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ones senses are sharpened in deadly peril; ; r live now, I distinctly heard the bells of Trinity chiming midnight, as { rose to the surface the next instant, immersed in the ston e cauldron, where I must swim for my jife Heaven only could tell how long; 1 . “I am a capital swimmer; and this natu rally gave me a degree of self-possession. — Falling as I had, I of course had pitched out some distance from the sloning parapet. A few strokes brought me to tneedge. I really was not yet certain but that I could clamber up the face of the wall anywhere. I hoped that I could. 1 felt certain at least there was some spot where I might get hold with my hands, even if 1 did not ultimately ascend it. [ tried the nearest spot. The inclination of the wall was so vertical that it did not even rest me to lean against it. I felt with m y hands and with my feet. Surely, I thought, there must be some fissure like that in which that ill-omened weed had found a place for its root! “There was none. My fingers became sore in busying themselves with the harsh and inhospitable stones. My feet slipped from the smooth and slimy masonry beneath the water", and several times my dace came in rude contact with the wall, when my foot hold gave way on the .instant that I seemed to have found some diminutive rocky cleft upon which I could stay myself. “ Sir. did you ever see a rat drowned in a half-filled hogshead ? how he swims round, and round, and round; and after vainly try ing the sides again and again with his paws, fixes his eyes upon the upper rim, as if he would look himself out rtf his watery prison. “ I thought of the miserable vermin thought of him as I had often watched .thus his dying agonies, when a cruel urchin of eight or ten. Boys are horribly cruel, sir; boys, women and savages. All child-like things are cruel'; cruel from a want of thought and from perverse ingenuity, although by in stinct each of is so tender. You may not have observed it, hut a savage is as ten der to its own young as a boy is to a favorite puppy —the same boy that will torture a kit ten out of its existence. I thought then, I say, of the rat drowning in a half-filled cask of water, and lifting his gaze out of the ves sel as he grew more and more desperate, and 1 flung myself on my back, and floating thus, fixed my eyes on the face of the moon. u The moon is well enough in her way, however you may look at her; but her ap pearance is, to say the least of it, peculiar to a man floating on his brack in the centre of a stone tank, with -a dead wall of some fifteen or twenty feet rising squarely on every side of him (the young man smiled bitterly as he said this, and shuddered twice before he went on, musingly)! The last time l had noted the planet with any emotion, she was on the wane. Mary was with me. I had brought her out here one morning to look at the top of the reservoir. She said little of the scene, but as we talked of our old and childish loves, I saw that its fresh features were in corporating themselves with tender memories of the past, and I was content. “ There was a rich golden haze upon the landscape, and as my own spirits rose amid the voluptuous atmosphere, she pointed to the waning planet, discernible like a faint gash in the welkin, and wondered how long it would be before the leaves would fall! — Strange girl, did she mean to rebuke my joy ous mood, as if we had no right to be happy while nature, withering in her pomp, and the sickly moon wasting in the blaze of noon tide, were there to remind us of the gone-for ever 1 •■‘They will ail renew themselves, dear Alary, 1 said i, encouragingly; ‘and there is one that will ever keep tryete alike with thee and Nature through all seasons, if thou wilt hut be true to one of us, and remain as now a child of nature. 1 “ A tear sprang to her eye, and then search ing her pocket for her card-case, she remem bered an engagement to be present at Miss Lawson’s opening of fall bonnets, at two o’- clock! “And yet, dear, wild, wayward Mary-, I thought of her now. You have probably outliyed this sort of thing, Sir; but I, looking at the moon, as I floated there upturned to her yellow light, thought of the loved being whose tears i knew would ilow T when she beard of my singular fate, at once so gro tesque, yet melancholy to awfulness. “ And how often have we talked, too, of that Carian shepherd who spent his damp nights upon the hills, gazing as I do on the lustrous planet! Who will revel with her those old superstitions'? Who, from our °wn unlegended woods will evoke their yet undetected, haunting spirits ? Who peer with