the French language, in
geography and mathematics. The elder is some ten years of age, but will
not succeed his father to the throne until after the death of his uncle,
who, by Mussulman law, is next in right to the reigning Sultan.
Inheritance, in Islam lands, runs through all the brothers before it
reverts to the children of the eldest son. Females can not succeed to the
throne, and the house of Othman would consequently become extinct with its
last male representative.

THE CURSE OF GOLD. A DREAM.

Mordant Lindsay threw off the long black crape scarf and hat-band which,
in the character of chief mourner, he had that day worn at the funeral of
his wife, as he entered one of the apartments at Langford, and moodily
sought a seat. The room was spacious, and filled with every luxury which
wealth could procure or ingenuity invent to add to its comfort or its
ornament. Pictures, mirrors, silken curtains, and warm carpets; statues in
marble and bronze were scattered about in rich profusion in the saloon,
and its owner, in the deep mourning of a widower, sat there--grieving
truly--thinking deeply; but not, as might have been supposed, of the lady
who had that day been laid in the vault of his ancestors--no, he was
regretting the loss of a much brighter spirit than ever lived in her pale
proud face, or in the coldness of her calm blue eye. Mordant Lindsay was
apparently a man of past fifty; his hair was streaked with gray, though
its dark locks still curled thickly round his head; he bore on his face
the marks of more than common beauty, but time had left its traces there,
in the furrows on his brow; and even more deeply than time, care. As a
young man, he had been very handsome, richly endowed by nature with all
those graces which too often make captive only to kill; but fortune, less
generous, had gifted him but with the heritage of a good name--nothing
more--and his early life had been passed in an attempt, by his own means,
to remedy the slight she had put upon him at his birth. The object of his
ambition was gained--had been now for some years: he was wealthy, the
possessor of all the fair lands stretched out before him as far as his eye
could reach, and a rent-roll not unworthy of one in a higher station in
life. Looked up to by the poor of Langford as the lord of the manor,
courted by his equals as a man of some consequence. Was he happy? See the
lines so deeply marked on his countenance, and listen to the si