"WHAT is the day's news? Tell me something, my dear Colonel, for I am dying of ennui,” said the showy Prince Charles of Buntzlau, one of the handsomest men about the court, and incomparably the greatest coxcomb.

"Not much more than yesterday," was the answer of Colonel the Baron Von Herbert. "The world goes on pretty much the same as , ever. We have an Emperor, five Electors, and fifty sovereign princes, in Presburg; men eat, drink, and sleep notwithstanding; and until there is some change in those points, one day will not differ much from another to the end of the world."

My dear Colonel," said the Prince, smoothing down the blackest and longest pair of mustaches in the imperial cuirassiers," you seem to think little of us, the blood, the couronnes, the salt of the earth, who preserve Germany from being as vulgar as Holland. But I forget; you have a partiality for the gens du peuple."

"Pardon me, Prince," said Herbert, with a smile, " I pity them infinitely, and wish that they might exchange with the Landgraves and Margraves, with all my heart. I have no doubt that the change would often be advantageous to both, for I have seen many a prince of the empire who would make a capital ploughman, while he made but a very clumsy prince; and I have, at this moment, three prodigiously high personages, commanding three troops in my regiment, whom nature palpably intended to clean their own horses' heels, and who, I charitably believe, might, by dint of drilling and half-a-dozen years' practice, make three decent dragoons."

"Just as you please, Colonel," said the Prince, "but beware of letting your private opinion go forth. Leopold is one of the new light, I allow, and loves a philosopher; but he is an Emperor still, and expects all his philosophers to be of his own opinion.-But here comes Collini."

Collini was his Italian valet, who came to inform his highness that it was time for him to pay his respects to the Princess of Marosin. This Italian's principal office was, to serve his master in place of a memory-to recognize his acquaintance for him as he drove through the streetsand to tell him when to see and when to be blind. The Prince looked at his diamond watch, started from the sofa, gave himself a congratulatory glance in a mirror, and, turning to Collini, asked, "When am I to be married to the Princess?"

"Poh, Prince," interrupted the Colonel, with something of disdain, "this is too absurd. Send this grimacing fellow about his business, and make love on your own account, if you will; or if not, choose some woman, whose beauty and virtue, or whose want of them both, will not be dishonoured by such trifling."

"You then actually think her worth the attentions of a Prince of the Empire?" said the hand

some coxcomb, as, with one finger curling his mustaches, he again, and more deliberately, surveyed himself in the mirror.

"I think the Princess of Marosin worthy of the attentions of any king on earth," said the Baron, emphatically; "she is worthy of a throne, if beauty, intelligence, and dignity of mind, can make her worthy of one."

The Prince stared. "My dear Colonel!" he exclaimed," may I half presume you have been speculating on the lady yourself? But I can assure you it is in vain. The Princess is a woman; and allowing, as I do," and this he said with a Parisian bow, that bow which is the very language of superiority, "the infinite pre-eminence of the Baron Von Herbert in every thing, the circumstance of her being a woman, and my being a Prince, is prodigiously in my favour."

The Baron had involuntarily laid his hand upon his sword at the commencement of this speech, but the conclusion disarmed him. He had no right to quarrel with any man for his own good opinion, and he amused himself by contemplating the Prince, who continued arranging his mustaches. The sound of a trumpet put an end to the conference.

"Well, Prince, the trumpet sounds for parade," said the Baron, "and I have not time to discuss so extensive a subject as your perfections. But take my parting information with you. I am not in love with the lady, nor the lady with me; her one-and-twenty, and my one-and-fifty, are sufficient reasons on both sides. You are not in love with the lady neither, and-I beg of you to hear the news like a hero-the lady is not in love with you. For the plain reason, that so showy a figure cannot possibly be in love with any thing but itself; and the Princess is, I will venture to say, too proud to share a heart with a bottle of lavender water, a looking-glass, and a poodle."