her, in prying scrutiny, into nature’s biws, and challenge the whispers of poetry f r om the voiceless throat of mailer ? Wbo MSMHIEKI MIT ©A% IS in? ♦ laugh merily over the stupid guess-work of pedants, that never mingled with the infini tude of nature, through love, exhaustless and all-embracing, as we have ? Poor girl, she will be companionless. •‘Alas! companionless forever —save in the exciting stages of some brisk flirtation. — She will live hereafter by feeding other hearts with love's lore she has learned from me, and then, Pygmalion-like, grow fond of the im ages she has herself endowed with sem blance of divinity, until they seem to breathe back the mystery the soul can truly catch from only one. “ How anxious she will be lest the coro ner shall have discovered any of her notes in my pocket! “ 1 felt chilly as this last reflection crossed my mind ; partly at the thought of the coro ner, partly at the idea of Mary being com pelled to wear mourning for me in case of such a disclosure of our engagement. It is a provoking thing for a girl of nineteen to have to go into mourning for a deceased lover, at the beginning of her second winter in the metropolis. “The water, though, with my motionless position, must have had something to do with my chilliness. 1 see, sir, you think I tell mv story with great levity; but indeed I should grow delirious did I venture to hold steadily to the awfulness of my feelings the greater part of the night. I think, indeed, l must have been most of the time hysterical with horror, for the vibrating emotions 1 have re capitulated did pass through my brain even as I have detailed them. “But as I now became calm in thought, I summoned up again some resolution of action. “I will begin at that corner (said I,) and swim round the whole enclosure. I will swim slowly and again feel the sides of the tank with my feet. If die I must, let me perish at least from well-directed though ex hausting effort, not sink from mere bootless weariness in sustaining myself till the morn ing shall bring relief. “ The sides of the place seemed to grow higher as I now kept my watery course be tween them. It was not altogether a dead pull. I had some variety of emotion in mak ing my circuit. When 1 swam in the shadow it looked to me more cheerful beyond in the moonlight. W hen I swam in the moonlight I had the hope of making some discovery when I should again reach the shadow. I turned several times on my back to rest just where those wavy lines would meet. Ihe stars looked viciously bright to me from the bottom of that well; there was such a com pany of them; they were so glad in their lus trous revelry; and had such space to move in! I was alone, sad to despair, in a strange element, prisoned, and a solitary gazei upon their mocking chorus. And yet there was nothing else with which I could hold com munion ! “ I turned upon my breast and struck out al most frantically, once more. The stars were forgotten, the very world of which I as yet formed a part, my poor Mary herself was forgotten. I thought only of the strong man there perishing —of me, in my lusty manhood, in the sharp vigor of my dawning prime, with faculties illimitable, with senses all alert, battling there with physical obstacles which men like myself had brought together for my undoing, the Eiernal could never have will ed this°lhing! I could not and I would not perish thus. And I grew strong in the inso lence of self-trust; and I laughed aloud as I dashed the sluggish water from side to side. “ Then came an emotion of pity for my self —of wild, wild regret; of sorrow, 0, in finite, for a fate so desolate, a doom so drea ry, so heart-sickening. Aou may laugh at the contradiction if you will, Sir, but I felt that I could sacrifice my own life on the in stant to redeem another fellow-creature from such a place of horror, from an end so pite ous. My soul and my vital spirit seemed in that desperate moment to be separating; while one in parting grieved over the deplorable fate of the other. “ And then I prayed! “I prayed, why or wherefore I know not. It was not from fear. It could not have been in hope. The days of miracles are passed, and there was no natural law by whose prov idential interposition I could be saved. I did not pray; it prayed of itself, my soul, within me. “Was the calmness that I now felt torpid ity ? the torpidity that precedes dissolution to the strong swimmer, who, sinking from ex haustion, must at last add a bubble to the wave as he suffocates beneath the element which now denied his mastery? If it were so, how fortunate was it that my floating rod at that moment attracted my attention, as it dashed through the water by me. 1 saw on the instant that a fish had entangled h.iiijseli in the wire noose. The rod quivered, plung ed, came again to the surface, anil rippled the water as it shot in arrowy flight from side to side of the tank. At last, driven towards the south-east corner of the reservoir, the small end seemed to have got foul somewhere.