she had restrained since leaving her room,
began to flow again. Urgent as her reasons
now were for effecting her departure without
a moment's loss of time, she advanced, with
the strangest inconsistency, a few steps
towards the nursery-door. Before she had
gone far, a slight noise in the lower part of
the house caught her ear, and instantly
checked her further progress. While she
stood doubtful, the grief at her heart- a
greater grief than any she had yet betrayed-
rose irresistibly to her lips, and burst
from them in one deep gasping sob. The
sound of it seemed to terrify her into a
sense of the danger of her position, if she
delayed a moment longer. She ran out again
to the stairs, reached the kitchen-floor in
safety, and made her escape by the garden-
door which the servant had opened for her
at the dawn of the morning.

On getting clear of the premises at
Porthgenna Tower, instead of taking the nearest
path over the moor that led to the high
road, she diverged to the church; but
stopped before she came to it, at the public
well of the neighbourhood, which had been
sunk near the cottages of the Porthgenna
fishermen. Cautiously looking round her,
she dropped into the well the little rusty
key which she had brought out of the Myrtle
Room; then hurried on, and entered the
churchyard. She directed her course straight
to one of the graves, situated a little apart
from the rest. On the headstone were in-
scribed these words:

              SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
                         HUGH POLWHEAL
                           AGED 26 YEARS.
                    HE MET WITH HIS DEATH
               THROUGH THE FALL OF A ROCK
                                     IN
                       PORTHGENNA MINE,
                     DECEMBER 17TH, 1823.

Gathering a few leaves of grass from the
grave, Sarah opened the little book of
Wesley's Hymns which she had brought with
her from the bed-room at Porthgenna Tower,
and placed the leaves delicately and carefully
between the pages. As she did this, the
wind blew open the title-page of the
Hymns, and displayed this inscription on it,
written in large clumsy characters: " Sarah
Leeson, her book. The gift of Hugh
Polwheal."

Having secured the blades of grass between
the pages of the book, she retraced her
way towards the path, leading to the high
road. Arrived on the moor, she took out
of her apron-pocket the parchment labels
that had been cut from the keys, and
scattered them under the furze-bushes.

"Gone," she said, "as I am gone! God
help and forgive me, it is all done, and over
now!"

With those words, she turned her back on
the old house and the sea-view below it, and

followed the moorland path on her way to
the high road.

Four hours afterwards, Captain Treverton
desired one of the servants at Porthgenna
Tower to inform Sarah Leeson that he
wished to hear all she had to tell him of
the dying moments of her mistress. The
messenger returned with looks and words
of amazement, and with the letter that
Sarah had addressed to her master in his
hand.

The moment Captain Treverton had read
the letter, he ordered an immediate search to
be made after the missing woman. She was
so easy to describe and to recognise by the
premature greyness of her hair, by the odd,
scared look in her eyes, and by her habit of
constantly talking to herself, that she was
traced with certainty as far as Truro. In
that large town, the track of her was lost,
and never recovered again. Rewards were
offered; the magistrates of the district were
interested in the case; all that wealth and
power could do to discover her, was done-
and done in vain. No clue was found to
suggest a suspicion of her whereabouts, or to
help in the slightest degree towards explaining
the nature of the secret at which she had
hinted in her letter. She was not seen
again, not heard of again, at Porthgenna
Tower, after the morning of the Twenty-
Third of August, eighteen hundred and
twenty-nine.

THE GIFT OF TONGUES.

An interesting feature in the late war
was the multiplicity of languages with which
it brought the western armies into contact.
They occupied the soil of a people whose half
barbarous speech was made up of contributions
from Greek, Roman, Scythian, Median,
Celt, Gothic Venetian, and Mongol Tartar.
They heard the tongues of Wallachian, Bulgarian,
Slovak, and Circassian. There was spoken
among them English, French, Italian, German,
Berber, Turkish, Egyptian, Modern Greek,
besides some little Abasian, Persian, Croatian,
and so forth. They were opposed to Russian,
Polish, Usbec Nogars, and all Cossack forms
of speech. In the midst of such a Babel who
was so much at a loss for the gift of tongues
as the Englishman? who was so little, as the
Russian?  In our Turkish alliance we depend
for the conduct of negotiations upon dragomen:
for generations we have governed our
Indian empire by help of interpreters. In the
Crimea, though our officers could manfully
do all the fighting that came in their way,
as to the talking, they were infants. The
commissary sent to buy provisions had to
trust to agents, who might be faithful, or who
might be double-dealing; and it is admitted
that some of the difficulty experienced in the
procuring of supplies was to be referred to