THE MURDERER'S GRAVE.

A few hundred yards from the small stream which, known by the whites under the appellation of "Line Creek," divides the territory of the Muscogees, or Creek confederacy, from the state of Alabama, stands, or rather stood, a ruined cottage of logs. Travelling through the wilderness several years ago, I passed this desolate spot. The walls, blackened by the smoke of many fires, and in part already decayed, stood tottering to their fall; the roof was entirely gone; a part only of the chimney was left, built in the custom of that country, of split sticks, and thickly plastered on the inside with mud.

The

fences had fallen around a small field, which shewed traces of former cultiva tion, and was now fast filling up with briars, plumb bushes, and sedge grass, where the still evident marks of the hoe and the cornfield gave proof that human beings had once found there a home. The mists of night were closing around us; the dark magnolia forest which frowned on the secluded spot, and the thick and gloomy swamp of the Line Creek, which stretched its unhealthful morass almost to the door, gave to the whole scene the stillness and horror of death. Although habited during a journey of many days to the solitude and gloom of the wilderness, I was struck with the peculiarly lugubrious aspect of the scene, and with an undefinable feeling of melancholy. I stopped my horse, to survey it more at leisure. My companion, who had ridden a few yards in advance, not hearing the accustomed sound of my horse's tramp, turned his head to learn the cause of my lingering, and rode back to the spot where I had halted.

"Here," said he, "is Riley's grave. Remark that small mound of earth resembling the heap of soil accumulated from a fallen tree, and which is, in truth, the effect of the trunk to which those decaying pinknots once belonged; there the murderer fell, and there he lies buried."

Not being so familiar with the legends of this wild region as to remember the story of the man whose crime and death had given a name to this lonely scene of desolation, I inquired into his history, and listened in deep and silent interest to a tale of revenge and remorse, strongly illustrative of the aboriginal character.

Barney Riley, as he was termed by the whites-his Indian appellation is now forgotten-was a petty chieftain

belonging to the confederacy of the Upper Creeks. Being a "half-breed," and, like most of the mixed race, more intelligent than the full-blooded Indians, he acquired a strong influence among his native tribe. Regarding the people of his father as allied to him in blood and friendship, he took very early a decided part in favour of the United States in the dissensions among the Creek nation, and, after the breaking out of war in 1812, joined the American forces with his small band of warriors. Brave and hardy, accustomed to confront danger and conquer difficulties, he led his men to battle, and in many instances proved by his activity of material service to the army. His gallantry and abilities attracted the notice of the commander-in-chief, and Riley's name was coupled with applause in many of the despatches during the campaign. On the restoration of peace, he returned to his people honoured with the thanks of his "Great Father," and sat down to cultivate his fields, and pursue the chase as in times gone by. Although distinguished in war and in council, he was still young, and devoting himself to his one wife, a lovely Indian girl, he seemed contented and happy.

About this time the restoration of tranquillity, and the opening of the rich lands just ceded to the United States on the upper waters of the Alabama, began to attract numerous emigrants from the Atlantic settlements, and the military road was soon thronged with caravans hastening to these fertile countries at the West. The country from the Oakmulgee to the settlements on the Mississippi, was still one howling wilderness, and many discontented spirits among the conquered tribes still meditated a hostile stroke against their white oppressors. Travelling was of course hazardous and insecure, and persons who were not able to associate in parties strong enough for mutual defence, were fain to procure the guidance and protection of some well known warrior or chief, whose name and presence might ensure a safe passage through those troubled countries.

Of this class was L-. I knew him formerly, and had heard some remote allusion to his fate. Though his misfortunes and embarrassments had driven him to seek a distant asylum, a warmer heart beat not in a human bosom. Frank and manly, open to kindness and prompt to meet friendship, he was loved by all who knew him, and " eyes unused to weep" glistened in bidding "God

speed!" to their old associate. Lhad been a companion in arms with Riley, and knew his sagacity, his cou rage, and fidelity. Under his direction he led his small family of slaves towards the spot upon which he had fixed for his future home, and traversed the wild and dangerous path in safety and peace.

Like most men of his eager and sanguine temperament, L- was easily excited to anger, and though ready to atone for the injury done in the warmth of feeling, did not always control his passions before their out-burst. Some slight cause of altercation produced a quarrel with his guide, and a blow from the hand of L-, was treasured up by Riley, with deep threats of vengeance. On the banks of yonder creek he watched his time, and the bullet too truly aimed, closed the career of one who little dreamed of death at the moment. His slaves, terrified at the death of their master, fled in various directions, and carried the news of his murder to the nearest settlements.

