as she came thence. But this was not to be; for the prime minister, Hum, who, with what truth I cannot pretend to say, had the reputation of being at all times wide awake, was not asleep upon the present occasion; and hearing, with his pair of very acute ears, a little scuffling in the gallery, he opened the door of his apartment, which was close to the scene of action. He had apparently been deeply engaged in study; for he held in his hand a lighted lantern, the light of which he now directed upon the pair in the corridor. The instant he saw them, however, it dropped from his hand; and closing and fastening the door with all possible celerity, he jumped upon his bed, coiled himself into a circle less than his waist in diameter, drew the clothes over him in a heap, and lay without moving, breathing, or letting his beard grow, till the morning light had filled his apart

ment.

During the moment that a gleam from the lantern had been thrown upon them, To-To became aware that it was only the Emperor who had frightened her so much in the dark; and of course much delighted at this discovery, and her fears all banished thereby, she immediately returned with him to the imperial apartment.

"My dearest To-To," said his imperial majesty, as they entered, “I was not till now aware that you were a somnambulist."

"Indeed, your majesty," replied the lovely Empress; "it is a very grievous affliction. Two steps more, but for your fortunate arrival, would have brought my head against the angle of that doorway."

"But why," he asked, "did you never mention to me that you were so afflicted? I would have had a gold collar made to surround your ankle, and a chain and lock to secure you to the bed. I myself would have kept the key, so dearly do I tender your safety."

"I had hoped," she replied, "that my attachment to your sacred majesty would always have exercised the counteracting influence which it had hitherto done, and have overcome entirely the infirmity to which I was formerly subject. I have no fear of another attack, and I think the gold chain, therefore, will be quite unnecessary."

"As, however, you are restless to-night," said the Emperor, "I will secure you for the present with this strap. Stay, let me pass it round you. There, that will do-nay, one pull more-uh, uh-you can't move now, I think. That's just the thing-the lock is famous-so-and here goes the key. Don't be afraid; you can't roll down. And now, as I'm rather of the sleepiest, good night, dearest madam. Indeed this sleep-walking is a terrible thing, but we'll say no more about that till the morning.

He had scarcely finished speaking before he was fast asleep; but poor To-To couldn't sleep at all, for she was almost cut in two by the strap he fastened round her.

In the morning the Emperor liberated his wife, but he did not revert to the subject of sleep-walking till after he had finished his morning devotions and meal. He then sent for her; and when she came into his presence, he asked if she remembered the circumstances of the preceeding night. She confessed that she had some confused recollection of a dream, in which she had imagined that, after her beloved

lord had been a long time absent from home, whilst pining for his return, she suddenly beheld him walking towards her, at a distance in the garden; and that in the affection of her heart she had gone forth to meet him, and to welcome him. That with these purposes she was hastening down the long walk, when a black dragon flew out of the canal by which it was bordered, and coiled suddenly around her. She was mortally frightened thereat, and, with the greatest presence of mind, made a resolve on the instant to utter a loud scream; but that the black dragon put one of its terrible paws upon her mouth, and rendered it impossible to carry a device so ingenious into execution. partially awakening about that time, what was her satisfaction at discovering that the black dragon was no other than the Emperor himself.

On

His majesty then questioned her as to how long she had been subject to this affliction of somnambulism, and she replied that ever since she had first acquired the use of her feet, it had occasionally seized her; and that sometimes she had hurt herself severely by walking against the wall. This was very hard, she said; but she supposed, if fate brought it upon her, she must endeavour to support it.

Her compasionate lord endeavoured to console her with the suggestion that some remedy might possibly be found for this unfortunate habit; and he questioned her as to whether there were any manner in which she could at all account for her being thus afflicted. In answer to this, she expressed a suspicion that her mamma had been partly concerned; and she told some long story to substantiate this view; but that I consider little worthy our attention, as she made the facts a few weeks older than herself, and might therefore be supposed to know but little of the matter. She afterwards, however, put the thing in a more philosophical light, when she said, that her habits being sedentary and her feet large, the latter, she thought, had not a proper proportion of exercise during the day, and thus made up secretly at night, when they knew that she was sleeping, and unable consequently to keep a look out upon their motions.

Now here let it be mentioned that large feet in the days of Min-Te were as necessary to the ideal of female loveliness throughout the celestial dominions, as small feet have been ever since; and that Min-Te himself had chosen the delectable To-To as the wife of his bosom, chiefly on account of her felicities in that department of the beautiful. Nevertheless, when his lady declared her conviction that with premeditation those, her lovely members, walked away with her in such an inexcusable manner, he could not restrain himself from uttering a malediction against them. This malediction was expressed in three words; but the nib of my pen turns this way and that, and refuses to write the first-" their soles," were the other two.

