III.

The maiden accepted the chain,

And its links round her white neck she bound, And then she went down to the plain

Where the knight lay at length on the ground.
"Thou art cast in the way like a thief,
Thou true knight, slain to my grief,
Who love thee so well!"

IV.

With the might that her misery gave,
Away to God's acre she bore him,
And laid him down hard by the grave
Where his father was buried before him.
She twisted the carcanet tight

Round the neck where it glittered so bright,
And died by her love.

V.

Two maidens sate in their bower,

And looked out on the valley below; Their father rode up to the tower,

With his shield, and his sword, and his bow. "Now welcome, lord father," they said, "O what wilt thou give to the maid Who loves thee so well?"

VI.

"O daughter, in kirtle of green,
My guerdon to-day is for thee;
The chief of thy pleasure hath been
In the chase by the greenwood trec.
This spear with a golden band
I took from a huntsman's hand,
And I paid him with Death."

VII.

The maiden accepted the spear

And went down to the forest beneath;
She tracked her quarry in fear,

And the cry of the hunt was "Death."
Her hounds went straight to the shade,
Where under the lindens was laid
The huntsman she loved.

VIII.

"I came to the lindens," she said,
"To the tryst I promised to keep."
And then with the spear she shed
Her life-blood and sank to sleep.

The birds sing the dirge of their doom,
The boughs make the arch of their tomb,
Where together they lie.

IX.

One maiden sate in her bower,

And looked out on the valley below; Her father rode up to the tower,

With his shield, and his sword, and his bow. "Now welcome, lord father," she said, "O what is thy gift to the maid Who loves thee so well?"

X.

"O daughter, in kirtle of white,

My guerdon to-day shall be thine; A blossom gives thee more delight Than the yellowest gold of the mine: This lily the gardener would hide, But I snatched it away from his side, And paid him with Death."

ACTED TO THE LIFE.

Ir was a good many years ago, for I was at the time a young fellow walking the hospitals, that one sultry evening in September I came home to my dreary chambers-doubly dreary now that the whole inn was almost tenantless. It was a glorious sunset, and I rested on the top landing, key in hand, looking over the housetops at the gorgeous sight. Down below was the quiet paved court, one side of it formed by the quaint old hall, the windows of which blazed again, as the light fell on the glass, all tinted with the heraldry of benefactors, long since gone to their rest. Quiet enough, but hemmed in upon all sides by the ceaseless roar of the great city, which reached the ear like the surge of a distant

sea.

Not a soul could I see about the place. The last of the men I knew-he lived in the opposite set of chambers-had gone that morning, and I seemed to be left alone in the inn. The bells of some church in the distance were ringing out peals that rose and died away with the breath of wind that just stirred the heavy air, and for a long time I leaned out of the landing-window, listening to them, and to the more distant memories they awakened. I thought of the chimes that I used to hear, years ago, when crossing the meadows to the cathedral in the grass-grown old city, and of the little stream, with its green sloping banks, along which the path wandered. I fancied I was a little fellow again, running by my mother's side, holding her hand, and looking up into her sweet face, that seemed to me so like that of

a sculptured angel in the chancel, too high up for the Puritans or forgotten by them when they broke the rest. So like, that one day, after gazing at the figure, lit up by the sun, and wondering, in childish fancy, whether it might not be some one who had lived on earth once, and had died and stopped there, an angel, on the way to heaven; thinking this, and then looking into my mother's pale face -(she could come with us now only on fine sunny days),—I was seized with an awful fear that I hardly understood, and threw myself crying into her lap. Ah! how bitter was my grief when, months later, they took me to her bedside for the last time, and she prayed me to be good, for that she must leave me, but to meet again in heaven. They buried her in the village churchyard, under the old yew-tree, where I had often climbed and played. How changed it all was now with its solemn, sad remembrances.