— The brazen butt, which, every time the fish sounded, was thrown up to the moon, now sank by its own weight, showing that the other end must be fast. But the cornered fish, evidently anchored somewhere by that short wire, floundered several times to the surface before I thought of striking out to the spot. “The water is now low, and tolerably clear. You may see the very ledge there, Sir, in yon der corner, on which the small end of my rod rested when I secured that pike with my hands. I did not take him from the slip-noose, however; but standing upon the ledge, han dled the rod in a workman-like manner, as I flung that pound pickerel over the iron rail ing upon the top of the parapet. The rod, as 1 have told you, barely reached from the rail ing to the water. It was a heavy, strong bass rod, which I had borrowed in the Spirit of the Times office, and when 1 discovered that the fish at the end of the wire made a strong enough knot to prevent me from draw ing my tackle away from the railing, round which it twined itself as I threw, why, as you can at once see, I had but little difficulty in making my way up the face of the wall with such assistance. The ladder which attracted your notice is, as you see, lashed to the iron railing in the identical spot where 1 thus made my escape ; and for fear of similar ac cidents, they have placed another one in the corresponding corner of the other compart ment of the tank, ever since my remarkable night's adventure in the reservoir.” We give the above singular relation, ver batim, as heard from the lips ot our chance acquaintance; and, although strongly tempt ed to “work it up” after the fantastic style of a famous German namesake, prefer that the reader should have it in its American simplicity. Selected Jjloctrg. From the Opal for 1849. THE THOUGHT-ANGEL: A WAKING AND SLEEPING DREAM. BY N*. P. WILLIS. [Written to illustrate a beautiful picture, by Rothermel of a Recording Angel accompanying a Thought.] Night is the sick man’s day, For the soul wakens as the body fails, 1 had told weary hours ; but, with the hush Os midnight, my la.st memory of pain Had stilled before a Thought of sudden brightness, And, like one rising upon spirit-limbs, Bo;e 1, and wandered with that thought away. Oh ! the blest truants that we are, when Sense, The Master, is 100 weak to call us in, And, loosed, us if the sehool-time of a life Were over, with its spirit-checking toils, We to the lields stray—following where’er Fancy? the vagrant, calls us ! All unshod Went by the hours, that with such heavy heel Came last in the slow vigils of the strong, And the dawn broke. Called in from spirit-straying, I knew again that 1 was weak and ill, Beginning on another day of pain ; Bat, with a blessing on my Thought —(whose track, Far thro’ a wilderness untrod before, It seemed that I might tell of with a pen Winged with illuminated words) —I slept. And presently I dreamed. In conscious sleep, 1 know that what I saw was bat a dream. The curtains of my bed, I knew, the while. Tented me round ; and on a couch beyond Lay a loved watcher by a dimming lamp ; And I remembered her —and where Ilay — And that the hour was morning—yet I saw, As if my dim room were dissolved in air, The vision 1 shall paint you. Lo! my Thought! The Thought that I had followed in rapt waking, And, of whose sweet unto me I longed in glowing words to tell the world — That Thought 1 saw —clad in a breathing shape, And like a sylph upon an errand sped, Prone for an arrowy flight, and through the air Cleaving its way resistless. The cleft wind, Beveaungly, to that symmetric thought Pressed its transparent chess; and beautiful, Oh, beautiful are tho shapes divine Which woman’s form makes possible to dream — Lay its impulsive outline on the air. I kindled with the pride tliat it was mine, The glory of is beauty—of my soul The easy effluence, moulded with a breath, And given—a rich gift —idly to the world l Andc ireles dy 1 sped it on its way — But—turned to look on it once more. Ah, lo! A cloud now lay aback between its'wings, I )rawu by its motion onward —a small cloud That from the night enveloped world below, deemed lighted by the half-arisen moon. 1 saw it, not as one upon the earth, But as they see from Heaven. And a-*, again, 1 watched that Thought—(irrevocably