furrowed her cheeks, and bent her form; but her eye was still bright, her manners authoritative and unchanged; she received her daughter coldly, but displayed more feeling as she folded her grand-children in her arms.  It is our nature to wish to continue our systems and thoughts to posterity through our own offspring.  The Countess had failed in this design with regard to her children; perhaps she hoped to find the next remove in birth more tractable.  Once Idris named me casually—­a frown, a convulsive gesture of anger, shook her mother, and, with voice trembling with hate, she said—­“I am of little worth in this world; the young are impatient to push the old off the scene; but, Idris, if you do not wish to see your mother expire at your feet, never again name that person to me; all else I can bear; and now I am resigned to the destruction of my cherished hopes:  but it is too much to require that I should love the instrument that providence gifted with murderous properties for my destruction.”

This was a strange speech, now that, on the empty stage, each might play his part without impediment from the other.  But the haughty Ex-Queen thought as Octavius Caesar and Mark Antony,

  We could not stall together
  In the whole world.

The period of our departure was fixed for the twenty-fifth of November.  The weather was temperate; soft rains fell at night, and by day the wintry sun shone out.  Our numbers were to move forward in separate parties, and to go by different routes, all to unite at last at Paris.  Adrian and his division, consisting in all of five hundred persons, were to take the direction of Dover and Calais.  On the twentieth of November, Adrian and I rode for the last time through the streets of London.  They were grass-grown and desert.  The open doors of the empty mansions creaked upon their hinges; rank herbage, and deforming dirt, had swiftly accumulated on the steps of the houses; the voiceless steeples of the churches pierced the smokeless air; the churches were open, but no prayer was offered at the altars; mildew and damp had already defaced their ornaments; birds, and tame animals, now homeless, had built nests, and made their lairs in consecrated spots.  We passed St. Paul’s.  London, which had extended so far in suburbs in all direction, had been somewhat deserted in the midst, and much of what had in former days obscured this vast building was removed.  Its ponderous mass, blackened stone, and high dome, made it look, not like a temple, but a tomb.  Methought above the portico was engraved the Hic jacet of England.  We passed on eastwards, engaged in such solemn talk as the times inspired.  No human step was heard, nor human form discerned.  Troops of dogs, deserted of their masters, passed us; and now and then a horse, unbridled and unsaddled, trotted towards us, and tried to attract the attention of those which we rode, as if to allure them to seek like liberty.  An unwieldy ox, who had fed in an abandoned granary, suddenly lowed, and shewed his shapeless form in a narrow door-way; every thing was desert; but nothing was in ruin.  And this medley of undamaged buildings, and luxurious accommodation, in trim and fresh youth, was contrasted with the lonely silence of the unpeopled streets.