The story of L-'s unhappy end soon reached his family, and his nearest relatives took immediate measures to bring the murderer to justice. Riley knew that punishment would speedily follow his crime, but took no steps to evade or prevent his doom. The laws of retaliation among his countrymen are severe but simple-"blood for blood"—and he "might run who read them." On the first notice of a demand, he boldly avowed his deed, and gave himself up for trial. No thought seemed to enter his mind of denial or escape. A deep and settled remorse had possessed his thoughts and influenced his conduct. He had no wish to shun the retribution which he knew was required. When his judges were assembled in the council at the public square, he stood up and addressed them.

"Fathers!" said he, "I have killed my brother-my friend. He struck me, and I slew him. That honour which forbade me to suffer a blow without inflicting vengeance, forbids me to deny the deed or to attempt to escape the Fathers! punishment you may decree. I have no wish to live. My life is forfeited to your law, and I offer it as the sole return for the life I have taken. All I ask for is to die a warrior's death. Let me not die the death of a dog, but boldly confront it like a brave man who fears it not. I have braved death in battle. I do not fear it. I shall not shrink from it now. Fathers! bury me where I fall,

and let no one mourn for the man who murdered his friend. He had fought by my side-he trusted me. I loved him, and had sworn to protect him."

Arrayed in his splendid dress of ceremony, he walked slowly and gravely to the place of execution, chanting in a steady voice his death song, and recount. ing his deeds of prowess. Seating himself in front of the assembled tribe upon yonder fallen tree, and facing the declining sun, he opened the ruffle of his embroidered shirt, and, crossing his hands upon his breast, gave with his own voice the signal of death, unmoved and unappalled. Six balls passed through both his hands and his bosom, and he fell backward so composedly as not to lift his feet from the grass on which they rested. He was buried where he fell, and that small mound marks the scene of his punishment; that hillock is the murderer's grave; that hovel, whose ruins now mark the spot, was erected for his widow, who lingered a few seasons in sorrow, supporting a wretched existence by cultivating yonder little field. was never seen to smile, or to mingle with her tribe; she held no more intercourse with her fellows than was unavoidable and accidental, and now sleeps by the side of her husband. The Indian shuns the spot, for he deems that the spirit of the murderer inhabits it. traveller views the scene with curiosity and horror, on account of its story, and, pausing for a few moments to survey this lonely and desolate glade, hastens on to more cheerful and happy regions.

She

The

With this short narrative we put spurs to our horses, and, hurrying along the road, in a few moments found ourselves beyond the gloomy and tangled forests of the creek.

SECLUSION.

BY HORACE GUILFORD.

(For the Parterre).

"Now should I have lain still and been quiet: I should have slept; then had I been at rest with kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves." Job iii. 13, 14.

1.

Oh! for a lone, a lonely tower,
Built in that ancient hour,

When dark Chaldæans parleyed with the stars;
And, overlooking earth,

And things of mortal birth,

Traced Wisdom in her own celestial characters!

2.

Alone it must be-all alone;
All stamped by time its swarthy stone;
Imperious in its height, and massive in its
mould;

A challenger of grim decay,
Imperishably old!

I would not have the gillyflower
Presume to glitter on that tower:
Nor the fulsome ivy dare
(Like a band of revellers,
O'er their father's sepulchres)
With riotous luxuriance impair

The pile so grandly old, so venerably bare.

3.

But the bent may wave in the window-sill,
O'er the velvet moss, when the wind is shrill;
And a yew, whose berry a bird in her bill

Brought (ages agone) to that desart tower,
Rooted above its embattled roof,
Outspread like a pall's funereal woof,
Be the Anarch Lord of its desolate hour.
4.

An elder tree of dateless age,

On the green mound, the grassy stage That bears that lonely tower of time, Around, hath leave to launch

Each labyrinthine branch,

reasonable stipend, to infuse the aforesaid particles of knowledge, with innumerable other particles, together with all sorts of classical information; to say nothing of morals, manners, accomplishments, and the inculcation of the "observance of the strictest cleanliness," into the head of every juvenile, of whatever capabilities, that may be consigned to their charge. This is undoubtedly desirable, and the only drawback is its utter impossibility. Indeed the professions of this species of the human race have always appeared to me as wildly extravagant as those of a romantic lover partially intoxicated, and their undertakings about as feasible as those of the worthy knight of La Mancha.

