 avoided being alone with him; but now, as he was more engaged by the preparations for their departure, which he had undertaken to superintend, and in settling poor Elphinstone's accounts with his employers, Celestina again ventured out

of an evening whenever she could escape unseen.
In one of these walks, along the edge of very steep rocks, where the scene presented only desolation: the dark and turbulent sea on one side, and on the other a succession of mountains, which seemed to have been thrown upon each other in some tremendous convulsion of nature, she turned towards the yet more dreary North, and reflected on the condition of those whom the poet describes as
The last of men,
the inhabitants of Siberia, of Lapland, and those extreme regions where
Life at last goes out.

"Alas!" cried she, "if they have not our enjoyments, they suffer not from those sensibilities which embitter our days. Their short summer passes in laying up necessaries for their long winter; and with what their desolate region affords them they

are content, because they know not that there are comforts and conveniencies beyond what it affords them. Void of the wish and the power to observe other modes of life, they are content with their own, and though little superior in point of intellect to the animal from which they derive their support, yet they are happy, if not from the possession of good, at least from the absence of evil; from that sickness of the soul which we taste from deprivation and disappointment."
A deep sigh closed this short soliloquy; and after indulging a little longer this train of thought, it produced the following sonnet:

THE LAPLANDER.
The shivering native, who by Tenglio's side
Beholds with fond regret the parting light
Sink far away, beneath the darkening tide,
And leave him to long months of dreary night,
Yet knows, that springing from the eastern wave,
The sun's glad beams shall re-illume his way,
And, from the snows, secur'd within his cave,
He waits in patient hope—returning day.
Not so the sufferer feels, who, o'er the waste
Of joyless life, is destin'd to deplore
Fond love forgotten, tender friendship past,
Which, once extinquish'd, can revive no more:
O'er the blank void he looks with hopeless pain;
For him those beams of heaven shall never shine again.
A few days after this, an interval of calm weather gave to Mrs. Elphinstone courage to determine on embarking: but the evening before that on which it was finally
