dire convulsion were at hand. Keep your hands unfettered, your mind uncontaminated. Stand aloof until the day of trial; and if that day shall come, old Joseph Tarrant tells his son to be ready at the post of loyalty, duty, and honour, and maintain the principles which his ancestors met poverty, ignominy, and death, in defend ing.

"The next morning, as it dawned, found Henri on his way to Paris. The events of the preceding evening were too full in his recollection to allow even the novelties of the journey, the longest he had ever travelled from home, to have much effect upon his spirits. But on the second day, the constant succession of new objects, the bustle of the towns, and the varieties of the country through which his journey lay, by degrees led his thoughts from the little circle in which he had passed his youth, to the great world which he was about to enter. He therefore approached Paris with a mind wholly engrossed by contemplations of the future, and with somewhat of that mixed feeling of fear and expectancy with which a mariner of little skill might be supposed to launch an untried bark upon a wide and treach

erous sea.

"Fear, certainly, predominated for a long time, after he had settled in Paris and commenced his studies. Left to his own guidance, he felt as if a charge had been committed to him which he was unequal to manage; and at every step he apprehended disaster. He was beset with temptations; but he shunned them, as a weak person avoids a powerful, dangerous, and forward foe. For many months his letters breathed nothing but indignation at the vices of Paris, and his determination to preserve himself from their infection. He gave regular and earnest assurances to his father, that he successfully resisted all solicitations, (and they were numerous and pressing,) which he received to join the associates of his studies, who were much addict ed to gambling, and some of whom were very active members of the reading societies and debating clubs which were then increasing in numbers, and becoming every day more and more distinguished by the boldness and publicity of their proceedings.

"I need not describe a father's pride and joy at finding in his own son even a better temper and a wiser conduct

than he had dared to hope for. M. Tarrant's replies proved how fully, and yet how easily, a child can repay the cares and fondness of a parent. To do Henri but justice, the happiness which he perceived his good conduct conferred upon his father, served to prolong the watchful guard which he held upon his actions. But his habits had not been formed for a continuance of self-restraint. Warm as his affections were, they were not strong enough to cope with the monster Self-will, which had been nourished within him by indulgence, and had grown in strength as he had advanced in age. His letters, towards the end of a year from his departure, became brief and infrequent. After some time, they contained little else than notices of the expenses of a Paris life, and pressing demands for money. And at length, when M. Tarrant, after many remonstrances, and after having mortgaged part of his little estate to answer these unreasonable calls, pointed out the absolute impossibility of supplying farther sums from a property which was now become insufficient even for the decent support of his family, Henri wholly dropped the correspondence. He changed his abode in town; and though M. Tarrant, almost distracted with apprehensions of the death or ruin of his child, wrote repeatedly to some of the few persons he knew in Paris, he received no tidings of Henri. The revolution had broken out, and M. Tarrant was prevented from quit ting his own district to make personal inquiries for his son. After a long period of anxiety and expectation, it seemed to him but too probable that Henri had joined some of the revolutionary factions, or had perished in one of the massacres at Paris.

"Henri had joined in the revolution, its madness and its excesses; but he had escaped its proscriptions. His abandonment of his early principles and virtuous habits was gradual, and was not completed without many struggles. As if providence designed to afford him a warning at each wrong step he took, his progress to guilt was by the very road against which he had been cautioned by his father. Some of the dark and cunning spirits, who, at the beginning of the political changes, worked incessantly to ensnare partizans, had contrived to make the blandishments of private vices subservient to their political designs.

They established houses of entertainment of various descriptions, into which the young and unwary were allured; and then, when their victims were heated with the excesses practised there, and were inclined to join in any pursuits the partners of their vices, these corrupters hurried them into some crowd of revolutionists, engaged in fervid debate, and colouring the most nefarious projects with the language and the sentiments of pure philanthropy and patriotic enthusiasm. It was at such a place and time that Henri became infected with the contagious frenzy of republicanism. He had been persuaded, after many refusals, to visit a gáming-house, which was a favourite place of resort to some most intimate associates. The recollection of his father's last words stung him as he entered; but he went determined not to play, and he kept his resolution. En couraged by the forbearance to which he found himself equal, he fell at length into the practice of visiting the place as a sort of lounge, looking on at his friends, but still refraining from play. He soon became familiar with these scenes; gambling lost its horrors for him; he had passed the threshold of the temple of vice, and it was not long before he began the worship which he saw all but himself practising within it. In short, he yielded to the entreaties, the encouragement, and the ridicule of his associates; and in a little time became a constant attendant at the gaming-table. He had, like other gamblers, his vicissitudes of good and ill fortune; but having exhausted his father's means, he, on one evening, after a run of ill-luck, staked, in despair, his all upon a single cast —and lost it. It was a moment of wildness and tempest of the passions. Virtue had lost her habitual hold, and he was like a skiff upon the waters, unoared, unruddered, and unanchored-ready to move as the current might drift it. His companions adjourned to a neighbouring political club. He walked with the crowd, and assisted in one of those stormy and portentous debates, which so often ended in maddening the auditors to a resolution, promptly executed, to commit, as essential to the common weal, some instant act of lawless violence. The meeting broke up in tumult; the members proceeded in a body to their work of atrocity; Henri, fired