I was

The bells had stopped, and the sunset was deepening, when I recollected that I had my key in my hand, and opened the heavy, black outer door, which always reminded me of the entrance to a mausoleum. The dreariness of the wretched rooms quite oppressed me. It was in vain that I tried to write or to read; after a few efforts I thrust papers and books away from me. The solitude of the place had grown hateful. walking up and down impatiently, confounding my stupidity in refusing Markham's invitation to go with him, when, passing my letter-box for about the tenth time, I at last observed that it contained a letter which had been dropped in after I went out in the morning. It was from Markham, who, having suspended his legal studies, which involved about an equal amount of dining in hall, farcewriting, and rowing about Putney, had gone down to an uncle's in Devonshire, whence, certain business matters arranged, he was to start for his mother's in North Wales. He asked me to join him there, and told me that both his mother and his sister Rhoda begged me to come. "One of them," I thought, "might guess that I don't need much persuasion." Why should I not take a holiday like the rest? I persuaded myself that I was overworked and wanted rest, and determined to take Markham at his word. I sat down and wrote two lines, telling him that I should walk down to Wales, starting that very night, and that if he got there first, he might expect me as soon as twenty miles a day and a zigzag road would bring me. In ten minutes I put up a few things to send on before me, packed a modest viaticum in a knapsack, and then shouldered my traps and rushed from the horrible gloom of my chambers. I knew that

I had just time to catch a train that would drop me a few miles out of London; so hailing a cab in the Strand, drove to the station, and in another hour found myself on a country road, doing my first stage in the bright moonlight.

How delicious, after the crowd and bustle of London, are the first hours of a walking trip! What a change from the hurry and fever of the thronged streets to the solitude and quiet of the hedged roads! I absolutely danced with delight; it was so glorious to be free once more. I was walking through a woody country, and felt a pleasure I cannot describe in reminiscences of childish terrors awakened by the strange forms that moonlight showed among the trees. When I came to a break in the woods, I leaned over a gate opening into meadows that stretched far away, all gleaming in the light which lends a beauty, delicate but mysterious, and almost unearthly, to the most common objects. As I leaned I listened; not a sound, except the tinkling of a sheep-bell: now and then the bark of a dog, baying the moon, or a village church-bell striking the hour.

But soon I saw, breaking over the horizon, distant lightning, which warned me that a storm was approaching. I had still some miles to go before I could reach the end of my first stage, so I pressed on again. Before an hour had passed the wind had risen, and was swaying the tree-tops overhead in the narrow arched lanes, and soon the moon was hidden, and I felt the first slow heavy drops of rain. Half-dazzled at times by vivid flashes, and splashing through puddles already formed in the cart-ruts, I hastened forward, but it was nearly midnight when, drenched to the skin, I reached the little town of D

It did not take me long to hunt up the market-place and to find out the Red Lion, which I knew to be the best inn. It was not quite so easy, however, to gain admittance; but, at last, a suspicious Boots, after a parley from a window, leisurely descended, and having narrowly examined me, admitted my claim to a night's lodging, and set about showing me to a room. It was a grand old place still, the Red Lion, although rapidly falling into decay, as Boots told me, lamenting the past, and enumerating the coaches that used to stop there. "You wouldn't have had to knock me up then, sir," he said; what with the late, and what with the early coaches, there was some one afoot most all night." And half-sympathising, I followed him as he went along the passage, past rooms with their names painted over the doorways, up-stairs, and along the gallery, which overlooked the courtyard.

"for

66

"You've got a theatre here, then?" I said, as my eye fell on a bill wafered to the wall. Yes, sir," said Boots, who, indemnified for his trouble in rising, was communicative, in spite of sleepiness. "Yes, sir, they do say as how Miss Barry is an uncommon good actress; she have only been here a week, and the company won't stop long, for there ain't many people to fill a theayter, except the young officer chaps from G-, likewise some gents from the university."

I stopped to look at the bill; a long, narrow document, which announced the appearance of Miss Barry in the "Thrilling melodrama of the Vampire!" I smiled as I read the bill, which not only set forth the performers' names, but gave in a few words the leading characteristics of the personages of the drama. "SIR GREVILLE LILBURNE (he is a swarthy baronet, of ancient lineage, poor but haughty, proud and revengeful); MARSDEN, the VAMPIRE!!! (a demon, who renews his life by drinking the blood of maidens !)"

