The maiden sat, and the maiden sigh'd;
Sing heigh, alas! and oh, dear me!

"I've a bonnet to trim ere eventide,

"And it's shameful, and that's what it is!" she cried; And she said, "I won't," said she.

The maiden stepped to the top of the stair;

Sing what you like if it comes in well.

And she called out "Mary! are you down there ?"
And she called Mary, again, I declare,

Instead of ringing the bell.

The maiden stood for a minute and more;
Sing re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do.

The maiden called, as I said before;

The number of times might be half-a-score;

But I didn't count, so I can't be shore.

It is painful to add that the maiden swore;

She bounced in again, and she banged the door;
And that's all about her I know.

G. T.

THE DEAD LADY'S RING.

A TALE, IN FOUR CHAPTERS, BY THE AUTHOR OF "SKETCHES OF CANTABS."

PART II-EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN.

CHAPTER II.-THE MYSTERY UNFOLDED.

ISING from his seat, after a few moments of confused thought, Dr. Longjumeau hurried up the staircase of the deserted house.

On reaching the first floor, he found the doors on both sides wide open, and the rooms with which they ocmmunicated emptied of furniture and reduced to the four bare walls. The light of the moon streaming in through the paneless casements showed him that these walls were mildewed in various places; in others, the plaster had completely fallen off, and left the wood-work exposed to view. The flooring, uneven from age, was covered with a thick layer of dust, upon which his feet left the imprint of their steps.

All the way up the house, the same traces of desertion met the eye. There was no sign of any habitation but that of the rats, rustling into the darkness at the approach of a human visitor. On most of the storeys, the doors had been removed, and the Doctor could see into the tenantless rooms before walking through them. From the size of these apartments, from the fragments of coats of arms standing out, from the cracked and mutilated marble chimney-pieces, from the relics of guilding and moulding on the ceilings, and other indications, he was induced to suppose that the house had at some former time been the residence of a great personage, perhaps of a Magistrate or Chancellor under Louis the Fourteenth.

It was not without a strange sensation at the heart that the Doctor found himself at last on the highest landing, and facing the rooms which had been the scene of his mysterious adventure. Great as was his anxiety to penetrate there, he had yet been protracting the time, as a patient about to be relieved of his pain by some salutary operation, will yet snatch at every moment of delay. He pushed open the door, which still remained on its hinges, but yielded without resistance to his touch. Whatever doubts as to the identity of the

VOL. V.

house remained in his mind were dispelled, as he made his way along a narrow passage into the room beyond it. Its form was precisely similar to that of the apartment which he had such good cause to remember; the fire-place and the window in the same relative positions; and as if to make certainty double certain, a few scattered rays of the moon, struggling at that moment in its passage from one cloud to another, lit up for an instant the remains of an allegorical painting on the ceiling, representing what appeared to be a goddess seated in a car. It could be nothing else than the effect of fancy, stimulated by these successive points of identity, but he could almost have sworn that the same rays of moonlight showed him just before their disappearance, a large red mass like a curtain, hanging at the further end of the room.

He groped his way on, towards this opposite end, till his hand was stopped by a soft substance which yielded as he pushed. It was a curtain then, after all. It struck him as singular that this one piece of furniture should have been left behind in the deserted house. He felt for one of the ends, and drew it aside; a slight noise above his head showing him that it was fixed to a rod on the ceiling, and moved on rings. When he had done this, he looked into the alcove behind it. At first all was darkness; but gradually there seemed to form itself to his eyes out of the darkness, a white object, like a sheet.

He felt for his tinder-box which, faithful to his early habits, he never omitted to carry about with him, together with a thin wax taper, which would burn for some quarter of an hour. At first, he feared that he had left them behind, in his confusion, but was lucky enough to find them in a pocket, or huge inner bag, of his great coat. He made three or four fruitless attempts to obtain a light, eliciting each time only a few feeble sparks from the wet tinder. Each of these sparks brought for a single instant, into a faint prominence, the object behind the curtain upon which his eyes remained constantly fixed; and without showing him what it was, enabled him to draw certain conclusions, as for instance that it was too still and motionless to be a living being. It was owing to this kind of preparation that he was not so startled as he would otherwise have been, when the taper being lit, he saw what it was that he had taken for a white sheet.

A sheet, indeed, there was, but it was disposed over the back of a chair upon which sat-a skeleton! When the first unavoidable flush of surprise had died out of his cheeks, the Doctor set himself calmly to examine the ghastly object before him. Indeed, the events of the last few hours had almost deprived him of the faculty of surprise at anything which might happen. It was the skeleton apparently of a woman, artistically put together, as far as he could judge from a hasty survey; and fitted up with a machinery of springs which were evidently for the purpose of putting it in motion. The right hand hung over the side of the chair, and approaching his taper to the little finger he saw, or thought he saw, marks of its having been broken. Carrying his light, with feverish haste, to the neck, he was satisfied, on inspection, that the vertebræ had been divided. Perhaps, he hardly needed

to have made these researches; or, their results may have been due to his own foregone conclusions; for, from the moment that his eyes rested on the skeleton, he felt sure that it was that of the unknown lady, and no other, by whose body he had stood, in this very recess, just five and twenty years before.

