friends, and loyal soldiers; and of all his admirers no more burning republican existed than Sir Ralph de Vere, a general in the Protector's army, one he had himself knighted on the field of Worcester. Sir Ralph, from being an intolerant Catholic, had now become an intolerant Protestant, and—

warred against those whose cause he had once warmly espoused, and sought the destruction of the creed of which he had once been the champion. Very different from Sir Ralph was his first cousin Augusta de Vere, then, in her own right, Countess of Wentworth, and Abbess of St. Clements, a monastic pile on the Wye.

Augusta was the last prop of her declining creed; with tears of sorrow, not unmixed with anger, she beheld stronghold after stronghold of Rome's once mighty power surrender into the hands of the Philistines. More deeply still she lamented the stain in her own family, and bewailed the falling away of Ralph, the most valorous soldier of the cross in better days, now the servant of one she deemed an arch impostor and hypocrite; faithless to his name; doubly faithless to his king; and, worse than all, faithless to his religion! But Augusta's was one of those noble minds, which, while it hates the error, pities the erring, and by all the means in her power she strove to reclaim her apostate cousin. The Roman Pontiff had not only excommunicated him in this world, but condemned his forfeit soul to everlasting torments, whilst Augusta, like her Master, rather sought the wandering sheep, and ceased not night or day with tears and vigil to remember him in her prayers. Augusta was also a faithful partisan of the crownless Charles;—during all his wanderings, as far as was in her power, she provided him with food and raiment, and he had remained beneath her hospitable roof as long as prudence would permit him; and when he quitted his ungrateful country for more friendly shores till Fortune once more smiled on her favourite son, the Abbess, at the risk of her life, had herself attended him to the seaside, and blessed him ere he departed.

It was little wonder that when this became known in London, Augusta brought down all the slumbering ire of Cromwell on her devoted head, and though nearly six years had passed away since she waved her hand to the fugitive king, he commissioned Sir Ralph de Vere to punish the haughty peeress. Sir Ralph was just the man to execute his cruel designs. In his bigoted hatred of Royalist and Catholic he even forgot how he was indebted to Augusta for his very life in days when he had fought on the side he now warred against, and was glad to avail himself of the sanctuary St. Clements afforded him. It was nothing that she was his near relative and he had sought her hand ere she had become the Bride of Heaven; she was a Catholic, "and he that loveth friend more than me," said the stern presbyterian, "is not worthy of me;" it was nothing that she was young and beautiful, so was Herodias' daughter; nothing that she was good and generous—she was a Royalist, and doomed! On the 26th of August, 1658, Sir Ralph appeared at the head of an army of fierce Puritans on the banks of the beautiful Wye. Autumn had stained the leaves red and yellow, and the golden sheaf still dotted many a field: the air was calm, the scene one of peace and security, soon to be one of bloodshed, rapine, and havoc!

Ravaging the country as they went, and leaving a wilderness behind them where they found an Eden, at last the tall turrets of St. Clements appeared over the embrowned woods. The scene that followed we shall not describe; suffice to say the monks were hewn down at the altar, the helpless inhabitants that lived on the hospitality of the Abbess murdered in cold blood, without distinction of age or sex, and the fair Abbess and her nuns turned into the damp woods, there miserably to perish of hunger and cold.

It was to no account that Augusta pleaded her youth, her relationship, their early love, his debt of life due to her; with a fierce frown he bade her "begone," and threatened that, unless she obeyed, worse things might follow. With a weeping band she departed, and amid their tears she heard the blessings of those whom she had fed and clothed heaped on her as she went out not knowing where to rest her head. Meanwhile Sir Ralph, who now assumed the title of Earl, the guerdon promised by Cromwell as the price of his slaughter, took possession of his new inheritance. The gloomy moroseness of the Puritans is well known, and never was an ascetic more strict than the Earl in his ideas; he abstained from wine, and thought dancing a damnable practice, and his most common remarks were interpolated with Holy Writ, according to the custom of the times. Naturally of a harsh temperament, he never paid the tribute of a thought to his hapless cousin, far less of a sigh! His ill-gotten towers and blood-purchased coronet were, however, fated to be a short-lived possession. About a week after his entry, on the fatal 3rd[A] of September, the day that saw the conquest of Scotland at Dunbar, and England at Worcester, and which Cromwell thought a fortunate day, there appeared in the heavens unmistakeable signs of a coming tempest. During the afternoon, the gusts of wind, bearing with them showers of leaves, grew stronger and stronger. As night advanced, the scud blew wildly across the welkin, and some time after sunset floods of rain descended. Towards midnight the gale increased to a perfect hurricane—"the rain fell not from one lone cloud, but as if heaven had caved in," and the Wye came down in high flood, carrying rocks and trunks of trees in its turbid course, and overflowing all the lowlands far and near. Ever and anon a wild crash told the fall of some patriarch of the forest, and with every blast the towers shook to their very foundations. During this war of the elements a great soul was passing away; it was a fit ending to a turbulent life. The wind sung his dirge as the ambitious Cromwell yielded up his ghost. Unknowing of his master's death, Earl Wentworth lay on his sleepless couch, and listened with terror to the violence of the storm; once or twice he thought the whole abbey would yield to its rage, but the strong masonry manfully repelled the gust, and the thick foundations rolled back the flood that beat against them. The roaring of the wind through the trees precluded the idea of sleep, and the thoughts of that stern man as he lay awake were aught but enviable. Within his bosom raged a storm, wild as that which howled without. The sins of his youth—the crimes of his manlier years—like fiends "no exorcism can bind," all flocked to his remembrance at that awful hour, and as his room shook, like Felix he, too, trembled, but like the Roman governor he bade conscience go its way this time, and at a more convenient season he would listen. Just then occurred one of those fitful pauses, as if the wind rested a moment to take breath, and regathered its strength for a still sterner effort. In that hush the moon broke forth from a gap in the flying clouds; and, looking calmly on the scene of terror, her beams kissed the raging waves of the flood that hurried by, and lit up the soldier's rough, weather-beaten features.

It was then that the Earl first became aware he was not alone. Beside his couch stood a form in white—was it the vision of a troubled mind? was it some horrid dream? He rubbed his eyes—the figure still stood there, motionless as a statue! In an instant he recognized Augusta: he tried to speak—the words froze on his lips, and in speechless terror he gazed on the apparition. Hunger and distress had not robbed her eye of its light, nor her face of its strange beauty; but there was something weird in her glance,—something