years of age, was of an excellent Scotch family, daughter
of a baronet, and a country gentleman. Beautiful and accomplished, an
orphan at seventeen years old, she had left Scotland with her brother,
Thomas Seyton of Halsbury. The absurd predictions of an old Highland
nurse had excited almost to madness the two leading vices in Sarah's
character,--pride and ambition; the destiny predicted for her, and in
which she fully believed, was of the highest order,--in fact, sovereign
rank. The prophecy had been so often repeated, that the young Scotch
girl eventually fully credited its fulfilment; and she constantly
repeated to herself, to bear out her ambitious dream, that a
fortune-teller had thus promised a crown to the handsome and excellent
creature who afterwards sat on the throne of France, and who was queen
as much by her graces and her kind heart as others have been by their
grandeur and majesty.

Strange to say, Thomas Seyton, as superstitious as his sister,
encouraged her foolish hopes, and resolved on devoting his life to the
realisation of Sarah's dream,--a dream as dazzling as it was deceptive.
However, the brother and sister were not so blind as to believe
implicitly in this Highland prophecy, and to look absolutely for a
throne of the first rank in a splendid disdain of secondary royalties or
reigning principalities; on the contrary, so that the handsome Scotch
lassie should one day encircle her imperial forehead with a sovereign
crown, the haughty pair agreed to condescend to shut their eyes to the
importance of the throne they coveted. By the assistance of the
_Almanach de Gotha_ for the year of grace 1819, Seyton arranged, before
he left Scotland, a sort of synopsis of the ages of all the kings and
ruling powers in Europe then unmarried.

Although very ridiculous, yet the brother and sister's ambition was
freed from all shameful modes; Seyton was prepared to aid his sister
Sarah in snatching at the thread of the conjugal band by which she hoped
eventually to fasten a crown upon her brows. He would be her
participator in any and all stratagems which could tend to consummate
this end; but he would rather have killed his sister than see her the
mistress of a prince, even though the _liaison_ should terminate in a
marriage of reparation.

The matrimonial inventory that resulted from Seyton and Sarah's
researches in the _Almanach de Gotha_ was satisfactory. The Germanic
Confederation furnished forth a numerous c