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their separation? That her secret was known, or at least strongly suspected, appeared to her certain; and she more than guessed that her father's forbearance in not putting into words the grieved displeasure which he evidently felt, was owing to the kind but crabbed old bachelor Mr. Fenton, whose conduct towards herself or rather, whose opinion of her powers, appeared to have undergone a considerable change, and who, giving her credit for strength of mind, seemed chiefly bent on spurring her on to exert that strength to the utmost. He gave proof of that knowledge of human nature which the dissenting ministers so frequently possess, by seeking to turn her thoughts into a different channel; and by bringing her Milton and Cowper, and supplying her with English books of history and theology, together with the lives of many pious and eminent men of his own persuasion, succeeded not only in leading her into an interesting and profitable course of reading, but in beguiling her into an unexpected frankness of discussion on the subject of her new studies. In these discussions, he soon found the talent of the young person whom he had so Jong undervalued; and constant to his contempt for the sex, (a heresy from which a man who has fallen into it seldom recovers,) began to consider her as a splendid exception to the general inanity of a woman; a good opinion which received further confirmation from her devoted attention to her father, who was seized with a lingering illness about a twelvemonth after the departure of Victor, of which he finally died, after languishing for nearly two years, kept alive only by the tender and incessant cares of his daughter, and the sympathizing visits of his friend.

On opening the will, his beloved daughter, Jane, was found sole heiress to a fortune of 70,0007.;-unless she should intermarry with a soldier, a papist, or a foreigner, in which case the entire property was bequeathed unreservedly to the Rev. Samuel Fenton, to be disposed of by him according to his sole will and pleasure.

Miss Lanham was less affected by this clause than might have been expected. Three years had now elapsed from the period of separation; and she had been so well obeyed, as never to have received one line from Victor d'Auberval. She feared that he was dead; she tried to hope that he was unfaithful; and the tremendous number of officers that had fallen in Napoleon's last battles, rendered the former by far the more probable catastrophe: -even if he had not previously fallen, the Russian campaign threatened extermination to the French army; and poor Jane, in whose bosom hope had long lain dormant, hardly regarded this fresh obstacle to her unhappy love. She felt that her's was a widowed heart, and that her future comfort must be sought in the calm pleasures of literature, and

in contributing all that she could to the happiness of others.

Attached to Belford by long habit, and by the recollection of past happiness and past sorrows, she continued in her old dwelling, making little other alteration in her way of life, than that of adding two or three servants to her establishment, and offering a home to her mother's sister-the aunt to whose intervention she owed the doubtful good of that proficiency in French which had introduced her to Victor, and whom unforeseen events had now reduced to absolute poverty.

In her she found an intelligent and cultivated companion; and in her society and that of Mr. Fenton, and in the delight of a daily increasing library, her days passed calmly and pleasantly; when, in spite of all her resolutions, her serenity was disturbed by the victories of the Allies, the fall of Napoleon, the capture of Paris, and the peace of Europe. Was Victor dead or alive, faithless or constant? Would he seek her? and seeing her, what would be his disappointment at the clause that parted them for ever? Ought she to remain in Belford? Was there no way of ascertaining his fate?

She was revolving these questions for the hundredth time, when a knock was heard at the door, and the servant announced Colonel d'Auberval.

There is no describing such meetings. After sketching rapidly his fortunes since they parted; how he had disobeyed her by writing, and how he had since found that his letters had miscarried; and after brief assurances that in his eyes she was more than ever charming, had gained added grace, expression, and intelligence,-Jane began to communicate to him, at first with much agitation, afterwards with collected calmness, the clause in the will by which she forfeited all her property in marrying him.

"Is it not cruel," added she, "to have lost the power of enriching him whom I love?"

"You do love me, then, still?" exclaimed Victor. "Blessings on you for that word! You are still constant ?"

"Constant! Oh, if you could have seen my heart during these long, long years! If you could have imagined how the thought of you mingled with every recollection, every feeling, every hope! But to bring you a penniless wife, Victor-for even the interest of this money since my father's death, which might have been a little portion, I have settled upon my poor aunt: to take advantage of your generosity, and burthen you with a dowerless wife,-never handsome, no longer young, inferior to you in every way,-ought I to do so? Would it be just? would it be right? Answer me, Victor."

"Rather tell me, would it be just and right to deprive you of the splendid fortune you would use so well? Would you, for my sake,

for love, and for competence, forego the wealth which is your own?"

