ils, and in which the
worst have gleams of that eternal principle of right, by which they have
been endowed by God; of those tempests which sometimes lie dormant in our
systems, like the slumbering lake in the calm, but which excited, equal
its fury when lashed by the winds; of the strength of prejudices; of the
worthlessness and changeable character of the most cherished of our
opinions, and of that strange, incomprehensible, and yet winning _melange_
of contradictions, of fallacies, of truths, and of wrongs, which make up
the sum of our existence.

The following pages are the result of this dreaming. The reader is left to
his own intelligence for the moral.

A respectable English writer observed:--"All pages of human life are worth
reading; the wise instruct; the gay divert us; the imprudent teach us what
to shun; the absurd cure the spleen."

The Headsman

Chapter I.

Day glimmered and I went, a gentle breeze
Ruffling the Leman lake.

Rogers.

The year was in its fall, according to a poetical expression of our own,
and the morning bright, as the fairest and swiftest bark that navigated
the Leman lay at the quay of the ancient and historical town of Geneva,
ready to depart for the country of Vaud. This vessel was called the
Winkelried, in commemoration of Arnold of that name, who had so generously
sacrificed life and hopes to the good of his country, and who deservedly
ranks among the truest of those heroes of whom we have well-authenticated
legends. She had been launched at the commencement of the summer, and
still bore at the fore-top-mast-head a bunch of evergreens, profusely
ornamented with knots and streamers of riband, the offerings of the
patron's female friends, and the fancied gage of success. The use of
steam, and the presence of unemployed seamen of various nations, in this
idle season of the warlike, are slowly leading to innovations and
improvements in the navigation of the lakes of Italy and Switzerland, it
is true; but time, even at this hour, has done little towards changing the
habits and opinions of those who ply on these inland waters for a
subsistence. The Winkelried had the two low, diverging masts; the
attenuated and picturesquely-poised latine yards; the light, triangular
sails; the sweeping and projecting gangways; the receding and falling
stern; the high and peaked prow, with, in general, the classical and
quaint air of those vessels that are seen in the older pa