, says M. de Tocqueville, by contemplating its final results. Whether we confine our observation to France, or extend it to all those countries in which the Revolution was for a time dominant, we shall find the same truth. Its rage was directed against certain institutions; and political order and religious belief were injured because inseparably interwoven with these institutions, but not because they themselves were the objects of popular animosity at that particular time. And so we see that "order" and "faith" have come out of the struggle unscathed. In one word, it was the aristocracy which the people rose against, and not the monarchy. It was the Gallican church which they detested, and not the Catholic religion. The system of centralization— the cause rather than the effect of the Revolution--had made the aristocracy contemptible, and the church be