"That's her father," interposed the officious Boots.

"ISA, (a lovely girl)——"

"That's true enough," cut in Boots; "she's fit for a better theayter nor this here; there's a London manager coming down to-morrow on purpose to see her."

I finished the bill, went into my room, and taking off my clothes, gave Boots particular instructions to have them well dried against the morning. But alone, and in bed in the huge room, only half-lighted by the candle, left burning, and flickering in the gusts of wind, which made their way to it, I found it impossible to sleep. There I lay, wide awake, listening to the thunder, which still muttered in the distance, and to the wind, which seemed to gain fresh strength every now and then, as it came dashing full against my windows. Then I watched the flickering shadows of the bed-hangings, and from that I fell to thinking of the playbill, and of the hideous subject of the play.

It was only a short time before that this frightful legend had engaged a good deal of my attention. I was a humble member of a little band of earnest students (I hope I may say so much without undue self-praise, the claims of most of my comrades would be readily acknowledged if I felt justified in divulging their names)-I was one, I say, of a little band that, not content with the study,

as a profession, of the art to which we had devoted ourselves, relieved our severer labours by the investigation of some of those natural phenomena and historical events connected with medicine, the mere names of which are

sufficient to produce an absorbing interest, by their potent influence on the imagination. These studies being undertaken as a recreation, we chiefly confined ourselves to the historical problems which abound in medicine; another motive for this choice was the wider reading! and more extended research which such inquiries would necessitate. It was thus that 1 the mysterious epidemics and the wholesale¦ poisonings of the Middle Ages had been selected at different times; that, with a wider range, we had studied the mystic lore and even repeated the experiments of the old alchemists; and that, more recently we had devoted ourselves to the history of vampirism and lycanthropy.

A prominent part in this last research was allotted to me, and I had read all that I could find on the subject. I soon remarked how completely I had been in error in accepting the ordinary opinion that the belief in vampires is confined to the Levant. What, indeed, was the Lamia of the Greeks; what were the Lemures of the Romans-"the souls of the silent," as Ovid beautifully calls them, to appease which festivals, Lemuria, were yearly held? what was the Jewish "man with an unclean spirit, and having his dwelling among tombs ?" what was the ghoul of the East but one and all vampires, under different names and forms? I had found that the legend, far from being confined to the Levant, was, to take Europe only, all but universally accepted and believed in throughout Hungary, Poland, and a great part of Austria. Legend, I have said; but I was not an adherent of that shallow philosophy which would teach the rejection of unexplained facts, and here was a popular belief than which scarce any, save those that command universal acceptance, rested on wider grounds; in a word, for I may as well say it at once, my studies had convinced me that vampirism must be accepted as a scientific fact.

Not that

How, indeed, could I refuse credence to the mass of evidence which was open to me? How, for instance, could I, who, as a student of materia medica, was every day compelled to give the highest authority to the testimony of the judicious Tournefort, reject as untrustworthy his assurances that he had actually seen cases of vampirism. belief was based on the evidence of isolated observers; there were the actual records of law courts; at that time there was present to my mind the recollection of a recent French case, too ghastly to be detailed here, that of Antoine Léger, still known in the Causes Célèbres as the anthropophagus." But,

* Ovid, Fasti 5.

indeed, incredulous science had long ago been compelled to admit the existence of vampirism; under another name - lycanthropia - its horrors were discussed by the highest authorities, the wide prevalence in France of this form of vampirism at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the execution of some 600 persons, confessed lycanthropists, having rendered doubt impossible.*

As I lay turning in my huge bed, thinking over all this, I confess that I wished the town, the theatre, and its bill had been anywhere but in my road that night. At last, however, I got tired of turning over and over, and my candle dying out, after many fitful leaps, which startled me not a little, I fell asleep.

