and
placed herself at the block.

Sir Raoul de Barbazure seized up the long ringlets of her raven hair.
"Now!" shouted he to the executioner, with a stamp of his foot--"Now
strike!"

The man (who knew his trade) advanced at once, and poised himself to
deliver his blow: and making his flashing sword sing in the air, with
one irresistible, rapid stroke, it sheared clean off the head of the
furious, the bloodthirsty, the implacable Baron de Barbazure!

Thus he fell a victim to his own jealousy: and the agitation of the Lady
Fatima may be imagined, when the executioner, flinging off his mask,
knelt gracefully at her feet, and revealed to her the well-known
features of Romane de Clos-Vougeot.

LORDS AND LIVERIES.

BY THE AUTHORESS OF "DUKES AND DEJEUNERS," "HEARTS AND DIAMONDS,"
"MARCHIONESSES AND MILLINERS," ETC. ETC.

I.

"CORBLEU! What a lovely creature that was in the Fitzbattleaxe box
to-night," said one of a group of young dandies who were leaning over
the velvet-cushioned balconies of the "Coventry Club," smoking their
full-flavored Cubas (from Hudson's) after the opera.

Everybody stared at such an exclamation of enthusiasm from the lips
of the young Earl of Bagnigge, who was never heard to admire anything
except a coulis de dindonneau a la St. Menehould, or a supreme de
cochon en torticolis a la Piffarde; such as Champollion, the chef of
the "Traveller's," only knows how to dress; or the bouquet of a flask of
Medoc, of Carbonell's best quality; or a goutte of Marasquin, from the
cellars of Briggs and Hobson.

Alured de Pentonville, eighteenth Earl of Bagnigge, Viscount Paon of
Islington, Baron Pancras, Kingscross, and a Baronet, was, like too
many of our young men of ton, utterly blase, although only in his
twenty-fourth year. Blest, luckily, with a mother of excellent
principles (who had imbued his young mind with that Morality which is so
superior to all the vain pomps of the world!) it had not been always the
young earl's lot to wear the coronet for which he now in sooth cared so
little. His father, a captain of Britain's navy, struck down by the
side of the gallant Collingwood in the Bay of Fundy, left little but his
sword and spotless name to his young, lovely, and inconsolable widow,
who passed the first years of her mourning in educating her child in an
elegant though small cottage in one of the romantic marine villages of
beautiful Devonshire. Her child! What a gush of consolation fill