-house in the garden on a specified evening, and that on the
following morning she should find the packet intended for her in the
same place. The sad engagement was kept, and having left her packet in
the evening, Miss Shuckburgh set out on the following morning to find
her own. A servant, it is said, who saw her in the garden, was curious
to know what could have brought her out at so early an hour. He
followed her unobserved, and on drawing near to the summer-house, "he
heard the voices of the lieutenant and of the lady in earnest dispute.
The officer was loud and impassioned, the lady firm but unconsenting.
Immediately was heard the report of a pistol, and the fall of a
body--another report and fall. Guessing the tragic truth, the servant
raised an alarm, and the two lovers were found lying dead in their own
blood." It is generally supposed that this terrible act of
self-destruction was the result of mutual agreement--the outcome of
passion and despair.

"Since that hour," writes Howitt, "every object, about the place which
could suggest to the memory this fatal event, has been changed or
removed. The summer-house has been razed to the ground; the
disposition of the garden itself altered; but," he adds, "such tragic
passages in human life become part and parcel of the scene where they
occur--they become the topic of the winter fireside. They last while
passions and affections, youth and beauty last. They fix themselves
into the soil, and the very rock on which it lies, and though the
house was razed from the spot, and its park and pleasaunces turned
into ploughed fields, it would still be said for ages: Here stood
Shuckburgh Hall, and here fell the young and lovely Miss Shuckburgh by
the hand of her despairing lover."

And to conclude with a romance in brief, some forty or fifty years
ago, in the far north of England a girl was on the eve of being
married. Her wedding dress was ordered, the guests were bidden. But,
it is said that at the eleventh hour, in a fit of passion and paltry
jealousy, she resented some fancied want of devotion in her lover.

He was single-minded, loyal, and altogether of finer stuff than
herself; but she was a wretched slave to such old stock phrases as
delicacy, family pride, and the like, and so he was allowed to go, for
she came of people who looked upon unforgiveness as a virtue.

Accordingly the discarded lover exchanged into a regiment under orders
for Afghanistan. At the time, our t