The Prince raised his eye-brows, but Von Herbert proceeded. "Buntzlau will be without a female sovereign, and its very accomplished Prince will remain to the last, the best dressed bachelor in Vienna. Au revoir. I see my Pandours on parade."

Von Herbert and the Prince parted with mutual smiles.-But the Prince's were of the sardonic order; and, after another contemplation of his features, which seemed, unaccountably, to be determined to disappoint him for the day, he rang for Collini, examined a new packet of uniforms, bijouterie, and otto of roses, from Paris, and was closeted with him for two profound hours.

"I wish them at the bottom of the river: they cost me a Turkish carabine, a brace of diamond watches, as I'll be sworn, from the showy fellow that I levelled at, with the valise behind his courier, scented enough to perfume a forest of brown bears."

Hang those Hulans," was the answer. "Ever since the Emperor's arrival, they have done nothing but gallop about, putting honester men than themselves in fear of their lives, and cutting up our employment so wofully, that it is impossible to make money enough on the road to give a decent education to one's children. But here comes the captain. We shall now have some news. Speranski never makes his appearance, unless something is in the wind.”

This dialogue passed between two Transylvanian pedlars, if a judgment were to be formed from their blue caps, brown cloaks, and the packs strapped to their shoulders. A narrower inspection might have discovered within those cloaks the little heads of a pair of short scimitars; their trowsers would have displayed to the curious the profile of two horse pistols, and their boots developed a pair of those large bladed knives, which the Hungarian robber uses, alike to slice away the trunks of the britchska, to cut the harness of the horse, the throat of the rider, and carve his own sheep's milk cheese.

The captain came in, a tall bold figure, in the dress of an innkeeper. He flung a purse upon the table, and ordered supper. The pedlars disburdened themselves of their boxes, kindled a fire on a hearth, which seemed guiltless of having administered to the wants of mankind for many a wild year; produced from an unsuspected storehouse under the floor some dried venison, and the paws of a bear, preserved in the most luxurious style of Hungarian cookery; decorated their table even with some pieces of plate, which, though evidently of different fashions, gave proof of their having been under noble roofs, by their armorial bearings and workmanship, though the rest of their history did not lie altogether so much in high life; and in a few minutes the captain, throwing off his innkeeper hat and drab-coloured coat, half sat, half lay down to a supper worthy of an Emperor, or of a man who generally sups much better, an imperial commissary.

The whole party were forest robbers; the thing must be confessed. But the spirit of the country prevailed even under the rotting roof of "the Ghost's house,"-the ominous name which this old and ruinous, though still stately mansion, had earned among the peasantry. The name did not exactly express the fact; for, when tenanted at all, it was tenanted by any thing rather than ghosts; by some dozens of rough, raw-boned, bold, and hard-living fellows-as solid specimens of flesh and blood as had ever sent a shot right in front of the four horses of a courier's cabriolet, or had brought to a full stop, scimitar in hand, the heyducs and chasseurs, the shivering valets and frightened postilions of a court chamberlain, whirling along the Vienna road with six to his britchska.

Etiquette was preserved at this supper. The inferior plunderers waited on the superior. Captain Speranski ate his meal alone, and in solemn silence. The pedlars watched his nod; filled out the successive goblets at a glance, and, having performed their office, watched, at a respectful distance, the will of the man of authority. A silver chime announced the hour of ten. One of the pedlars drew aside a fragment of a ragged shawl, which covered one of the most superb pendules of the Palais Royal.

