morrow even that would have been sold to provide the bare necessaries of the life he ceases to care for. He opens it, passes his fingers across the keen edge, and, removing his coat, turns up his shirt-sleeve to the shoulder and deliberately severs a large vein or artery in his arm. Oh, that maddening music!encouraging, tempting, even applauding his crime of self-destruction. I see, and sicken at the sight, the first red rush of blood from his white arm; and then-drip, drip, drip-follow the large, quick-falling drops. So real, so horrible, is the vision that I can even note the crimson pool forming forming amid the tattered paper covering the floor. Will the fatal music never end? Minutes are hours as Minutes are hours as I watch the face grow whiter and yet whiter as the man sits bleeding to death. Now, while I long to faint and lose the dreadful sight, he rises and with tottering steps walks across the floor and takes up the violin. With the life-blood streaming from his left arm, once more, and for the last time, he makes the instrument speak; and again, I say, the music comes from him, and not from Luigi. As he plays, even while I wait for what must follow, I know that such rare music was never heard on earth as the strain to which I listen, fancying, the while, I see the eager wings of Death hovering around the player. To what can I compare it? A poet would term it the deathsong of the swan. It is the death-song of a genius-one whom the world never knew— whose own rash act has extinguished the sacred flame. Strong and wild and wonderful rises the music for a while. Now it sinks lower-lower and lower. Now it is so soft I can scarcely hear it; it is ebbing to silence,

even as the heart's blood is ebbing to death. The face grows ghastly; the head sinks upon the breast; the eyes flicker like the dying flame of a candle; the violin drops from the reddened hand, and the man falls sideways from his chair to the ground even as Luigi's violin completes the bar his fall had broken off in the score; and as it sums up the tragedy in one long-sustained passage of hopeless grief I see the bloodless white face of the man, now dead, or soon to be dead, lying on the ruddy floor, while the left arm, motionless now, rests as it had fallen across the violin, which those nerveless fingers had at last been fain to drop.

The music stopped; the spell was ended. So powerfully was I wrought upon by the last vision I had seen that the moment my limbs resumed their freedom I rushed forward and fell fainting on the very spot on which it seemed to me the man had fallen. When I recovered consciousness, I found Luigi bending over me and sponging my face with cold water. He was pale and agitated, and seemed, from physical exhaustion, scarcely able to stand. I rose and with a shudder looked toward that part of the room where the phantasmagoria had appeared. Nothing was there now to move me: the familiar wall-paper, the pictures I had so often scanned, alone met my eye. As I gazed round, Luigi, in a whisper, asked,

can I say now, when another sees it also?" I could give him no answer; I could offer no explanation; only I asked,

"Why did you not cease playing and spare me that last sight?"

"I could not. It was your impulse to play on that violin, when first you saw it, that led me to think its strange power would act on another besides myself and induced me to go through it all once more. But it will tell its story to no one else."

I turned inquiringly, and, seeing on the carpet a mass of small splinters of wood mixed with tangled strings and pegs, knew what he meant. This, then, was the end of the masterpiece of Stradivarius!

"And you mean to say you had no power to cease when once you began-were compelled to play through the whole tragedy?"

We parted at last. Luigi left England, as arranged, and has not yet revisited it.

Is there any sequel to my incredible story None that will throw any light upon it or enable me-as, indeed, I have little hope of doing to win the reader's belief; only some time afterward I saw in the house of a man known-by name, at least—to all who are familiar with the titles of the great ones of the land, the portrait of a lady. It was that of his mother, who had died a few years after her marriage; and if the painter's skill had not erred, it was also the portrait of the phantom woman whom I had seen twice that night in the visions brought before me by the weird music. Every feature was so stamped upon my memory that I could not be mistaken. And yet I did not trouble to inquire into her private history. Even if I could have learned it, it could have

"That, to me," replied Luigi, replied Luigi, "is the strangest thing of all. Neither you nor I can recall a single bar of it. Even those two or three melodies which as we heard them we thought would haunt us have vanished."

And it was so. Try how I would, I could fashion no tune at all like them.

"It bears out what I told you," said Luigi, in conclusion: "I was simply an instrument. Indeed, it seemed the whole time not I, but another, was playing. But here is an end of it."

story of her love and its tragic endingdoubtless a sealed page in her life—had been fully revealed to me as I lay in Luigi's room listening to the varying strains of the haunted Stradivarius.

O

BIRTH.

HUGH CONWAY.

F all vanities and fopperies; the vanity of high birth is the greatest. True nobility is derived from virtue, not from birth. Titles, indeed, may be purchased, but virtue is the only coin that makes the

BURTON.

Round the pasture where the flocks were

grazing,

Where so sly I used to watch for quails

Guided thither by an angel-mother; Now she sleeps beneath its sacred sodSire and sisters, and my little brother, Gone to God!

ing.

Traps and trails!

There the rude three-cornered chestnut-rails.

"There I heard of Wisdom's pleasant ways

Bless the holy lesson !—but, ah never