considerable time in the troop; and he was sufficiently acquainted with the spots in which it was found most convenient to them to take up their residence. As I have said, he hung upon their march, and had observed the direction they pursued. And now he led his new companions along the line of the Apennines, to what is called the Abruzzi. Cloudesley with his party had already passed one night among the mountains, taking refuge, as they could, during the season of darkness, under such shelter as the forest-trees of the declivities afforded. Night overtook them a second time, under the leading of Corrado, on the banks of the Salto.

The next morning they had the lake of Celano before them, not far from which they expected to find the encampment of St Elmo. The mountains, as they advanced, assumed a wilder character; the rocks were naked and overhanging; and the torrent, leaping from fragment to fragment, roared below. Trees,

growing on the edge of crags that seemed ready to tumble on your head, clung by their roots only to the surface from which they sprung, while the branches, and frequently the trunk itself, darkened the waters beneath, its position being horizontal, or the line it described often pointing downward, and much below the horizontal. Every thing talked of desolation and horror.

In the midst of this scene a party in ambush suddenly sprung forth from a position nearly in contact with the travellers. Corrado saw that they consisted of the followers of St Elmo. The incident was hostile to the design he meditated. He judged it to be the purpose of the persons he had joined, to play the scout, to observe the position and numbers of the enemy, and then to carry the intelligence of what they saw to those who sent them. In proportion as they approached nearer to the expected place of the encampment, it had been his plan to conduct them along

one of the ridges of the mountain, with the line of which he was perfectly acquainted, and to place them where they might accurately observe all that he imagined them sent to discover, at the same time that they should themselves be completely unseen. But his scheme was baffled. He and those to whom he officiated as a guide, had not yet reached the point at which he ima gined caution would be necessary, and where he intended to lead them by the higher road, before they fell in with this detachment of the adversary.

Francesco had the command of the marauding party. They stopped for a moment to reconnoitre. It was the system of the banditti, when they found nothing pointedly of a hostile character in the travellers they lighted upon, to summon them quietly to surrender such booty as might excite the cupidity of the assailants, and then to dismiss them, unburthened of whatever they might possess that was valuable, but in

other respects uninjured. Francesco cast an eager and enquiring glance upon the strangers, and immediately detected the person of Corrado. He guessed the rest. He believed that these were not ordinary travellers, who had come by chance into the Apennines, but that their purpose was expressly hostile. His party doubled the number of strangers. He gave the word to fire. Corrado was killed on the spot; and Cloudesley fell desperately wounded. Francesco was then satisfied with the effect produced, and immediately drew off his party into the hollow of the mountain. Between the moment that he gave the word to fire, and the destructive result, a second glance had given him the image of Cloudesley, and he was smitten with the deepest compunction as he viewed his fall.

Thus terminated the generous exploit of the English yeoman for the recovery of his ward. Of the three survivors no one knew the purpose which had brought him so far: that secret was

lodged in his own breast. The remaining care therefore was cast on the servant that Cloudesley had brought along with him. The men he hired for the occasion, willingly took their directions from this servant. He determined to convey his master to Tagliacozzo, the town nearest to the scene where the fatal event had occurred, and from thence to conduct him in a litter and by easy stages to Florence. A medical man who was consulted at Tagliacozzo did not oppose this determination. Cloudesley survived, but was speechless. As soon as the servant was left alone with his master, he thought it his duty to take into his own custody the money and valuables which Cloudesley had about him. Respecting the body of Corrado he gave himself

no concern.

Francesco did not communicate to his companions the secret of what had occurred. He told nothing more, than that, seeing their late expelled confederate at the head of a party of