by example, and desperate at his state of total destitution, which seemed to leave him no refuge but in the public ruin, joined in their wildest excesses, and became too far committed to avail himself of a moment of repentance and reflection, even were that moment allowed him-but it was not. His sanguine temper had made him a leader in the disorder which he at first only thought he shared; and he was obliged to take an active, though subordinate post among the faction which he had joined. The speed with which a character can be changed in times of public convulsion would be incredible, if facts did not terribly attest it. At the miserable period of our revolution, I have seen the mildest and best natures so soured and hardened by atrocious usage, or by a familiarity with crimes which they were compelled to witness, or driven, at first, by the force of circumstances, to share, that in the end they seemed to have the tempers not of men, but of demons. But civil wars only make that more glaring and manifest which occurs less obtrusively in the most quiet times. Character must ever be the result of habit and example; and he who trusts his virtue in the neighbourhood of vice will find, that the diseases of the mind are but too like the contagious distempers of the body -as infectious, and as deadly.

"So it was with Henri Tarrant. For a while he shuddered at the deeds which it became his part to assist in perpetrating. He objected, he remonstrated; but he only made himself suspected by his party, who talked of treason when he spoke of mercy or of justice. He found himself, therefore, obliged, at first, to abandon humanity for self-preservation; after some time, his conscience ceased to prompt when he ceased to listen to its dictates; and at length he became a proselyte to the doctrines and arguments which flattered him, by seeming to excuse or palliate the courses that he considered it impossible to avoid. Paris, however, was a place so dangerous alike to those of moderation and humanity, and those who adopted measures of the sternest rigour, that he seized the first opportunity of procuring a commission in the revolutionary army, and was soon after ordered on active service.

"In the meantime, La Vendée had become the theatre of a conflict as

moved past them urged to the young people the advice which their parents had given. One of them, who remonstrated most strongly, was a neigh bour of M. Tarrant's, and he even caught the arm of Marie, and strove to force her away. For an instant, Gabriel seemed irresolute, but he cast a glance at his sister, and that glance confirmed him. Her arm was clasped round her mother's, who at the sudden alarm would have sunk, but for her support; and her eyes were cast upwards with an expression in which fixed resolution was blended with humble and devout resignation.

"Here, then, we remain,' said Gabriel, as a party of the Blues appeared on an eminence of the road, a few yards distant. We shall live, or die together.'

"The revolutionary troops were guarding a number of prisoners whom they drove forward laden with forage. They stopped short upon seeing how near they had come to the flying host, which was crossing the river at St Ferment, and as they were but a small party, sent out to scour the country for provisions, they did not choose to approach nearer to St Ferment, lest they might fall in with some straggling band of their opponents more numerous than their own. Two of the foremost lifted their sabres to cut down the Tarrants; but another called out that the commanding-officer, who was at a little distance behind, had given orders to spare, for the present, all the prisoners they might meet, in order that, by distributing among them the burdens with which the other wretches were overladen, they might proceed more quickly to the town to which they were to return before night, and which was several miles distant. The Tarrants were then loaded and driven on with the rest of the crowd. Marie and Gabriel asked for double weight, and implored that their aged parents might be freed from burdens which they could not bear; but they were answered with sabre-blows from the soldiers. The old man, and his sick and feeble wife, were compelled to bear their load with the rest, and the whole group moved towards the town, the prisoners being goaded on by the swords and bayonets of the soldiery. What would have been the agony of this aged couple, had they known that

the troops who inflicted these tortures upon them were commanded by their own son! Henri Tarrant was the officer of the party. But his station, during this march, was some hundred yards to the rear, and his miserable parents were spared the anguish of the discovery.

