g;
its feathers were rumpled and disordered; its tail ragged. There was no
beauty in the bird, which was probably only kept as a variety of the
species; and it appeared to me as if it had been placed there as a
lesson to myself, vain its modest attire, in its melancholy and pensive
attitude, it seemed, with its gaudy plumage, to have dismissed the world
and its vanities, while in mournful silence it surveyed the crowded
mementos of eternity.

"This is my office, not thine," said I, apostrophising the bird, which,
alarmed at my near approach, quitted its position, and disappeared among
the surrounding tombs, I sat down, and fixing my eyes on the name which
the tablet bore, ran over, in a hurried manner, all that part of my
career which had been more immediately connected with the history of
Eugenia. I remembered her many virtues; her self-devotion for my honour
and happiness; her concealing herself from me, that I might not blast my
prospects in life by continuing an intimacy which she saw would end in
my ruin; her firmness of character, her disinterested generosity, and
the refinement of attachment which made her prefer misery and solitude
to her own gratification in the society of the man she loved. She had,
alas! but one fault, and that fault was, loving me. I could not drive
from my thoughts, that it was through my unfortunate and illicit
connection with her that I had lost all that made life dear to me.

At this moment (and not once since the morning I awoke from it) my
singular dream recurred to my mind. The thoughts which never had once,
during my eventful voyage from the Bahamas to the Cape, and thence to
England, presented themselves in my waking hours, must certainly have
possessed my brain during sleep. Why else should it never have occurred
to my rational mind that the connection with Eugenia would certainly
endanger that intended with Emily? It was Eugenia that placed Emily in
mourning, out of my reach, and, as it were, on the top of the Nine-pin
Rock.

Here, then, my dream was explained; and I now felt all the horrors of
that reality which I thought at the time was no more than the effect of
a disordered imagination. Yet I could not blame Eugenia; the poor girl
had fallen a victim to that deplorable and sensual education which I had
received in the cockpit of a man-of-war. I--I alone was the culprit.
She was friendless, and without a parent to guide her youthful step; she
fell a victim to my ung