shrieked the unhappy girl;
and at the same time she sprang from the bed and darted
after him, in order by her grasp to detain him. But the
warning came too late; for scarcely had he passed the
threshold, and hardly had his niece had time to utter the
startling exclamation, when the door which divided the two
rooms closed violently after him, as if swung to by a strong
blast of wind. Schalken and he both rushed to the door, but
their united and desperate efforts could not avail so much
as to shake it. Shriek after shriek burst from the inner
chamber, with all the piercing loudness of despairing
terror. Schalken and Douw strained every nerve to force open
the door; but all in vain. There was no sound of struggling
from within, but the screams seemed to increase in loudness,
and at the same time they heard the bolts of the latticed
window withdrawn, and the window itself grated upon the sill
as if thrown open. One _last_ shriek, so long, and piercing,
and agonized, as to be scarcely human, swelled from the
room, and suddenly there followed a death-like silence. A
light step was heard crossing the floor, as if from the bed
to the window, and almost at the same instant the door gave
way, and yielding to the pressure of the external
applicants, they were nearly precipitated into the room. It
was empty. The window was open, and Schalken sprang to a
chair, and gazed out upon the street and canal below. There
was no one there; but he saw, or thought he saw, the waters
of the broad canal beneath settling ring after ring, in
heavy circles, as if a moment before disturbed by the
submersion of some ponderous body."

SKETCHES OF LIFE IN SWEDEN.

Hans Christian Anderson, the Danish poet and story-teller, whose
_Improvisatore_ is one of the most beautiful and intrinsically truthful
of the myriad beautiful books upon Italian life, has published a new
work, _Pictures of Sweden_. It is very genial summer reading, consisting
of detached sketches of Swedish life and scenery, with interludes of
poetic reverie. The London journals complain that it is not sufficiently
well translated, but we quote the following characteristic passages in
which the same weird child-likeness of feeling which his readers will
recall, is expressed in the peculiar, subdued strain of northern
sentimentalism, which i