"When they reached the town, the prisoners, on being unloaded, were distributed, without food, among the houses of a large square, which the sword had cleared of its inhabitants during the day; and which served as prisons for the victims until their savage guards, to use their own language, had leisure' to dispatch them. "It was the practice, during this inhuman war, to assign an officer and his party, during the night, the task (as the phrase was) of clearing the prisons; that is, of butchering the prisoners in cold blood. About midnight, the cries which burst from several parts of the square, announced that the business of slaughter had begun. House after house was searched and cleaned. The officer (it was a part of his ordinary duty) preceded the soldiers, opened the door, and directed them in their bloody work. They had visited all the houses but one, and as that stood at a little distance from the others, the soldiers were retiring without having noticed it; when their captain, who had approached, and discovered that it contained some victims not yet immolated, called the soldiers back, entered the house, and ascended the stairs which led to the room where the prisoners were confined. A broken door had been nailed up to secure them, and, had they not been too feeble for the exertion, they might have torn it down without much difficulty, and so have probably escaped; for that part of the square had been left nearly unguarded. They did not appear to have made any such effort. The officer looked through the chinks of the shattered door; the moon shone full in through a barred window; and Henri Tarrant (for it was he) saw by its light his father, bending in mute anguish over the body of his mother, who seemed to have just expired in the arms of her children. Time was precious;-but it was lost. So sudden, so appalling was the discovery, that Henri gazed on stupidly for a few seconds.

"The spirit has fled to its last rest

ing-place,' said M. Tarrant, lifting his face upwards. Soon shall we all meet there. Providence is wise, my children, and we must not murmur.-Henri ! Henri! she blessed you as she died. Would to God that I, too, before I die, could see and bless you!-Three years have this night passed since

"Henri was awakened to the passing peril of the moment. He essayed to rush down and order off the soldiers; but a file of a serjeant and five or six grenadiers had passed quickly up stairs, without knowing that their officer had entered; and though they bore lights, not observing him in their haste, they overturned him in the press. What followed was the work of a moment. The door was burst open at a plunge. Marie, when she saw the soldiers approach, flung herself between them and her father; but her cry of filial anguish, before it was fully breathed out, became the shriek of death. In an instant her lifeless body quivered upon a bayonet. Gabriel received another mortal thrust, aimed, like the former, at his father; and before

Here M. St Julien paused for the first time since he had begun this miserable narrative. He added hurriedly:" Just as I rushed forward to save my father, a blow from a sabre cleft his grey head, and he fell upon the weltering heap,-the bodies of my mother, my sister, and my brother, all-all brought to death by my means, and three of them slaughtered before my eyes, and under my authority!"

I recoiled with horror at this dreadful confession, and could not for some moments bear to address a man, who stood before me a self-convicted parricide. He perceived what I felt, and said:

"I did not purpose making this avowal, but guilt is a poor dissembler. You abhor me. It is but just-yet hear me. Listen a little farther to the most wretched penitent thatever sought to atone, in a life of misery and sorrow, for crimes, at the bare mention of which humanity shudders. You are young; perhaps you are yet innocent; perhaps, too, you have parents. You live in times free from the distractions of those atrocities, the example and the frequency of which rob man of all that is human in his nature. But every season, and every age of man, and of the world, has its own dangers.

Take from my history a solemn warning.

"Mark how I fell. My first crime was disobedience. Had I never entered a gaming-house, I would have become unpopular with my associates; and in separating from them, I would have been cut off from the contagion of their atrocious vices. Again, my second crime was disobedience also to which I was led by the first. Had I not entered a political club, I might have escaped the bloody work of the revolutionary demons. Had I, in short, followed my father's injunctions, given on the eve of my departure from home, I would not have been, in three years from that very evening, the occasion of his murder. But so it is. Take but one step in crime, and you glide as on a downward plane of ice ;-it is a special mercy of Heaven if your criminal course be arrested;-and on that who dare reckon?

"For me, I had filled up the measure of my crimes. I immediately quitted the army. The accidents of the times, and the laws of indemnity, saved me from death, but not from punishment. Parricide was written in fiery characters in my brain; there they are still, and there they will remain for ever. During many years, I laboured at a profession which allowed me the privacy suited to repentance; designing, if I could compass it, to purchase the spot (forfeited at the Vendean insurrection) on which I had spent the years of my innocence, and to pass the remainder of my life in dispensing some little benefit among my fellow-creatures. The storms of the Revolution have swept off all by whom I could be personally remembered here, and my change of name prevents any suspicion of my identity. I shall spend the days that are left me in assuaging pain, as some wretched effort at atonement for the agonies I have caused, and in diffusing among the youth around me, as far as my scanty means allow, those principles of virtue, and those truths of religion, which I once learned from the fondest of mothers; and which, notwithstanding all the unhappy errors of my education, and all the deep guilt with which I have since been covered, give, even to such a wretch as I am, a consolation in misery here,-a hope of mercy hereafter."

P.