If the Apollo who sat harping in gold upon its stytolate, could have given words to his melodies, he might have told a curious narrative; for he had already seen a good deal of the various world of adventure. Since his first transit from the magnificent Horlogerie of M. Sismond, of all earthly watchmakers the most renowned, this Apollo had first sung to the world and his sister Muses, in the chamber of the unlucky Prince de Soubise. The fates of France had next transferred him, with the Prince's camp plate, dispatches, secret orders, and military chest, into the hands of a regiment of Prussian hussars, at the memorable battle of Rosbach, that modern "battle of the Spurs." But the Prussian Colonel was either too much or too little a lover of the arts to keep Apollo and the Nine all to himself; and the pendule next rang its silver notes over the Roulette table of the most brilliant of Parisian opera-dancers, transferred from the salle of the Academie to the Grand Comedie at Berlin. But roulette, wheel of Plutus as it is, is sometimes the wheel of fortune; and the fair La Pirouette, in spite of the patronage of the court and the nation, found that she must, like Generals and monarchs, submit to fate, and part with her brilliant superfluities. The pendule fled from her Parian mantel-piece, and its chimes were thenceforth to awake the eyelids of the handsomest woman in Hungary, the Countess Lublin nee Joblonsky, memorable for her beauty, her skill at loto, and the greatest profusion of rouge since the days of Philip Augustus. Its history now drew to a close. It had scarcely excited the envy of all the countesses of her circle, and, of course, become invaluable to the fair Joblonsky, when it disappeared. A reward of ten times its value was instantly offered. The Princess of Marosin, the arbiter of all elegance, who had once expressed her admiration of its taste, was heard to regret its loss as a specimen of foreign art. The undone proprietor was only still more undone; for of all beauties, living or dead, she most hated the Princess, blooming, youthful, and worshipped as she was, to the infinite detriment of all the fading Joblonskys of the creation. But no reward could bring it back. This one source of triumph was irrecoverably gone; and from Presburg to Vienna, all was conjecture, conversation, and consternation. So ended the court history of the pendule.

When the repast was fully over, Speranski, pouring out a glass of Tokay from a bottle which bore the impress of the Black Eagle of the House of Hapsburg, and which had evidently been

arrested on its road to the Emperor's table, ordered one of the pedlars to give him the papers, "which," said he, with a smile, “that Turkish courier mislaid where he slept last night." A small packet was handed to him;-he perused it over and over with a vigilant eye, but it was obvious, without any of the results which he expected; for, after a few minutes' pause, during which he examined every part of the case in which they were enclosed, he threw the letters aside."What," said he, in a disappointed tone,

was

to be expected from those opium-eaters? Yet they are shrewd in generation, and the scandals of the harem, the propitious day for shaving the Sultan's head, the lucky star for combing his illustrious beard, or the price of a dagger-hilt, are as good topics as any that pass in our own diplomacy. Here, Sturnwold, put back this circumcised nonsense into its case, and send it, do you hear, by one of our own couriers, to the Turkish secretary at Vienna; let it be thrown on his pillow, or tied to his turban, just as you please; but, at all events, we must not do the business like a clumsy cabinet messenger. Now, begone, and you, Heinrich, hand me the Turk's Meerschaum."

The bandit brought him a very handsome pipe, which, he said, would probably be more suited to the Turk's tobacco, of which he had deposited a box upon the table. Speranski took the pipe, but, at his first experiment, he found the neck obstructed. His quick conception ascertained the point at once. Cutting the wood across, he found a long roll of paper within. He glanced over its contents, instantly sprang up, ordered the attendance of half a dozen of "his friends," on horseback, looked to the priming of his pistols, and galloped off through the forest.

The

On the evening of one of the most sultry days of July, and in one of the most delicious yet most lonely spots of the Carpathian hills, a trampling of hoofs and a jingling of horse-furniture, and a confusion of loud and dissonant voices, announced that strangers were at hand. sounds told true, for, gradually emerging from the glade covered with terebinth trees, wild vines, that hung their rich and impenetrable folds over elms, hazels, and cypress, like draperies of green and brown silk over the pillars of some Oriental palace, came a long train of sumpter mules, led horses, and Albanian grooms; next came a more formidable group of horsemen, the body-guards of the Hospodar of Moldavia, sent to escort Mohammed Ali Hunkiar, the Moslem Ambassador, through the Bannat; and then came, seated on the Persian charger, given him from the stables of the Padishah, the brother of the sun and the father of the moon, Sultan Selim, the most mighty, a little bitter-visaged old Turk, with the crafty countenance of the hereditary hunchbacks of the great city of the faithful. Nothing could be more luxurious than the hour, the golden sunset; nothing lovelier than its light streaming in a thousand rays, shifts and shapes of inimitable lustre through the blooms and foliage of the huge ravine;

