screened from the fury of the wind; and when he gazed upon the roaring fall beneath him, visible through the darkness in a glistening sheet of foam, his heart overflowed with gratitude for his providential deliverance.

As he moved about upon the starling, Mr. Wood became sensible that he was not alone. Some one was standing beside him. This, then, must be the person whom he had seen spring upon the western platform at the time of the collision between the boats. The carpen

ter well knew from the obstacle which had interfered with his own progress, that the unknown could not have passed through the same lock as himself. But he might have crept along the left side of the pier, and beneath the further arch; whereas, Wood, as we have seen, took his course upon the right. The darkness prevented the carpen. ter from discerning the features or figure of the stranger; and the ceaseless din precluded the possibility of holding any communication by words with him. Wood, however, made known his presence to the individual by laying his hand upon his shoulder. The stranger started at the touch and spoke. But his words were borne away by the driving wind.

Finding all attempts at conversation with his companion in misfortune in vain, Wood, in order to distract his thoughts, looked up at the gigantic structure, standing like a wall of solid darkness, before him. What was his transport on perceiving that a few yards above him a light was burning. The carpenter did not hesitate a moment. He took a handful of the gravelly mud, with which the platform was covered, and threw the small pebbles, one by one, towards the gleam. A pane of glass was shivered by each stone. The signal of distress was evidently understood. The light disappeared. The window was. shortly after opened, and a rope ladder, with a lighted horn lantern attached to it, let down.

Wood grasped his companion's arm to attract his attention to this unexpected means of escape. The ladder was now within reach. Both advanced towards it, when, by the light of the lantern, Wood beheld, in the countenance of the stranger, the well-remembered and stern features of Rowland.

The carpenter trembled; for he perceived Rowland's gaze fixed first upon the infant, and then on himself.

"It is her child!" shrieked Rowland, in a voice heard above the howling of the tempest, "risen from this roaring abyss to torment me. Its parents have perished. And shall their wretched offspring live to blight my hopes and blast my fame? Never!" And, with these words, he grasped Wood by the throat, and despite his resistance, dragged him to the very verge of the platform.

At this juncture, a thundering crash was heard against the side of the bridge. A stack of chimneys, on the house above them, had yielded to the storm, and descended in a shower of bricks and stones.

When the carpenter a moment afterwards stretched out his hand, scarcely knowing whether he was alive or dead, he found himself alone. The fatal shower, from which he and his little charge escaped uninjured, had stricken his assailant and precipitated him into the boiling gulf.

"It's an ill wind that blows nobody good," thought the carpenter, turning his attention to the child, whose feeble struggles and cries proclaimed that, as yet, life had not been extinguished by the hardships it had undergone. "Poor little creature!" he muttered, pressing it tenderly to his breast, as he grasped the rope and clambered up to the window: "if thou hast, indeed, lost both thy parents, as that terrible man said just now, thou art not wholly friendless and deserted; for I myself will be a father to thee! And, in memory of this dreadful night, and the death from which I have been the means of preserving thee, thou shalt bear the name of THAMES DARRELL."

No sooner had Wood crept through the window, than nature gave way, and he fainted. On coming to himself, he found he had been wrapped in a blanket and put to bed with a couple of hot bricks to his feet. His first inquiries were concerning the child, and he was delighted to find that it still lived and was doing well. Every care had been taken of it, as well as of himself, by the humane inmates of the house in which he had sought shelter.

About noon, next day, he was able to move; and the gale having abated, he set out homewards with his little charge.

The city presented a terrible picture of devastation. London Bridge had suffered a degree less than most places. But it was almost choked up with fallen stacks of chimneys, broken beams of timber, and shattered tiles. The houses overhung in a frightful manner, and looked as if the next gust would precipitate them into the river. With great difficulty, Wood forced a path through the ruins. It was a work of no slight danger, for every instant a wall, or fragment of a building, came crashing to the ground. Thames Street was wholly impassable. Men were going hither and thither with barrows, and ladders and ropes, removing the rubbish, and trying to support the tottering habitations. Gracechurch Street was entirely deserted, except by a few stragglers, whose curiosity got the better of their fears; or who, like the carpen. ter, were compelled to proceed along it. The tiles lay a foot thick in the road. In some cases, they were ground almost to powder; in others, driven deeply into the earth, as if discharged from a piece of ordnance. The roofs and gables of many of the houses had been torn off. The signs of the shops were carried to incredible distances. Here and there, a building might be seen with the doors and windows driven in, and all access to it prevented by the heaps of bricks and tilesherds.

Through this confusion the carpenter struggled on;-now

ascending, now descending the different mountains of rubbish that beset his path, at the imminent peril of his life and limbs, until he arrived in Fleet Street. The hurricane appeared to have raged in this quarter with tenfold fury. Mr. Wood scarcely knew where he was. The old aspect of the place was gone. In lieu of the substantial habitations, which he had gazed on overnight, he beheld a row of falling scaffoldings, for such they seemed.

It was a dismal and depressing sight to see a great city thus sudden. ly overthrown; and the carpenter was deeply moved by the spectacle. As usual, however, on the occasion of any great calamity, a crowd was scouring the streets, whose sole object was plunder. While involved in this crowd, near Temple Bar,-where the thoroughfare was most dangerous from the masses of ruin that impeded it,--an individual, whose swarthy features recalled to the carpenter one of his tormentors of the previous night, collared him, and, with bitter imprecations, accused him of stealing his child. In vain Wood protested his innocence. The ruffian's companions took his part. And the infant, in all probability, would have been snatched from its preserver, if a posse of the watch (sent out to maintain order and protect property) had not opportunely arrived, and, by a vigorous application of their halberts, dispersed his persecutors, and set him at liberty.