"Would I? Oh, how can you ask!" "Will you, then, my own Jane? Say yes, dearest, and never will we think of this money again. I have a mother worthy to be yours-a mother who will love and value you as you deserve to be loved; and an estate with a small chateau at the foot of the Pyrenees, beautiful enough to make an emperor forget his throne. Share it with me, and we shall be happier in that peaceful retirement than ever monarch was or can be! You love the country. You have lost none of the simplicity which belonged to you, alike from taste and from habit. You will not miss these riches?"

"Oh, no! no!"

"And you will be mine, dearest and faithfullest? Mine, heart and hand? Say yes, mine own Jane!"

And Jane did whisper, between smiles and tears, that "yes," which her faithful lover was never weary of hearing and in a shorter time than it takes to tell it, all the details of the marriage were settled.

In the evening, Mr. Fenton, whom Miss Lanham had invited to tea, arrived; and in a few simple words, Jane introduced Colonel d'Auberval, explained their mutual situation, and declared her resolution of relinquishing immediately the fortune which, by her father's will, would be triply forfeited by her union with a soldier, a foreigner, and a Catholic. "And your religion?" inquired Mr. Fenton, somewhat sternly.

"Shall ever be sacred in my eyes," replied Victor, solemnly. "My own excellent mother is herself a Protestant and a Calvinist. There is a clergyman of that persuasion at Bayonne. She shall find every facility for the exercise of her own mode of worship. I should love her less, if I thought her capable of change." "Well, but this money:-Are you sure, young man, that you yourself will not regret marrying a portionless wife?" "Quite sure. I knew nothing of her fortune. It was a portionless wife that I came hither to seek."

"And you, Jane? Can you abandon this wealth, which, properly used, comprises in itself the blessed power of doing good, of relieving misery, of conferring happiness? Can you leave your home, your country, and your friends ?"

"Oh, Mr. Fenton !" replied Jane, "I shall regret none but you. His home will be my home, his country my country. My dear aunt will, I hope, accompany us; I shall leave nothing that I love but you, my second father. And for this fortune, which, used as it should be used, is indeed a blessing-do I not leave it in your hands? And am I not sure that with you it will be a fund for relieving misery and conferring happiness? I feel that if, at

this moment, te whom I have lost could see into my heart, he would approve my resolution, and would bless the man who had shown such lisinterested affection for his child."

"In his name and my own, I bless you, my children," rejoined Mr. Fenton; "and as his act and my own do I restore to you the forfeited money. No refusals, young man!no arguments! no thanks! It is yours, and yours only. Listen to me, Jane. This will, for which any one less generous and disinte rested than yourself would have hated me, was made, as you must have suspected, under my direction. I had known from your friend, the hostess of the Red Lion, of your mutual attachment; and was on the point of putting a stop to your interviews, when an exchange, unexpected by all parties, removed M. d'Auberval from Belford. After your separation, it would have been inflicting needless misery to have reproached you with an intercourse which we had every reason to believe completely at an end. I prevailed on my good friend to conceal his knowledge of the engagement, and tried all I could to turn your thoughts into a different channel. By these means I became gradually acquainted with your firmness and strength of mind, your ardour and your sensibility; and having made. minute and searching inquiries into the character of your lover, I began to think, little as an old bachelor is supposed to know of those matters, that an attachment between two such persons was likely to be an attachment for life; and I prevailed on Mr. Lanham to add to his will the clause that you have seen, that we might prove the disinterestedness as well as the constancy of the lovers. Both are proved," continued the good old man, a smile of the purest benevolence softening his rugged features, "both are proved to my entire satisfaction; and soldier, Frenchman, and Papist though he be, the sooner I join your hands and get quit of this money, the better. Not a word, my dear Jane, unless to fix the day. Surely you are not going to compliment me for doing my duty! I don't know how I shall part with her, though, well as you de serve her," continued he, turning to Colonel d'Auberval; "you must bring her sometimes to Belford." And, passing the back of his withered hand across his eyes to brush off the unusual softness, the good dissenting minister walked out of the room.

BELFORD RACES.

BELFORD RACES,- The Races, as the inhabitants of the town and neighbourhood were pleased to call them, as if they had been the Races par excellence of the kingdom, surpass ing Epsom, and Ascot, and Doncaster, and

New-market, instead of being the most trumpery meeting that ever brought horses to run for a plate-are, I am happy to say, a nonexisting nuisance. The only good that I ever knew done by an enclosure act was the putting an end to that iniquity.

