projects to his father and aunt.  Captain Everett received the announcement with a sarcastic smile, coldly remarking, that if Mrs. Fitzhugh was satisfied, he had no objection to offer.  But, alas! no sooner did her nephew, with much periphrastic eloquence, in part his passion for the daughter of a mere merchant to his aunt, than a vehement torrent of indignant rebuke broke from her lips.  She would die rather than consent to so degrading a mesalliance; and should he persist in yielding to such gross infatuation, she would not only disinherit, but banish him her house, and cast him forth a beggar on the world.  Language like this, one can easily understand, provoked language from the indignant young man which in less heated moments he would have disdained to utter; and the aunt and nephew parted in fierce anger, and after mutual denunciation of each other—­he as a disobedient ingrate, she as an imperious, ungenerous tyrant.  The quarrel was with some difficulty patched up by Captain Everett; and with the exception of the change which took place in the disappointed lover’s demeanor—­from light-hearted gaiety to gloom and sullenness—­things, after a few days, went on pretty nearly as before.

The sudden rupture of the hopes Mrs. Eleanor Fitzhugh had reposed in her nephew as the restorer of the glories of her ancient “house,” tarnished by Mary Fitzhugh’s marriage, affected dangerously, it soon appeared, that lady’s already failing health.  A fortnight after the quarrel with her nephew, she became alarmingly ill.  Unusual and baffling symptoms showed themselves; and after suffering during eight days from alternate acute pain, and heavy, unconquerable drowsiness, she expired in her nephew’s arms.  This sudden and fatal illness of his relative appeared to reawaken all Frederick Everett’s tenderness and affection for her.  He was incessant in his close attendance in the sick-chamber, permitting no one else to administer to his aunt either aliment or medicine.  On this latter point, indeed, he insisted, with strange fierceness, taking the medicine with his own hand from the man who brought it; and after administering the prescribed quantity, carefully locking up the remainder in a cabinet in his bed-room.

On the morning of the day that Mrs. Fitzhugh died, her ordinary medical attendant, Mr. Smith, terrified and perplexed by the urgency of the symptoms exhibited by his patient, called in the aid of a locally-eminent physician, Dr. Archer, or Archford—­the name is not very distinctly written in my memoranda of these occurrences; but we will call him Archer—­who at once changed the treatment till then pursued, and ordered powerful emetics to be administered, without, however, as we have seen, producing any saving or sensible effect.  The grief of Frederick Everett, when all hope was over, was unbounded.  He threw himself, in a paroxysm of remorse or frenzy, upon the bed, accusing himself of having murdered her, with other strange and incoherent expressions, upon which