Did

they propose to give the mere sketch or outline the technicalities of those sciences, one or two of which it takes the life of man to master-it would make the thing appear more probable, more

their familiarity with the arithmetic may have the effect of expanding the imaginative faculty in an outrageous degree, and hence the riotous and unchecked flights of fancy in which they indulge in their advertisements and other lucubrations for the cajolement of soft-hearted mothers and softer-headed fathers. Ay, cajolement ! I fearlessly repeat the word. What care I for them? I am

66

grown up" now-free, emancipated"they shall never whip me more!"

I cannot say that I ever liked or felt attracted toward the (par excellence) sublime study of astronomy; at least not further than was barely necessary for the comprehension of its more attractive neighbour, geography. It is too vast, too stupendous a study for a mind of moderate calibre, requiring one of a somewhat Miltonic cast and dimensions thoroughly to comprehend its grandeur and its glories. I get (like Robert Montgomery) out of my latitude amid infinite space, and experience a puzzling and uncomfortable feeling of vasty vagueness, which I cannot possibly mistake for the essence of the "true sublime." I can admire and feel the beauty of the quiet night, with her multitudes of stars or worlds, and our world's lamp-the moon-hanging in the midst. I can invest them with kindly influences and attributes, imagining how they are gladdening the route of the wayworn wanderer over the solitary waste, or glittering on the path of the home-bound mariner. I can imagine the thousand lovely dells, and silent streams, and peaceful cottages

"embowered in trees," that they are complacently looking down upon, making beauty still more beauteous; I can imagine the manifold tribes of lovers they are surveying walking in quiet happiness, or tremulous joy, or pouting coyness, or sheepish bashfulness, beneath their beams, engaged in all sorts of speculations; from plans for the realization of the most extravagant bliss, down to the most feasible and economical means of purchasing household furniture. I can imagine the multitudinous race of youthful poets who are standing on innumerable balconies, with folded arms and upturned eyes and upturned hair, with a mixture of hazy inspirations inflating and leaden dulness pressing upon their pericraniums, jumbled up with confused notions of power and Byron and might and majesty, until the chilling night-dews check the formation of incipient sonnets to Venus, Jupiter, or "fiery Mars," by hinting that they may catch a cold; and they walk into their chambers, and stalk from the contemplation of immensity unto their pier-glass, to contemplate how they may have looked should any proprietors of petticoats from adjacent windows, have made them the objects of their terrestrial speculations, while they were picturesquely gazing on things celestial. I can imagine all this and much more, while lolling lazily out of the window, on a moonlight night, in a speculative mood; but when I come to view those heavenly bodies scientifically - astronomically arithmetically-touching their size, distance, density, specific gravity, etc., together with considerations respecting the centripetal and centrifugal forces by which their motions are regulated, my imagination, as the sailors say, is "taken all aback!" It is making mere matterof-fact work of it, subjecting the objects of one's love, wonder, and unbounded admiration, at once to "cold, material laws," to weight and measurement, and divesting them of all their beautiful and poetical properties.

Mythologically considered, I love the planetary bodies well. Literature cannot do without the gods and demigods, and full and half-bred divinities of former times. Beautifully has Schiller said, in his Wallenstein (as beautifully translated by Coleridge)—

"The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion; The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty, That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, Or forests by slow stream, or pebble spring, Or chasms, or wat'ry depths; all these have vanish'd,

They live no longer in the faith of reason! But still the heart doth need a language, still Doth the old instinct bring back the old names. And to yon starry world they now are gone, Spirits, or gods, that used to share this earth With man as with their friend; and to the lover Shoot influence down; and even at this day Yonder they move-from yonder visible sky

'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great, And Venus who brings every thing that's fair.”

No more need be added on this point. "The words of Mercury are harsh, after the songs of Apollo."

I entertain another quirk or notion against astronomy, except when studied for practical purposes. Though humility be a good thing, a sense of extreme littleness is not; and when we turn from the tremendous-the astounding study of astronomy, to consider what we are in connexion with what is, we become ludicrously small, even when viewed through that powerful magnifier-our own estimation. In the study of natural history, when we read of thousands of insects inhabiting a drop of water, or colonizing a green leaf, we are Brobdignagians, the least of us. But when we come to consider that this "great globe" itself, with all its storms and tempests, its thunder and fierce lightning, is, as regards size, a mere trifle to that of surrounding bodies, and, compared to them in quantity, as a grain of sand to its brethren of the seashore, the consideration has a depressing and not an elevating effect. In such a case, what are we who strut and fret about, and take upon us " pride, pomp, and circumstance?" What is our glory or grandeur-our wit or wisdom-our civic, literary, or military fame? Why, we are comparatively smaller than we can possibly comprehend. Shakspeare is a midge, and Napoleon a thing too diminutive to be thought of. Our virtues and our vices sink into insignificance, as, who should trouble themselves about the virtues of a grashopper, or the vicious propensities of a caterpillar, or enter with interest into the humours, whims, foibles, and eccentricities of a mite? We lose our distinctive qualities as men and women, and become a mass of animalcules. It is discouraging to think of it.