Generally speaking, enclosures seem to me lamentable things. They steal away from the landscape, the patches of woodland, the shady nooks and tangled dingles, the wild heathy banks and primrosy dells, the steep ravines and deep irregular pools,-all, in short, that the artist loves to paint and the poet to fancy, -all that comes into our thoughts when we talk of the country; and they give us, instead, hedge-rows without a tree, fields cut into geometrical lines, and Macadamized roads, which, although as straight and as ugly as the most thoroughgoing utilitarian can desire, do yet contrive to be more inconvenient and farther about than the picturesque by-ways of the elder time. Moreover, let political philosophy preach as it will, an enclosure bill is a positive evil to the poor. They lose by it the turf and furze for their fuel, the odd nooks adjoining their cottages, which they sometimes begged from the lord of the manor, and sometimes, it must be confessed, took without that preliminary courtesy, (I wish all | thefts were as innocent,) to cultivate for a garden; whilst the advantage of a village green to their little stock of pigs and poultry was incalculable. But all this is beside my purpose. However, according to the wellknown epigram, "to steal a common from a goose," may be an evil, to steal a common from the Races must be a good; and when the enclosure of Belford Heath put an end to that wearisome annual festivity, I believe verily that there were not twenty people about the place who did not rejoice in the loss of those dullest of all dull gaieties.

Even the great Races are tiresome things: they last so long, and of the amusement, such as it is, you see so little. Moreover, the weather is never good: it is sure to be dusty, or showery, or windy, or sunny; sometimes it is too hot, generally it is too cold;-I never knew it right in my life. Then, although the crowd is such that it seems as if all the world were on the ground, you are quite sure never to meet the person you want to see, and have very often the provoking mortification of finding, by one of those accidents which at races always happen, that you have missed each other by five minutes. The vaunted company is nothing compared with the Zoological Gardens on a Sunday. You lose your partyyou have to wait for your servants-you lame your horses-you scratch your carriage-you spoil your new bonnet, you tear your best pelisse-you come back tired, and hungry, and cross, you catch a cold or a fever; and your only compensation for all these evils is, that you have the power of saying to some

neighbour wise enough to stay at home,-"I have been to the races!"

These calamities, however, belong to the grand meetings, where horses of name and fame ridden by jockeys of equal renown, run for the Derby, the Oaks, or the St. Leger; where ladies win French gloves and gentlemen lose English estates; where you are at all events sure of a crowd, and pretty sure of a crowd of beauty and fashion; where, if your pocket be picked, it is ten to one but a lord is equally unlucky; and if you get drenched by a shower, you have the comfort of seeing a countess in the same condition.

Our Belford afflictions were of a different sort. The Heath, which, contrary to the general picturesqueness of commons, was a dull, flat, low, unprofitable piece of ground, wholly uninteresting in itself, and commanding no view of any sort, had been my aversion as long as I could remember; having been for many years the scene of those reviews of volunteers and yeomanry, presentations of colours, and so forth, which formed the delight of his majesty's noise-loving subjects, and were to me," who hated the sound of a gun like a hurt wild-duck," the objects of mingled dread and detestation, the more especially as, besides its being in those days reckoned a point of loyalty not to miss such exhibitions, people used to inculcate it as a duty to take me amongst guns, and drums, and trumpets, by way of curing my cowardice.*

I

*Courage is a strange, capricious thing. I am still such a coward with regard to the mere noise, not the danger of gunpowder, that the very first words I ever spoke to Mr. Macready, who was superintending the rehearsal of one of my tragedies, contained an earnest entreaty that he would not allow a gun, which I had unwarily introduced, to be fired; and that being subsequently at a theatre with a friend and her little boy, whom it would have been cruel to have taken away, sat in such agony during a melodrame in which a cannon was dragged about for two long acts, that a very respectable-looking gentleman, who had been sitting behind us much amused by my head-ducking and ear-stopping when the firing seemed inevitable, fairly wished me joy of having survived the piece as he made room for us to go out. Such is my cowardice on the other hand, I am so fearless amongst much -and luckily cowardice is a female privilege; whilst, greater dangers by land and by water, as rather to enjoy the fright of other ladies in a crazy sailing-boat, and to have occasioned considerable alarm to the late Lord Rivers and his keepers by caressing his fierce and high-blooded greyhounds, and walking about the kennel amongst twenty brace of them as freely as their feeders; and once almost won the heart of a gentleman driving his own four blood-horses, (I had very nearly called him a coachman,) on the box with dle of a race with a real stage-coach, whilst going full whom I was accidentally seated, and who, in the midgallop, with his insides screaming out of the windows, happened to recollect that he had promised to have especial care of me, and inquired apologetically if I were frightened,-by replying con spirito--"Frightened! Not at all! Get on! Beat them!" I suppose it is that the imagination exaggerates the expected shock; for when a gun is fired near me without my previous knowledge, I merely start and laugh like

