er before, perhaps, had Fate so
literally made of a living man (with his passions and his powers, his
ambition and his love) the plaything and puppet of a dream!

"Ah," said Vane, who had heard the latter part of Trevylyan's story,
"could the German have bequeathed to us his secret, what a refuge should
we possess from the ills of earth! The dungeon and disease, poverty,
affliction, shame, would cease to be the tyrants of our lot; and to
Sleep we should confine our history and transfer our emotions."

"Gertrude," whispered the lover, "what his kingdom and his bride were to
the Dreamer art thou to me!"

CHAPTER XXIV. THE BROTHERS.

THE banks of the Rhine now shelved away into sweeping plains, and on
their right rose the once imperial city of Boppart. In no journey
of similar length do you meet with such striking instances of the
mutability and shifts of power. To find, as in the Memphian Egypt, a
city sunk into a heap of desolate ruins; the hum, the roar, the mart of
nations, hushed into the silence of ancestral tombs, is less humbling
to our human vanity than to mark, as along the Rhine, the kingly city
dwindled into the humble town or the dreary village,--decay without its
grandeur, change without the awe of its solitude! On the site on
which Drusus raised his Roman tower, and the kings of the Franks their
palaces, trade now dribbles in tobacco-pipes, and transforms into an
excellent cotton factory the antique nunnery of Konigsberg! So be it; it
is the progressive order of things,--the world itself will soon be one
excellent cotton factory!

"Look," said Trevylyan, as they sailed on, "at yonder mountain, with its
two traditionary Castles of Liebenstein and Sternfels."

Massive and huge the ruins swelled above the green rock, at the foot
of which lay, in happier security from time and change, the clustered
cottages of the peasant, with a single spire rising above the quiet
village.

"Is there not, Albert, a celebrated legend attached to those castles?"
said Gertrude. "I think I remember to have heard their names in
connection with your profession of taleteller."

"Yes," said Trevylyan, "the story relates to the last lords of those
shattered towers, and--"

"You will sit here, nearer to me, and begin," interrupted Gertrude, in
her tone of childlike command. "Come."

THE BROTHERS.

A TALE.*

* This tale is, in reality, founded on the beautif