Min-Te then informed his lady, that it had come to his knowledge that, though he doubted not she was quite unconscious of the fact, the little excursion she had taken the past night was by no means the first she had made in the same direction; and he considered that if she walked at all, that was the wrong way, and this he disapproved in To-To.

But To-To expressed great satisfaction at hearing this, as she said that actions done in sleep always went by a rule of contrary, and that her walking the wrong way in a dream, was the most lucid of all pos

Could the Emperor do otherwise than bow to the force of such argument? He highly applauded his lady, and assured her of his perfect confidence in her walking excellence. Yet he confessed that his strong conviction of this was in itself a source of disquiet to his mind; for she had clearly demonstrated, that it would be the occasion of her always going wrong to sleep. It was his wish, if possible, that this might be avoided, and the only mode which occurred to him of escaping from the dilemma, was to prevent her from going at all. How to effect this? He wished heartily that her feet had not grown since infancy, as she then would not have taken to sleep-walking; but they had, and what was to be done? Min-Te was an inventive genius; he hit upon an admirable plan, he sent for a cook and cleaver, and had these offending members chopped six inches shorter. The cure was complete-it is confidently stated, that To-To never more walked in her sleep; and I recommend all somnambulists to try the efficiency of Min-Te's invention.

The Emperor next wished a private conference with his prime minister. Hum had not yet arisen, and the messengers had to seek him in his chamber. They found him nearly in the attitude in which he lay when

A proclamation went abroad throughout the empire that the most honoured and exemplary Empress, the lantern of beauty and steelyard of ceremony, had set the fashion of short feet; and though it was not absolutely required that all the ladies of the land should conform to this mode, it was made imperrative on all parents to wrap up the feet of their female children in such ligatures of cotton, silk, leather, or brass, as should effectually prevent the future growth of the pedal bones and ligaments, the toes being bent inwards towards the sole; "for," said the edict," as the toes of women have a natural bias to go wrong, it is proper that they should be turned the opposite way."

This order was everywhere obeyed with great alacrity; and it is supposed that no less than six millions of ladies, wishing to be at the top of the fashion, voluntarily, and with their own hands, chopped off their feet at the instep.

Min-Te and To-To thenceforth lived ever happily. The wisdom of Min-Te is much spoken of in this day, and he is accounted one of the greatest benefactors of his country; for the Chinese are of opinion that their wives have walked much more steadily since they lost the use of their feet.

CHAPTER I.

In the west of "La belle France" is a department called "Les deux Sevres," from two rivers of the same name which ran through its territory; and the capitol of this department is the thriving little town of Niort. Since the days of Charles VIII. and the Maid of Orleans, this district has not been so much frequented by our ubiquitous countrymen as most other parts of France; and a residence on the banks of the "Sevre Niortaise"-as the southern of the two streams is named, to distinguish it from its sister river-might be confidently recommended to some of those English who may be frequently heard lamenting the difficulty of finding a spot where they may live unmolested by the sight or sound of others of the same species. It is a strange subject of complaint this; though all who have rambled on the Continent must have heard it from the lips of sundry of their wandering countrymen. Little complimentary, too, one would suppose it, when addressed to an Englishman, yet shall you hear it at Pau, at Carlsbad, at Sorrents, under the Cedars of Lebanon, or at Tadmor in the desert. Mrs. Smith confiding to Mrs. Thomson her distresses at being unable to discover a spot uninfested with English! and that with an amount of self-complacency indicating the conviction entertained by Mrs. Smith that she was hereby clearly manifesting her own superiority to all the common and unclean herd of her compatriots. To the French this sort of absurdity is especially unintelligible, except on hypo

theses far from advantageous to the English-hating Englishman in question. One of the objections to the solitary system of imprisonment is the great quantity of prison-room it requires. And a great deal of the world it takes to find sufficiently isolated lodgings for the fancies of our dear anti-gregarious countrymen. But there is still accommodation, as has been said, for one or two in the department of "Les deux Sevres."

A pleasant country, too, is this district of the ancient province of Poitou, undulating, green, well wooded, well watered, and rich enough in deep verdure and silvan beauty to remind the traveller of the prettiest parts of Nottinghamshire, rather than of the brown monotony of the greater part of France. And Niort, the capital of this pleasant country, is for a French town an active, thriving, commercial little city. In the old times, when Poitiers was the capitol of the province of Poitou, and before Niort could in any degree vie with it in size and importance, the two towns were strongly contrasted in their nature and appearance. Proud Poitiers was a true medieval city, a legitimate, though the youngest, child of the feudal system. Its cathedral, its parliament, its university, its long and intricately tortuous streets, compelled to twist round many a sharp corner by the huge town mansions of the Poitevin noblesse, and forced between long lines of dead wall by their large gardens, all contributed to impress upon it the genuine stamp of an old provincial capital of the first class. Niort, on the contrary, was a young commer

