'Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures; but I know not how it is, but I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them.

The old mother came to the door; her looks told me the story before she opened her mouth. "She had lost her husband; he had died," she said, "of anguish, for the loss of Maria's senses, about a month before. She had feared at first," she added," that it would have plundered her poor girl of what little understanding was left; but, on the contrary, it had brought her more to herself; still she could not rest. Her poor daughter," she said, crying, "was wandering somewhere about the road

Why does my pulse beat languid as I write this? and what made La Fleur, whose heart seemed only to be turned to joy, to pass the back of his hand twice across his eyes, as the woman stood and told it I beckoned to the postillion to turn back into the road.

When we had got within half a league of Moulines, at a little opening in the road leading to a thicket, I discovered poor Maria sitting under a poplar. She was sitting with her elbow in her lap, and her head leaning on one side within her hand: a small brook ran at the foot of the tree.

I bid the postilion go on with the chaise to Moulines, and La Fleur to bespeak my supper; and that I would walk after him. She was dressed in white, and much as my friend described her, except that her hair hung loose, which before was twisted within a silk net. She had superadded likewise to her jacket, a pale green riband, which fell across her shoulder to the waist; at the end of which hung her pipe. Her goat had been as faithless as her lover; and she had got a little dog in lieu of him, which she had kept tied by a string to her girdle as I looked at her dog, she drew him towards her with the string. "Thou shalt not leave me, Sylvio," said she. I looked in Maria's eyes, and saw she was thinking more of her

father than of her lover, or her little goat; for, as she uttered them, the tears trickled down her cheeks.

I sat down close by her; and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell, with my handkerchief. I then steeped it in my own, and then in hers, and then in mine, and then I wiped hers again; and, as I did it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion.

I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world ever convince me to the contrary.

MARIA.

WHEN Maria had come a little to herself, I asked her if she remembered a pale thin person of a man who had sat down betwixt her and her goat about two years before? She said she was unsettled much at that time, but remembered it upon two accounts; that, ill as she was, she saw the person pitied her; and next, that her goat had stolen his handkerchief, and she had beat him for the theft. “She had washed it," she said, "in the brook, and kept it ever since in her pocket to restore it to him in case she should ever see him again, which," she added, "he had half promised her." As she told me this, she took the handkerchief out of her pocket to let me see it; she had folded it up neatly in a couple of vine-leaves, tied round with a tendril; on opening it, I saw an S. marked in one of the corners.

She had since that, she told me, strayed as far as Rome, and walked round St. Peter's once, and returned back; that she found her way alone across the Appenines, had travelled over all Lombardy without money, and through the flinty roads of Savoy without shoes: how she had borne it, and how