tedly to drown her cries. It was evident to me that agony had sobered her, and that she not only shrieked, but even attempted to escape her doom. But it was now, alas! too late. The crowd pressed close to the pile, and we were quietly, but effectually, squeezed out of the ring. I could still see the flames rising majestically from this pagan altar, and could, I fancied, hear the cries of the devoted victim; but it was, alas! now out of our power to assist her. She had refused our succour,-we were bound not to interfere. I turned away with an aching heart, and returned to Mr Phail's residence.

I visited the spot next day; the grass was burnt up where the pile had stood; nothing else betokened the sacrifice, or indicated the exact place where I had beheld the « suttee. »

I

THE CHEMIST'S FIRST MURDER.

BY LAMAN BLANCHARD, ESQ.

"

I know not how to begin the story, said the chemist, sighing heavily, while a slight spasm passed over his sorrowful face; but when I used to poison people—»

I can't accept that for a beginning,» said I, interrupting him. Your conscience is over-nice, too sensitive and suspicious by half. Begin, in plain, honest English, When I was a chemist—' »

"

群

It means the same thing, he answered. The people in Albania, you know, always commence their stories with "When I was a thief.'»

So might some of us in England, who belong to what Sydney Smith calls the undetected classes of society; but you never heard a lawyer, when settled in his easy-chair, opening a narrative of the past with When I used to ruin half the parish, nor do retired members of parliament, referring to past periods of legislation, preface their anecdotes of patriotism with When I practised bribery through thick and thin. »

You speak, returned the chemist, sadly, of people wiser than I am; people who can very well bear their own reproaches, so long as they can contrive to escape the world's. But enough of this. When I was a pois-Well, then, when

I was a chemist— »

« That's it—now go on.»

At that time London had the Byron fever. But London contains many Londons, and they all had it with greater or less virulence. Thinking and thoughtless Londonthose who read much, and those who never read anythingthe large-souled, the little-souled, and the no-souled-every one took the infection. It became quite the fashion, all of a sudden, to feel. Iron nerves relaxed, hearts of stone broke to pieces inwardly. There might be some who did not know what to think-yet these could of course talk; and there might be a few who, from long-established habits, found it' quite impossible to get fast hold of a feeling-still they could shed tears.

Society became a sponge, soaking up those briny showers of the muse, which only descended faster and faster, " and the big rain came dancing to the earth. Young men wept until their shirt-collars fell down starchless and saturated; young ladies, sitting on sofas, were floated out of the drawing-room window into the centre of Grosvenor-square; and I! verily believe that if those cantos (but they were not yet in existence) which found some little difficulty in making their way into families, could have got into a needle's eye, they would have extracted a tear from it.

For the ladies, however, I do not answer positively-I can only vouch for the condition of my youthful brethren. You might have seen them with the new volume-bought, mindnot borrowed; with the volume itself, not an American broadsheet that had pirated its precious contents; with a wet copy of the first edition, not a smuggled, sneaking, cheating, French version; with this volume of world-enchanting wonders tenderly grasped, you might have seen them hurrying along the street, stopping every now and then, and just opening it so as to peep at the mighty line within then hastening on a little way, repeating the half-dozen words that breathe just read, until they were breathless-then, burning with curiosity for the passionate revelation, they would glide down a gateway, or shelter themselves at a shop-door, to dive a little further into the sea of thought, bringing up a pearl at every dip.

n

The sensation with which these young people first read

Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child?

constituted an epoch in their lives. It did in mine. That third canto was my first rock, a-head. I never knew one bottle from another afterwards. All drugs became alikemerged into a drug. I hated Apollo in his connexion with, physic, but I worshipped him in his poetical divinity. I did not aspire to write verse-my appreciation of it was too ene thusiastic, exalted, and intense to read it, to understand it, to recite it silently, accompanying myself on the pestle and mortar, was sufficient ecstacy.

་་

By degrees, rather rapid, the pestle and mortar accompaniment was omitted. I abjured all practical superintendence of the affairs of the shop. I regarded with a scorn that bordered on disgust the people who visited it, with prescriptions': testifying to their miserable and innately vulgar concern for the welfare of their bodies-I longed to read them a favourite passage or two, prescriptive of mental medicine. A sudden

burst

t

With thee, my bark, I'll swiftly go, startled the matter-of-fact applicant for an ounce of that strengthening medicine; and an involuntary application of the everrecurring line,

Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child do. would elicit from the simple girl who came for hartshorn, the explanation, that in general it was, only mother's is swelled. »

time, and with it, as a matter

to

,,

"

Disgust naturally came in of course, total inattention business, », Add to this the fact, that I was possessed, in the person of an apprentice, of, one of those things called treasures in short, a precocious, genius-and it will readily be understood that a few mistakes in the mixing of medicines would occur every now and then. Physicians' prescriptions carefully prepared, inscribed in gold letters upon purple glass, neatly framed, figured in the window; and no doubt care was taken to prepare as many as might be presented; but the lad had unhappily an expe

rimental turn, and he was always for throwing perfumes upon Dr. Somebody's violets.

When he had no particular ground for guessing how an improvement might be effected, he would hazard an alteration for the sake of change, just to keep his hand in; and the bottle to the extreme right, or the drawer to the extreme left, or the jar next to him, had an equal chance in these cases of being resorted to. The effect was sometimes to heighten, to an alarming degree, some peculiar influence delicately infused by the learned prescriber, and sometimes to neutralize altogether the essential principle of the prescription.

«Men have died from time to time, says the poet, « and worms have eaten them-but not for love. Can this be said of physic?

At that time, however, I heard of no disaster. Men died doubtless, and worms dined. This was perfectly natural. At the worst, if any mysterious case obtruded itself, and the death of a patient followed immediately upon his taking a new lease of life from the verdict of a physician, there was always the convenient broken heart to fall back upon. Broken hearts were then as plenty as blackberries.

"

And some," says Manfred, pleasantly enumerating the var

ious disagreeables whereof people perish

And some of withered or of broken hearts,

For this last is a malady that slays.

More than are numbered in the lists of fate.

We always used to set down any little inadvertence to the inevitable malady, the broken heart. A wrong medicine perhaps produced a very embarassing and equivocal turn in the disease,-which came after a little while to look like a totally different complaint-and having an odd appearance with it, it was clearly a case of broken heart. . .

(The chemist groaned heavily, and appeared to labour under an attack of conscience.)

It was all very well while the mischiefs that arose, either from my own deliberate neglect, or the apprentice's speculative genius, were uncertain and obscure-so long as the body