ds had just been
succeeded by a stronger one for Mrs Radcliffe and romances. Time flew on.
Their daily interviews improved to evening rambles, the interchange of
notes, supplies of books and flowers upon one side, an avowal of love and
tale of lofty but luckless patriotism on the other. To the object of his
passion alone did the stranger confide his story. Fascinated by the
principles of freedom with which France had lately inoculated mankind, and
maddened by the miseries of ill-government under which his own green
Island groaned, he had engaged, full of hope and high aspirations, in that
enterprise for the recovery of her national independence, which terminated
in the martyrdom of as noble and pure-spirited a being as sleeps buried
and unhonoured in "the cross ways of fame"--ROBERT EMMETT. The Stranger
had been dispatched, he said, to the south to forward the movement of his
party in that quarter, when their central Power in the capital prematurely
exploded, carrying dismay and destruction to every remoter organ of the
confederacy. His name--the name of Fergus Hewitt, citizen of the new
Western Republic, and major of brigade--was one of the first upon the list
of the proscribed; a reward was offered for his head; and it was while
lurking a hunted man, amid the fastnesses of Tipperary, that he wooed and
ventured to win the heart and hand of the heiress of Clogheen.

Such was the tale along whose vicissitudes the fair girl to whom it was
imparted now glanced with a bewildered mind. The interview just terminated
will have given the reader some idea of the unsettled state of her
feelings; but it was in the solitude of her chamber, when she found
herself called on to part for ever, or for ever to be united with this
interesting stranger, that she seemed to discover, not without
consternation, how necessary to her happiness he had become. The waste
vacancy of her time and thoughts before she had met him--broken only by
dull and distant visits to duller and more distant aunts, vapid rides
through rude and solitary scenes, and incessant feud and amnesty between
her cousin Lysaght and herself--was this once more to be her portion? or
would she fly with Him who had relieved her from them all, and relinquish
her father and her home? How, she continued to ask herself, would that
beloved parent, so stern to all else, so blindly indulgent to her, endure
her loss? Would he proscribe her for ever? She felt not--assuredly not.
No, her f