I awoke late, feeling heavy, and out of humour, and my temper was not at all improved by finding that for the present there was no chance of getting further on my road. All above was one dull mass of clouds, from which the rain still poured in torrents. I breakfasted slowly, wrote a few letters, rendered necessary by my abrupt departure, and then looked out into the market-place at the puddles; when tired of this, I turned for consolation to the literary resources of the coffee-room, I found only a Book of Roads, an odd volume of some one on Tropical Fevers, and the second volume of a novel, containing neither introduction nor dénoúment. In my despair I would have played at backgammon with myself, but a redundancy of four men of one colour did not compensate a deficiency of six of the other, so I abandoned the attempt. Utterly miserable-for my clothes, despite my injunction, had been wretchedly dried-I had a fire lit, and sat before it reading the book on fevers, till the waiter came in to ask me when I would dine. As dinner, carried to the pitch of repletion, appeared to be the readiest means of rendering myself impervious to meteorological influences, I ordered a repast which taxed the resources of the Red Lion to the utmost. I had scarcely sat down to it when a fly drove to the door, and shot out a large man, who entered with much bustle and a loud tread. It was the "London manager" of whom Boots had told me. In him I was glad to recognise Potts (let me veil his personality under this discreet pseudonym), an enterprising lessee, known to me slightly through

To lycanthropia, or lupina insania (wolf-madness), Avicenna (Ibn-S:na) gives the name cucubuth. A constant symptom was that those affected by it ran howling about graves in the night. See also Wierus De Praestig. Demon.; Forrestus, Observat. lib. 10. I may here also remind the reader of the case of Sergeant Bertrand, known as "the vampire," who was tried in Paris in 1849. For months the Paris cemeteries were constantly desecrated: graves were opened, and the bodies of the dead, frightfully mutilated, were scattered on the ground. The most assiduous watching was for a long time baffled, but Bertrand was at last apprehended and convicted of being the author of these profanations.

Markham, who had written for his theatre. He recollected me, and we dined together. He confirmed Boots' account of the object of his visit, and asked me to go with him to the theatre. I accepted, for there was something intensely amusing to me, half a recluse, in the lively talk of the manager, his anecdotes and knowledge of the world. The rain had ceased, and it was now a lovely afternoon, but still so wet underfoot, that I thought I would stop at D another night; so we sat over our wine he talking, I listening and laughing-till it was time to be off.

It was not the fact of the theatre being a wretched one that so much surprised me, as that D should have one at all. Of all the unhappy investments in brick and mortar which have ever come under my observation, that was decidedly one of the very worst. Nevertheless, travelling companies did occasionally take it for a while, though I should not like to affirm that any of them ever got a living out of it.

The performance had begun before our arrival, and it was with some difficulty that we found any one who would consent to take our money and admit us. The ill-lighted, empty look of the house, with its tawdry decorations all faded and mouldered, was wretched in the extreme. My attention was far too much occupied by the chit-chat of Potts to allow of my noticing particularly what was passing on the stage; but the acting I knew was ludicrously bad, for it excited in us so much merriment that an irruption into our box of the D-population was at one time threatened. But after a while appeared the young actress whom Potts' account had made me anxious to see. Certainly, I had rarely beheld more exquisite beauty of face and figure, or more intelligent action. Her dress, too, was simple, and even poor, yet it gave evidence of a refined taste, which surprised me in a girl so situated. The managerial eye of Potts saw her capabilities at a glance, and for a while our merriment was restrained, only to be re-awakened, however, by the entrance of the supposed vampire. father," said Potts; "decayed gentleman, poor old fellow; won't let his daughter act without him." It required all my sympathy to refrain from laughing outright at the absurd antics of the poor old man, who had had to sacrifice many a prejudice before he could consent to allow his daughter to employ her talents as a means of livelihood.

"Her

I have almost forgotten the plot of the piece; but it was in the final act, if I recollect rightly, that the lovely girl was to become the When the curtain rose, Vampire's victim.