sped, Without a fear that it might turn to ill, Without a prayer that it might bless in fleeiDg)— Behold, all calmly with it, on the cloud, Bode a winged angel with an open book ; And—of the hearts it moved—and of the dreams, Passions and hopes it called on as it flew— Os all it gave a voice to, that had else Slumbered unuttered in ihe Thought-ruled world— That angel kept a record. “ Thou, hereafter,” Said a voice near me, “ shnlt that record hear ; For in thy using of that gift of power, Speed ini’ t chat Thought thou wilt across the world, Thou speukest with the pervading voice of God, And, as thy sway of the world’s heart, will be The reckoning w ith thy Maker. Human Thought, Cfli poet! lightly may take wondrous wings. Thy careless link hinds words to travel far. But oh, take heed! —for see—by dream-revealing— How Thoughts of power with angels so attended, Outfleeing never the calm pen that writes Their history for Heaven ! The sun shone in Upon my wind-stirred curtains, and J woke, Ami this had been a dream. ’Tis sometimes so: We dream ourselves what we have striven to he, And hoar what had been well for us to hear, Did our dreams shadow what we are. ©limpsts of Jfcm books, lift. JERICHO .MARRIES THE WIDOW. The wedding was very gorgeous. Very rarely are two people joined together with so much expense. Nevertheless, the contri bution of either party —had the other known it—would have somewhat shaken Hymen; if, indeed, it had not wholly frightened him out of the church. Mrs. Pennibacker, when introduced to Jericho, was so deep in debt, that often, let folks try as they would, they could not see her. And Jericho, doubtless from a short supply of platina, was an object of extreme solicitude to a large number of dealers. When, however, it was understood that the widow was to be married to a rich man in the city, the lady found the very handsomest outfit for herself and children, made delightfully easy. And Jericho, bear ing in mind the heavy expense of an intoxi cating honey-moon, readily obtained the means, when his circle—and every man has a circle, though of the smallest—rang with the news that he was in imminent likelihood of marrying the widow of an Indian nabob ! And so bridegroom and bride—with a mutual ; trust even beyond mutual expectation—walk ■ ed to the altar, there to be wedded into one, They were married at St. George’s Church— married in the bosom of a few surrounding friends. The bride’s children were present, anil cast a mixed interest of pensive ness and pleasure on the ceremony. The bride had told her bridesmaids that “ It would cost her a struggle, but the dear children should be present; it was right they should. They ought to have the sacrifice impressed upon their minds in the most solemn way; the sacrifice that their poor mother consented to make for them. Nobody but herself knew’ I what a struggle it was; but, it was her duty, 1 and though her heart was with dear Penni ; hacker—yes, she would go through with it. j Mr. Jericho had given the dear girls the most | beautiful lace-frocks, and to Basil a lovely gold hunting-watch; therefore, they ought and they should witness the sacrifice.” And Miss Pennibacker . and Miss Agatha Penni | backer, like little fairies, clothed in muslin ! an< ! l ace from Elfin-looms, saw the sacrifice with a vivacity of heart that almost spirted out at the corners of their lips; and Basil’ Pennibacker, a gaunt, reedy boy of twelve did nothing during the ceremony but take out his new gold hunting-watch—open it—snap it to—and return it again, as though he had already had a glimpse ol the preparations for. the wedding breakfast, and with his thoughts upon all the delicacies of the season, wasim-. patient for the sacrifice to be completed.— And the last “Amen”-—the last blow on met was struck, and Solomon Jericho and Scihilla Pennibacker were man and wife. Whereupon, in a hysteric moment, the bride, turning to her children, took the three in one living hunch in her arms, and sweeping them over to Jericho, said, “ You are their father, now. ’ A Man Made of Monet/, hi/ Douglas Jerr old. THE DEATH OF HAROLD. Sir E. L. Bulwer’s new novel, “ Haroldy the last of the Saxon Kings,” is virtually a history, thrown into the form of a novel, ami m that shape will be of immense value in popularizing a knowledge of the curious and ; little-known times it treats of. The great in cident—the battle of Hastings—is magnifi ! cently described. The death of Harold is I managed with consummate art. The Nor ; mans, unable to penetrate the defences into which the flower of the English had gather j ed, resorted to the expedient of discharging 252