Again, to a certain class of minds, such as have never thoroughly been able to master the perplexities of the multiplication-table; the billions, trillions, quintillions, and so on, with which astronomy abounds, is perfectly incomprehensible. They read of a billion or so of miles, but have about as clear an idea of the distance implied, as they have of the occult mysteries of duodecimals. They

have a vague idea, perchance, that it may be as far as China and back again, but nothing more. For my own part, I had always looked upon the enumeration of the sum total of the national debt of England, as the most august and imposing mass of figures that could be brought together for any conceivable purpose. Why, look now, it becomes comparatively an unostentatious unit, as it were, a mere fraction. "The distance of the star Draconis appears, by Dr. Bradley's observations, to be at least four hundred thousand times that of the sun, and the distance of the nearest fixed star not less than forty thousand diameters of the earth's annual orbit; that is, the distance of the earth from the former is at least 38,000,000,000,000 miles, and the latter not less than 7,000,000,000,000 miles. A cannon-ball, supposing it could preserve the same velocity, would not reach the nearest of the fixed stars in six hundred thousand years!" There is goodly work enough to upset any moderate man's notions of time and space. Had this cannon-ball taken its departure in the time of Cheops, or even Cheops' grandfather (if the imagination can roam so far back into the dense blackness of the past), it would even now be merely at the outset of its journey. Cheops' grandfather dandles young Cheops on his knee: he in turn grows up, waxes in years, builds the everlasting (in our frail acceptation of the word) pyramids, lives to an antediluvian age, dies, is buried, and forgotten; successive generations spring up and pass away; states rise and fall; empires expand and decay, and expand again, up to this present 1834, and yet this cannon-ball, that has been travelling all this time with inconceivable rapidity, is, as it were, but a hop, step, and jump on its way towards the nearest fixed star! This way of thinking will never do. It diminishes our ideas of the sombre stateliness of the past, and makes "hoar antiquity" a thing of yesterday. The by-gone glories of departed empires, looming with added grandeur through the indistinct and spectral past, must seem, to a mind familiarized with such unconscionable notions of time and space, but as things that had existence an inconsiderable time ago, last week, or the week before. Let us leave this speculative star-gazing, and turn our attention to our own snug little portion of the solar system, with all its infinite varieties of men, manners, customs, and countries. Abandon astronomy to Doctor Herschel and other lineal descendants of the Chal

dees, who had devoted themselves to it, and it alone; and therefore may deduce from it some great and useful results. It is not necessary that our artizans, lawyers, poets, clergymen, and agriculturists, should have the motions of even the primary planets revolving in and addling their head-pieces. And as for the sweeteners of our life and tea; the makers of our pies and the mothers of our children; it is not fitting that they trouble themselves about the relative distances of the fixed stars. Let them rather go on as they have done; inventing fashions, quoting Byron, working lace, multiplying albums, and fulfilling their destinies.

HISTORICAL GLEANINGS. (For the Parterre).

"History is philosophy teaching by example." Lord Bolingbroke.

DUTCH COURAGE.

In the year 1673, when the French troops under the command of the Duke of Luxemburgh were wasting Holland with fire and sword, the principal men in Amsterdam assembled for the purpose of considering the expediency of sending the keys of their city to the French commander. Several of the council were anxious that this should be immediately done; when the burgomaster Tulip indignantly rose from his seat, upbraided them with their cowardice, and advancing to the window, threatened to call in the people, who were waiting outside to hear the result of the deliberation. The assembly, dreading the fury of the populace, came to the determination to resist their enemies, and the city was placed in a state of defence. Tulip, shortly afterwards, was going the night rounds upon the ramparts, and desirous of testing the fidelity and courage of the sentinel, did not reply to the challenge, when the man fired, and shot him dead.

E. M. A.

PRISONERS DURING THE CIVIL WARS.

On the day that Charles the First was beheaded, several of the royalist prisoners made their escape from confinement. The Duke of Hamilton and Lord Loughborough contrived to get out of Windsor Castle, and Sir Lewis Dives got away from Whitehall. On the first of February Lord Capel escaped across the Tower moat. The Duke of Hamilton was soon captured by some troopers, who re