and nothing less lovely or more luxurious than the little old ambassador, who had earned his elevation from a cobbler's stall to the Divan, by his skill in cutting off heads, and had now earned his appointment to the imperial embassy, by his dexterity in applying a purse of ten thousand sequins to the conscience of the slipper-bearer of his highness the Vizier.

Nothing could seem less inclined to look at the dark side of things at this moment, or to throw away the enjoyments of this world for the good of Moslem diplomacy, than Mohammed Ali Hunkiar, as he sat and smoked, and stroked his long beard and inhaled the mingled fumes of his Smyrna pipe, and the air aromatic with a host of flowers. But the Turkish proverb, "the smoker is often blinded by his own smoke," was to find its verification even in the diplomatic hunchback. As he had just reached the highest stone of the pass, and was looking with the triumph of avarice, or ambition, if it be the nobler name, down the valley chequered with the troop that meandered through paths as devious, and as many coloured as an Indian snake, a shot struck his charger in the forehead; the animal sprung high in the air, fell, and flung the ambassador at once from his seat, his luxury, and a certain dream of clearing ten times the ten thousand sequins which he had disbursed for his place, by a genuine Turkish business of the dagger, before he left the portcullis of Presburg.

All was instant confusion. The shots began to fall thick, though the enemy might have been the beasts of the earth or the fowls of the air, for any evidence that sight could give to the contrary. The whole troop were of one opinion, that they must have fallen into the power of the fiend himself; for the shots poured on them from every quarter at once. Wherever they turned, they were met by a volley. The cavalry of the Hospodar, though brave as panthers on parade, yet were not used to waste their valour or their time on struggles of this irregular nature. They had bought their own places, and paid the due purchase of a well-fed sinecure; they had bought their own clothes, and felt answerable to themselves for keeping them in preservation worthy of a court; they had bought their own horses, and, like true Greeks, considered that the best return their horses could make was to carry them as safe out of the field as into it. The consequence was, that, in the next five minutes, the whole escort was seen riding at will in whatever direction the destiny that watches over the guards of sovereign princes might point the safest way. The ravine, the hill, the forest, the river, were all speckled with turbans, like flowers, in full gallop; the muleteers, being of slower movement, took the simpler precaution of turning their mules, baggage and all, up the retired corners of the forest, from which they emerged only to turn them with their lading to their several homes. All was the most picturesque melee for the first half-dozen rounds, all was the most picturesque flight for the next. All was silence thenceforth; broken only by the shots that came dropping

through the thickets, wherever a lurking turban suddenly seemed to recover its energies, and fly off at full speed. At length even the shots ceased, and all was still and lone. The forest looked as if it had been unshaken since the deluge; the ravine, calm, rich, and tufted with thicket, shrub, and tree, looked as if it had never heard the hoof of cavalry. The wood-dove came out again, rubbed down its plumage, and cooed in peace to the setting sun; the setting sun threw a long radiance, that looked like a pyramid of amber, up the pass. Turban, Turk, skirmish, and clamour, all were gone. One remnant of the time alone remained.

Under a huge cypress, that covered the ground with its draperies, like a funeral pall, lay a charger, and under it a green and scarlet bale. The bale had once been a man, and that man the Turkish ambassador. But his embassy was over. He had made his last salaam, he had gained his last sequin, he had played his last trick, he had told his last lie. "Dust to dust" was now the history of Mohammed Ali Hunkiar.