Once I had the pleasure of baffling their good intentions. It was a fine day in the midsummer holidays, and my dear mother taking a young lady with her in the carriage, I rode with my father in the gig, he having been tormented by some sage adviser into taking me into the field, and thinking that the most palatable manner; and I so ordered matters by mere dint of coaxing, that happening to be early on the ground, I prevailed on my dear companion to turn back, and drive me home again before the arrival of the reviewing general; thus escaping the shock of the salute after the fashion of the patient who, being ordered to take a shower-bath, jumped out before pulling the string.

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tageous to the sale of a horse to have won plate even at Belford, the races would undoubtedly have fallen to the ground from the mere absence of racers.

As it was, they languished on from year to year, every season worse than the last, with no company except the families of the neighbourhood, no sporting characters, no gentlemen of the turf, no betting-stand, no blacklegs, no thimble-people, no mob. The very rouge et noir table did not think it worth its while to appear; and although there was a most convenient pond for ducking such delinquents, I do not even remember to have heard of a pick-pocket on the race-course.

The diversion was, as I have said, confined Well, this ugly piece of ground numbered to the neighbourhood; and they, poor innocent amongst its demerits that of being the worst people, were, for the three days that the affair race-course in England. Flat as it looked, lasted, kept close to that most fatiguing of all it was found on examination to be full of ine- work, country dissipation. The meeting was qualities, going up hill and down hill just in held early in September, and the hours having the very parts where, for certain reasons which undergone no change since its first establishI do not pretend to understand, (all my know- ment a century before, it was what is termed ledge of the turf being gathered from the an afternoon race: accordingly, besides a early part of Holcroft's Memoirs, one of the public breakfast at ten o'clock in the Townmost amusing pieces of autobiography in the hall, there was an ordinary at two at the Swan language,) it ought to have been as level as a Hotel for ladies as well as gentlemen: then rail-road. Then, for as dry as it seemed-a everybody drove at four to the course; then dull expanse of dwarf furze and withered everybody came back to dress for the ball; heath, there were half-a-dozen places so in- and on the middle evening, when luckily there curably boggy, that once in a sham fight at a was no ball, everybody was expected to go to review half a company of the Belford Volun- the play. And to miss, only for one day, the teer Legion sunk knee-deep, to their own inex-race-course, or the two balls, or the middle pressible consternation, the total derangement of the order of battle, and the utter ruin of their white spatterdashes: and in order to avoid these marshy spots, certain awkward bends occurred in the course, which made as great demands on the skill of the jockeys as the sticking fast of his troops had done on the tactics of the reviewing general. In a word, as a race-course Belford Heath was so detestable, that a race-horse of any reputation would have been ashamed to show his face there.

Then the only circumstance that could nave reconciled the owners of good horses to a bad course-high stakes and large subscriptions were totally wanting. There was, to be sure, a County Member's Plate and a Town Member's Plate, and the Belford Stakes and the Hunt Stakes; and a popular high-sheriff, or a candidate for the borough or the county, who had a mind to be popular, or some Londoner, freshly imported, who thought supporting the races a part of his new duties as a country gentleman, would get up something like a subscription: but nothing could be less tempting than the rewards held out to the winners, and but for the speculations of certain horse dealers, who reckoned on its being advan

other people: but still the extreme cowardice in the one case, and the total absence of it in others, does seem somewhat puzzling.

play, was an affront to the stewards and the stewards' wives,-to the members who dared not be absent to the young ladies, who, not of sufficient rank or fortune to be presented to court, first made their appearance at this august reunion of fashion and beauty-to the papas, mammas, and maiden aunts, to whom the ceremony was important,-to the whole neighbourhood and the whole country. The public breakfasts and ordinaries were not de rigueur; but three races, two balls, and one play, were duties that must be fulfilled, pun ishments that must be undergone by all who j desired to stand well in country society: to have attempted to evade them, to have dared to think for yourself in a matter of amusement. would have been to run the risk of being thought over-wise, or over-good, or parsime nious, or poor. And as no one likes the three first of these nicknames, and it is only rich people who can afford to be suspected of poverty, dull as the diversions were, and leave shade, and coolness, and quiet, and to triste as the gaieties, we were content to pass three of the hottest days of early autumn amid fatigue and dust, and sun and crowd, on the very same wise principle of imitation which makes a flock of geese follow the gander.