Nor would their community of feeling on religious matters have helped in any material degree, as might at first sight be supposed, to draw them together. The Huguenots were a large and mixed body; and their numbers were augmented by proselytes from all ranks of society, whose motives for dissenting from the state religion were by no means all the same. The heart of the body were strict, rigid Calvinists. These were for the most part bourgeois; and such was Jacques Bartenau. Then there were ambitious, scheming nobles, who saw in this stern, resolute, and disaffected body, an instrument which might be used with advantage for their own purposes. Court disappointments, discontent, dislike of the existing order of things, reckless restlessness, and love of movement, drew to the Huguenot ranks a large and loose crowd of straggling partisans, the effect of whose championship was to weaken and not stregthen the cause they thought fit to espouse.

It did not necessarily follow, then, from the fact of both being Huguenots, that much community of sentiment should exist between the two prisoners and their wives. And in truth it is not often that men, so widely differing in all respects as did these two co-religionists, are found conducted by fate into circumstances so precisely parallel. The Sieur D'Aubigné was, it seems, a violent, hot-headed, ill-conducted man, ever scrambling out of one trouble to fall into another, unfit to be trusted to find his own way through life, and much less to guide his wife and children on theirs. Jacques Bartenau, the Niort merchant, was a very different sort of man. He was, at the period of his daughter's birth in 1635, in the very pride of middle life, being then 38 years old. He was a remarkably handsome man; though fav persons, perhaps, would have deemed his features prepossessing. The cold, though large and wellopened grey eye, expressed too much self-concentration, lighted up too rarely with sympathetic contagion at another's mirth-too rarely melted in tenderness for the woes of others, ay, or even for his own. The thin and habitually closed lips prevented the otherwise beautifully formed mouth from producing the pleasing impression which it would have else not failed to do. The well moulded and strongly pronounced chin indicated, in connexion with the other features which have been noticed, too much firmness, too small a seasoning of human weakness, for amiability. A high and well-outlined Roman nose completed the severe and stern character of the countenance. The coal black hair, which had begun to retreat from the large and lofty forehead, was already mingled with grey. His person, both physically and in its moral expression, corresponded well with the features of his face. Tall, perfectly well-formed, and even commanding as was the handsome figure of the Niortais trader, there was a rigidity about it, an unbending, self-sustained erectness, and an uncompromising determination, expressed even in his measured gait, which was more calculated to inspire fear than love in those connected with him by family ties.

Such is he, who now at the moment of our reader's introduction to him, is holding in his arms, and gazing at the features of his first-born child-the prison-born infant, whose subsequent fortunes, still remembered in the traditional lore of her native town, it is the business of these pages to relate.

"I had hoped," said the father, turning to another man about his own age, whose dress indicated him to be a Huguenot priest, and who was standing near him, "I had hoped to have been the father of a boy, who in the troublous times that but too evidently are coming upon us, might have helped the good cause with heart and with hand. There will be days of wailing and nights of terror for the women of our faith, or I have no skill in reading the portents of the

times."

"Bless the Lord! my friend, for the child which he has given you," returned the divine; "bless the Lord! and, by his blessing, our women, ay, and our children, shall so fight the good fight, as to purify the rottenness of this darkened land, and change the louring blackness of its future to a bright light. Let us welcome the babe with prayer."

The father and the preacher knelt together, and the prayer pronounced by the latter was long, and strongly marked by the peculiar doctrines of the more rigid Calvinists. The petition was listened to by Jacques Bartenau without the smallest symptom of impatience; and when it was concluded, and not till then, he turned to go and visit the mother of his child, a mother now for the first time.

And this mother, this wife of the stern Huguenot, for whose faith's-sake her first-born child first drew the breath of life within a prison wall, was she a helpmate meet for the zealous partizan, the severe man, to whose fate she had indissolubly linked her own? Louise Bartenau, the mother of the Huguenot's daughter-let us now make acquaintance with her.

Louise Bartenau was not a Frenchwoman by birth, nor had the name she bore in the land of her fathers been the French one, Louise. She, whom fate had destined for the life-partner of the Poitevin Huguenot, grew and ripened into loveliness beneath the beautyfostering sun of Cadiz. Whether that genial city had also been her birthplace, no one knew; for Zara Diaz had been a foundling. The first of these names had been found attached to the cloth which wrapped the infant; and the second was that of the good Cadiz trader, who adopted her as his foster-child, and beneath whose roof Bartenau, travelling in Spain for the purposes of his commerce, had found her. There could be little doubt that the dark-eyed child, who seemed almost daily to expand into precocious beauty, was of Moorish or perhaps of Gipsey parentage. The posterity of the Visigoth has become matured into very perfect beauty beneath the vivifying and munificent skies of Spain; and all Europe has heard