With what earthly object could it have been placed there ?—or what could have induced the assassins to preserve with so much care, this damning evidence of their guilt? Then his wife, and the Duchesse de Guémenée—what mysterious attraction could link them to such a house as this? The curiosity which had been gathering, snow-ball fashion, during a quarter of a century, swollen by this time into a mountain, lay like a weight not to be shaken off, upon the unfortunate Doctor's wits. He determined not to leave the room, at the risk of remaining there the whole night, and at whatever peril to his own safety. The house could not be so deserted as it appeared; some one must be near the spot, and would be likely to show himself, before long. But soon, yielding to a restless feeling, he made up his mind to avail himself of the short remainder of his taper to make a closer examination of the premises, with the view of profiting by any clue which chance might throw in his way.

He observed that there were marks of other footsteps, besides his own, upon the dust of the floor; and this confirmed him in his view that there must be some one near at hand. Beyond this, and with the exception of its ghastly tenant, he could see no signs which distinguished the room from those of the storeys below. The walls were perfectly bare, and the night wind coming in through the dismantled casements rendered it a matter of difficulty for him to keep his light burning. He wandered gradually into the corridor, and thence to the outer landing, and there for the first time that evening noticed—a fresh confirmation if any were needed-the lamp which had attracted his attention on the former occasion; the lamp modelled to represent an eastern figure, with a turban and flowing robes, holding a torch in its hand.

He attempted to lift it off the slab on which it stood, but found that it was fixed there. On a nearer examination, he saw that the waist of the figure was encircled by a belt, in the centre of which was a square ornament, or clasp, with certain characters engraved upon it. These characters were identical with those of his ring, and were surmounted in the same way, by the crest of a lion, with a thin strip, or layer of metal, going from one side to the other. He pressed the place where he expected to find a secret spring, and was not disappointed; the ornament immediately flew open; but, instead of a key, there was exposed to view a small key-hole. On fitting the key. of his ring to this hole, he found that the two corresponded perfectly. He had no sooner done this, than, to his surprise, the figure and the slab moved forward with a rotatory motion from the wall, revealing, behind them, the handle of a secret door.

The Doctor, without hesitation, turned this handle, and immediately the bottom of the recess, revolving outwards upon a hinge, showed him a flight of spiral steps, built into the wall. He glanced for an instant

at his taper, then held it at arm's-length before him. Its feeble rays* lighted up some ten or twelve steps-but beyond that was darkness ; there was nothing to indicate where the flight might terminate. Obeying the impulse of an irresistible curiosity, and not even taking into account the possibility of a peril to be run, Doctor Longjumeau descended, slowly and carefully, the secret staircase. He stopped every now and then, to listen for a sound, but none reached his ear. Judging from the number of steps he concluded that they must reach from the top to the bottom of the house: he had heard of the existence of such things being discovered, before now, on pulling down some of the oldest houses in Paris.

At length his descent terminated. He found himself in what-to judge from its dampness-must be an underground corridor, or passage. It was of great length, as might be seen from a feeble light shining from its extreme end. Towards this light he moved, with as little noise as possible; his heart, as he could not help thinking, beating with a sound more audible than that of his footsteps. The moment for a discovery of some kind was approaching! Suddenly, his attention was riveted by a female figure, sitting on a stone bench, her back to the wall, and fast asleep. Her appearance was that of a common workwoman, but there was nothing in her dress or person to indicate extreme misery. On the contrary, her figure was plump, and her features expressive of an easy contentment: it was clear that her dreams were happy ones. What could the woman be doing, sleeping down here, in a cellar, and in complete darkness? She was not a prisoner; that was obvious at a glance. At first, the Doctor thought of waking her, but, on second thoughts, he crept on, carefully veiling his taper, in the direction of the light.

It proceeded, as he found, on reaching the end of the passage, from the top of a short ladder, which was set in the ground at that place. On climbing up the ladder, he found himself passing through a sort of trap-door, into a large barn, or out-house, which must be situated, as he judged, in the garden of the house. At the same moment, his eyes were dazzled by a flood of light, and a sound of voices reached his ears. He crept to a wooden pillar, which supported the roof close to the opening in the floor by which he had ascended, and looked cautiously from behind it. Strange as had been the events of the last few hours, what he now saw reduced them, by comparison, to mere every-day occurrences. If he did not rub his eyes, to make sure whether he was awake, after the fashion of heroes of romances, it was because, in fact, his hands, tied to his sides by surprise, would have refused to perform that office. Stolid, paralysed, with an expression which would, perhaps, have struck him as comical, if he could have seen himself in a glass, Doctor Longjumeau looked into the body of the barn, and witnessed the strangest of all the strange scenes that had met his eyes in the course of his checquered life.

At the further end of the building, in a chair, placed upon a raised platform, or dais, sat a woman, robed in white. Her waist was encircled by a crimson belt, joined in the middle by a clasp, and across her left shoulder hung a scarf of the same colour. In the position in