The Hall of the Diet at Presburg is one of the wonders of the capital. The heroes and magnates of Upper Hungary frown in immeasurable magnitude of mustache, and majestic longitude of beard, on its walls. The conquerors of the Bannat, the ravagers of Transylvania, the potentissimi of Sclavonia, there gleam in solidity of armour, that at once gives a prodigious idea of both their strength and their terrors. The famous rivers, figured by all the variety of barbarian genius, pour their pictured torrents over the ceiling. The Draave embraces the Saave, the Grau rushes in fluid glory through the Keisse; and floods that disdain a bridge, and flow a hundred leagues asunder, there interlace each other in streams, as smiling and affectionate as if they slept in the same fountain. Entering that hall, every true Hungarian lifts up his hands, and rejoices that he is born in the country of the arts, and, leaving it, compassionates the fallen honours of Florence and Rome.

Yet in that hall, the Emperor Leopold, monarch of fifty provinces, and even sovereign of Hungary, was pacing backwards and forwards, without casting a glance on the wonders of the Hungarian hand. Colonel the Baron Von Herbert was at the end of the saloon, waiting the imperial pleasure. The dialogue, which was renewed and broken off as the Emperor approached or left him, was, of course, one of fragments. The Emperor was in obvious agitation. "It is the most unaccountable thing I ever heard of," said Leopold. "He had, I understand, a strong escort; his own train were numerous; the roads regularly patroled; every precaution taken; and yet the thing is done in full sunshine. A man is murdered almost under my own eyes, travelling with my passport; an ambassador, and above all ambassadors, a Turk."

"But your majesty," said Von Herbert, "is not now in Vienna. Your Hungarian subjects have peculiar ideas on the subject of human jus

tice; and they would as soon shoot an ambassador, if the idea struck them, as a squirrel."

"But a Turk," said the Emperor, "against whom there could not have existed a shadow of personal pique; who could have aroused no jealousy at court; who could have been known, in fact, by nobody here; to be killed, almost within sight of the city gates, and every paper that he had upon him, every present, every jewel, every thing carried off, without the slightest clue to discovery!-Baron, I shall begin to doubt the activity of your Pandours."

The Baron's grave countenance flushed at the remark, and he answered, with more than even his usual gravity.-"Your majesty must decide. But, whoever has been in fault, allow me to vindicate my regiment. The Pandour patrol were on the spot on the first alarm; but the whole affair was so quickly over, that all their activity was utterly useless. It actually seemed supernatural."

"Has the ground been examined?" asked Leopold.

Every thicket," answered Von Herbert. "I would stake my troopers, for sagacity and perseverance against so many bloodhounds; and yet, I must acknowledge to your majesty, that, except for the marks of the horse's hoofs on the ground, the bullets sticking in the trees, and the body of the Turk himself, which had been stripped of every valuable, we might have thought that we had mistaken the place altogether."

"The whole business," said Leopold, “is a mystery; and it must be unravelled." He then broke off, resumed his walk to the end of the hall, then returning, said abruptly-" Look to the affair, Colonel. The Turks have no good opinion of us as it is, and they will now have a fresh pretext in charging us with the assassination of their ambassador. Go, send out your Pandours, offer a hundred ducats for the first man who brings any information of the murder; offer a thousand, if you please, for the murderer himself. Even the crown would not be safe, if these things were to be done with impunity. Look to your Pandours more carefully in future.'

The Baron, with a vexation which he could not suppress, hastily replied-"Your majesty does not attribute this outrage to any of my. corps ?"

"Certainly not to the Baron Von Herbert," said the Emperor, with a reconciling smile. "But, my dear Baron, your heroes of the Bannat have no love for a Turk, while they have a very considerable love for his plunder. For an embroidered saddle or a diamond-hilted dagger, they would go as far as most men. In short, you must give those bold barbarians of yours employment, and let their first be to find out the assassin."