Lightly as the county was apt to set by the town, the inhabitants of Belford were of no small use on this occasion. They helped

(like supernumeraries on the stage) to fill the ball-room and the theatre; and thinly covered as the race-course was, it would have looked emptier still but for the handsome coach of the Misses Morris-for Miss Blackall's chariot, with her black servant in his gayest livery and her pet poodle in his whitest coat on the box, and Mrs. Colby snugly intrenched in the best corner for Stephen Lane and dear Margaret in their huge one-horse chaise, with a pretty grand-child betwixt them-for King Harwood galloping about the ground in ten places at once-for the tradespeople and artisans of the place, (I do love a holiday for them, whatever name it bears-they have too few,) down to the poor chimney-sweepers and their donkey, taking more interest in the sport than their betters, and enjoying it full as much. Still the town ladies were little better than the figurante, the Coryphees in this grand ballet, the young county damsels were the real heroines of the scene; and it was to show them off that their mammas and their waiting-women, their milliners and their coachmakers, devoted all their cares; and amongst the fair candidates for admiration few were more indefatigably fine, more perseveringly fashionable, more constant to all sorts of provincial gaiety, whether race, concert, play or ball, than the Misses Elphinstone of Ashley, who had been for ten years, and perhaps a little longer, two of the reigning belles of the county.

Why it should be so, one does not well know, but half the ladies of H-shire used to meet every Monday between the hours of three and five in the Market-place of Belford. It was the constant female rendezvous; on Saturday, the market-day, the gentlemen came into town to attend the Bench, - some on horseback, some in gigs, the style of the equipage not unfrequently in an inverse ratio to the consequence of the owner; your country gentlemen of large fortune being often addicted to riding some scrubby pony, or driving some old shabby set-out, which a man of less certain station would be ashamed to be seen in: so that their appearance harmonized perfectly well with the carts and wagons of their tenants, the market-people of Belford. Their wives and daughters, however, indulged in no such whims. True to the vanities of the dear sex, laudably constant to fineries of all sorts, as regular as Monday* came were they to be seen in carriages the most fashionable, drawn by the handsomest horses that coaxing or lecturing could extort from their husbands and fathers, crowded round the shop-door of Mr. Dobson, linen

draper and haberdasher, the most approved factor of female merchandise, and the favourite minister to female caprice in the whole county of H- —; and amongst the many equipages which clustered about this grand mart of provincial fashion, none were more punctual and few better appointed, than that of the Elphinstones of Ashley.

Mr. Elphinstone was a gentleman of large landed property; but the estate being considerably involved and strictly entailed, and the eldest son showing no desire to assist in its extrication, he was in point of fact a much poorer man than many of his neighbours with less than half of his nominal income. His wife, a lady of good family, had been what is called a fine woman; by which is understood, a tall, showy figure, good hair, good teeth, good eyes, a tolerable complexion, and a face that comes somewhat short of what is commonly reckoned handsome. According to this definition, Mrs. Elphinstone had been, and her daughters were two fine women; and as they dressed well, were excellent dancers, had a good deal of air and style, and were at least half a head taller than the other young ladies of the county, they seldom failed to attract considerable admiration in the ballroom.

That their admirers went at the most no farther than a transient flirtation, is to be accounted for, not so much from any particular defect in the young ladies, who were pretty much like other show-off girls, but by the certainty of their being altogether portionless. Very few men can afford to select wives with high notions and no fortune; and unwomanly and unmaidenly as the practice of husbandhunting is, whether in mothers or daughters, there is at least something of mitigation in the situation of young women like Gertrude and Julia Elphinstone,-accustomed to every luxury and indulgence, to all the amusements and refinement of cultivated society, and yet placed in such a position, that if not married before the death of their parents, they are thrown on the charity of their relations for the mere necessaries of life. With this prospect before their eyes, their anxiety to be settled certainly admits of some extenuation; and yet in most cases, and certainly in the present, that very anxiety is but too likely to defeat its object.

Year after year passed away;-Mr. Elphinstone's family, consisting, besides the young ladies whom I have already mentioned, of four or five younger lads in the army, the navy, at College, and at school, and of a weakly girl, who, having been sent to be nursed at a distant relation's, the wife of a Why Monday should be the chosen day, no one gentleman farmer at some distance, still recan tell. It is the day on which the poor country-mained in that convenient but ignoble retreat, women make their little purchases, because their husbands being paid on a Saturday night, they have then a pittance to spare. But why the ladies should choose that day, is still a puzzle.

became every year more and more expensive; whilst the chances of his daughters' marriage diminished with their increasing age and his

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