; she shall find me very complaisant. I must be so, for live without her I cannot. She must she shall be mine. It is a prize which I am born to bear away from all competitors. This is what flatters and consoles me.
You, Fairfax, think yourself more in luck. You continue to range at large. You scorn to wear the chain to-day which you cannot shake off laughingly to-morrow—Well I envy you not—When

you see her, if you do not envy me may I be impaled and left to roast in the sun, a banquet for the crows.
Good night.
C. CLIFTON.


FRANK HENLEY TO OLIVER TRENCHARD.
Paris, Hotel de l'Université.
SOME events have happened, since I wrote to thee, on which I meant to have been silent, till we had met; but I want thy advice on a new incident, and must therefore briefly relate what has passed. I have had an opportunity of appeasing that hungry vanity, which is

continually craving after unwholesome food. I have proved to Clifton that it was not fear which-made me submit to obloquy, which in his opinion could only be washed away in blood. I have been instrumental in saving his life.
There is a half lunatic count, who was a visitor at the Chateau, and who is enamoured of her whom all are obliged to love and admire. I know not whether it be their climate, their food, their wine, or these several causes combining and strengthened by habit, or whether it be habit and education only which give the natives of the south of France so much apparently constitutional ardour; but such the fact appears to be. This count is one of the most extravagant of all the hot-brained race I have

mentioned. He indulges and feeds his flighty fancy by reading books of chivalry, and admiring the most romantic of the imaginary feats of knight-errantry.
The too haughty Clifton, angry that he should dare to address her to whom he openly paid his court, fell into habitual contests with him, daring him to shew who could be most desperate, and at last gave a tolerably strong proof that, though he has an infinitely more consistent mind, he can be at moments more mad than the count himself. He leaped down a rock into a lake, where it is probable he must have perished, but for me.
One would have imagined that what followed would have cooled even a Marseillian fever of such phrensy. But no:

the count has been brooding over the recollection, till he had persuaded himself he was