honoured for what I was, beloved for what I had been.  What if, at some mortal wish in some freak of nature, the form which I now bore were for ever to remain before the eyes of my children!  Were such a thing to befall, how would their souls ever be lifted upward to the contemplation of that higher state of being into which it is my hope soon to pass when the hand which guided me hither shall beckon me hence?  At the thought my heart was chastened.  Never since that night have I indulged in any one wish framed in opposition to nature’s laws. Now I find my dream-children in the present; and to the past I yield willingly all things which are its own—­among the rest, the Lost Ages.

STORY OF GASPAR MENDEZ.

By Catherine Crowe.

The extraordinary motives under which people occasionally act, and the strange things they do under the influence of these motives, frequently so far transcend the bounds of probability, that we romance-writers, with the wholesome fear of the critics before our eyes, would not dare to venture on them.  Only the other day we read in the newspapers that a Frenchman who had been guilty of embezzlement, and was afraid of being found out, went into a theatre in Lyon and stabbed a young woman whom he had never seen before in his life, in order that he might die by the hands of the executioner, and so escape the inconvenience of rushing into the other world without having time to make his peace with Heaven.  He desired death as a refuge from the anguish of mind he was suffering; but instead of killing himself he killed somebody else, because the law would allow him leisure for repentance before it inflicted the penalty of his crime.

It will be said the man was mad—­I suppose he was; and so is everybody whilst under the influence of an absorbing passion, whether the mania be love, jealousy, fanaticism, or revenge.  The following tale will illustrate one phase of such a madness.

In the year 1789, there resided in Italy, not far from Aquila in the Abruzzo, a man called Gaspar Mendez.  He appears to have been a Spaniard, if not actually by birth, at least by descent, and to have possessed a small estate, which he rendered valuable by pasturing cattle.  Not far from where he resided there lived with her parents a remarkably handsome girl, of the name of Bianca Venoni, and on this fair damsel Mendez fixed his affections.  As he was by many degrees the best match about the neighbourhood, he never doubted that his addresses would be received with a warm welcome, and intoxicated with this security, he seems to have made his advances so abruptly that the girl felt herself entitled to give him an equally abrupt refusal.  To aggravate his mortification, he discovered that a young man, called Giuseppe Ripa, had been a secret witness to the rejection, which took place in an orchard; and as he walked away with rage in his heart, he heard