Mr. Wood, then, took to his heels, and never once looked behind him till he reached his own dwelling in Wych Street. His wife met him at the door, and into her hands he delivered his little charge.

THE ETERNAL CITY;

BY THE AUTHOR OF "A PARISIAN SABBATH.

THE COLOSSEUM.

While looking at its

EVERY traveller goes to see the Colosseum. ruins, every body feels, or pretends to feel, something akin to the poetical. Every beholder thereof desires to say, or write, something impressive about it. Every one, by judicious selection of time and circumstances, is anxious to secure to himself a fair share of the emotions which its presence is naturally calculated to awaken. There. fore in his first visit does he avoid the broad glare of day. Moreover, does he eschew for companions all Cockneys, and likewise those other prosers, who are continually pronouncing moonlight nothing but humbug. He may not be so punctilious as to visit it according to a prescription by Madame Starke, exactly "during the moon's second quarter," or immediately after having witnessed certain illuminations in Holy Week; nor even upon a most empty, and therefore most sentimental, stomach. Sufficient, haply, may it be, if he select an hour like this, of midnight; when but faintly the wind stirs these ivy leaves around me; when the windows of yonder broad full moon seem flung wide open, and over hill and wide campagna, and arch and temple, and fountain and ruin, are poured floods of light: not golden, but light, soft, rich, mellow and mellowing, such as may be seldom seen in other than the sky of an Italian evening.

The sound

I recline upon the loftiest approachable resting-place. of a sentry's footsteps, as he stalks through the arena below, faintly reach me at this far height. All things are in repose. The silence is unbroken, save by the desolate hooting of an owl on yonder Arch of Constantine, and the silver-like falling of water from a fountain near. There is nothing to break the charm. A good fortune this, and rather unusual to the lover of ruins in Rome. I was about to say that, for such romantic individual, this is one of the least favourable resorts in the world. His serious, antique memories are not merely marred, but broken continually into a thousand fragments, by common-place, modern, modernizing sights and sounds around him. Ancient Rome is in the midst of modern Rome. Her temples are within the smell of fish markets. Her palaces are serving as stables for oxen and horses. Her theatres are converted into shoe-shops. The mausoleum of Augustus is now appropriated to the exhibition of jugglers and circus riders; and fritters are at this moment frying in the Portico of Octavia. Whoever comes hither for the agreeable impression which ruins, properly beheld, sometimes awaken, must prepare himself for vexations and disappointments. Perchance he flings himself into poetical attitudes, with the "mighty ruin" directly in his eye. The melancholy, and of course delightful, sensation has commenced. The mysterious influence, rife with all antiquity, is passing into his deepest heart. He is just beginning to enjoy, when alas! the jingle of a beggar's tin cup, the scream of a market-woman, or some other of the thousand disenchanting sounds here audible, breaks in, like the crow of a morning cock, startling into sudden flight the ghosts of departed beauty and majesty, which haply he had invoked into his

imagination and presence. He starts off for his lodgings, unsatisfied and chagrined. He reminds him of his likeness to that miserable one, from whom, by some invisible hand, luxuriously crowded banquets are fabled to have been snatched away, just as they were on the eve of gratifying his half-famished appetite. He denounces ruin-seeing in the Eternal City as a bore, and for a moment imagines himself translated to the vast plains of Thebes, or among the untenanted ruins of Balbec or Palmyra, where, meditating among voiceless solitudes, he may satisfy his taste thoroughly, without interruption, and without deception. I say without deception. He cannot always boast of that freedom in Rome. He is continually in danger of being gulled. About the origin, history, and objects, of a great majority of the antiquities here seen, there are some half dozen contradictory theories. The antiquaries are all pulling in different directions. The temple of one is the bath of a second, the palace of a third, and the basilica of a fourth. Behold yonder ruin-admirer. His eye is upon a lofty column. He has been told that it belongs to the times of the Republic; that it is one of the few relics of that heroic era, which time and human passion have permitted to live. Instantly, in his fancy, it is surrounded with magnanimous associations. It is the very column, at whose base have rested the noblest of Roman patriots, the purest of Roman matrons. It has in his memory become sanctified. Happy he, thus to have before him an object, linking the present with one of the finest periods in human history! What must be his chagrin, however, when, on returning to his chamber, and opening a description of the Antiquities of Rome, he finds it positively stated, that this very column was first erected, not in the time of the Republic, but five hundred years later, in one of the most degenerate periods of the Empire, by one of its most dissolute and degraded rulers. His face falls into the expressiveness of one who has been gulled. His patriotic enthusiasm oozes strangely off, and he calls aloud for pen that he may write himself down an ass. Now, this only illustrates what is here of most frequent occurrence. In the midst of jarring statements, the antiquitygazer is wisest who permits himself to be governed by that theory, which haply shall invest objects with the greatest quantity of the antique, and the greatest number of impressive associations. If now and then cheated, why should he be sad? He has enjoyed the impression, and happy thus far, has secured one end of mortal life. We know it is but a very small portion of the agency which works in us our deepest feelings, and our happiest, that is truly worthy of so doing.

But of this ruin-the Colosseum-whereon I now rest, there an be no doubt. It is what it claims to be. It comes down to us, bearing around it a thousand well-ascertained truths, whereof we need not have the slightest distrust. Even the most sceptical as to the safety of feeling emotion in presence of a ruin, may do it here without the least possible danger. For the benefit of those whose interest is deep in dates and measures, I will note down that it was commenced by Flavian Vespasian, seventy-two years after Christ, and was completed in four years; that its shape is oval, and computed to be one thousand seven hundred and forty-one feet in circumference, and one hundred and seventy-nine feet in height; that its arena, likewise oval, is three hundred feet long, one hundred and ninety feet wide; that its entrances were by eighty arches in the outer wall;