Smith with a red face; he had been eating his dinner, and had since been toasting himself over the fire, for it was a cold night.

The fire in the inner office, a small square room, where Mrs. Smith had been shown, was nearly out, but the lawyer cracked it up, and put on some more coal. They sat down, the table covered with the lawyer's papers between them, and Mrs. Smith told her tale from beginning to end, the little lawyer, in his eagerness, interrupting her with perpetual questions.

The story astonished him beyond expression. Again and again he asked whether there could be no mistake. Mr. Carlton, who stood so well in the good graces of his fellow townsmen, the destroyer of that poor Mrs. Crane! and Mrs. Crane was his wife, and the sister of the Ladies Chesney? Mr. Drone thought he had never heard so improbable a tale - off the stage.

Mrs. Smith, calm, patient, porsistent, went over it again. She spoke of Lady Jane's visit to her that afternoon, she handed him the letter her ladyship had left with her. Mr. Drone began to think there must be something in the story, and he set himself to recall as many particulars as he could of Mrs. Crane's death; he had been fully cognisant of them at the time, as clerk to the magistrates.

"Does Lady Jane Chesney suspect Mr. Carlton?" he asked.

"Not she," replied Mrs. Smith. "She has no idea it was Mr. Carlton that was Mrs. Crane's husband. She suspects it was a Mr. Crane who married her, but she does think Mr. Carlton knew of the marriage, for he was a friend of Mr. Crane's. I'm not sure but she fears Mr. Carlton knew more about the

pose you never obtained the slightest clue as to where the ceremony took place ?"

"No," returned Mrs. Smith, hesitating at the word. "I remember once, the winter that she was at my house at Islington, we were talking about churches and marriages and such things, and she said, in a laughing sort of way, that old St. Pancras Church was as good a one to be married in as any. It did not strike me at the time that she meant anything in saying it; but it's just possible, sir, she was married there."

Mr. Drone's brisk eyes twinkled, and he made a memorandum in his pocket-book. He made other memorandums; he asked about five hundred questions more than he had already asked. And when Mrs. Smith departed, he stood at the door to watch her away, and then jumped into the omnibus just starting for Great Wennock station, and sent the following telegram to London :

"Henry Drone, South Wennock, to John Friar, Bedford Row.

"Search old St. Pancras register for 1847. Certificate of marriage wanted: Lewis Carlton to Clarice Beauchamp, or perhaps Clarice Chesney. Lose no time; bribe clerk if necessary, and send special messenger down at once with it, if obtained."

(To be continued.)

GOETHE AND FREDERIKA BRION; A PILGRIMAGE TO SESENHEIM.

as Mr. Crane's friend."

"But I can't see why Mr. Carlton should have destroyed this poor young lady?-allowing that he did do so, as you suspect," urged Mr. Drone.

"Nor I," said Mrs. Smith. "Unless any of his plans were put out by her coming down, and he was afraid it would be found out that she was his wife."

The lawyer pulled at his whiskers, his habit when in thought. "You see there's no certainty that she was his wife-that she was married at all, in fact."

"I'm as

"Then there is, for I'd stake my life upon it," angrily returned Mrs. Smith. certain she was married as that I was married myself. You are as bad as my husband, sir; he'd used to say as much."

"It

"The chief thing would be to get a proof of it," composedly returned the lawyer. would supply the motive, you see.

I sup

Strasburg friends.

On the twenty-eighth of August of the above-named year young Goethe completed his twenty-first year. Nature had endowed him with uncommon beauty of face and figure, a warm temperament, and a lively imagination. He felt within him a fund of passion and sentiment which yearned for a vent. The surrounding landscape appeared to him a picture which knit itself to his inmost being. There throbbed within him a craving for the pleasurable sensations which woman's love can give. He had already had some experience in love affairs. When a student at Leipzig he had won the heart of Anna Katherine Schönkopf. He had purposely tormented her, and she, after a patient endurance of his cruel sport, had broken loose from him, had conceived a strong dislike

The university fell to the ground during the troubles of the French Revolution. It is now represented by the Protestant Seminary.

to him, as he himself admits, and had mortified his vanity by betrothing herself to a less brilliant but more trustworthy lover, whom Goethe had introduced to her parents' house.

In freeing herself from Goethe's fascination Miss Schönkopf was probably aided by the difference in years between herself and the young poet. She was three years older than he. Perhaps the recollection of this just retribution nettled him and gave an additional stimulus to that yearning for woman's love which was natural in one of his years and warm temperament. Of his life in Strasburg at the period we are speaking of he wrote,-"I have never felt so powerfully as now, as here in Strasburg, what it is to be pleased without my heart participating in any way therein. An extended acquaintance among pleasant people, a wide awake cheerful society drives one day after the other past me, leaves me little time for thought and no rest for sentiment, and when we are without sentiment we certainly do not think of our friends. In a word, my present life is perfect as a sledge-drive, glittering and rattling, but as little for the heart as it is much for the eye and the ear."

In the month of October, 1770, a great change was destined to take place in Goethe's life. He was to have another affaire du cœur, in some respects the most important one in his life. None was so idyllic in its origin and progress, none so tragic in its termination. According to Mr. Lewes, in his "Biography of Goethe," (which, by the way, is even more highly esteemed on the continent than in England)—“Of all the women who enjoyed the distinction of Goethe's love none seem to me so fascinating as Frederika." The biographer is not alone in this opinion. The meeting of Goethe with the Maid of Sesenheim was brought about in the following way. Weyland, a fellow-student and a native of Northern Alsace, determined to take a holiday and visit some of his relatives and friends in the neighbourhood of Sesenheim. He invited Goethe to accompany him. The invitation was accepted. In Goethe's Autobiography, written more than forty years after the events we are about to allude to, the excursion is represented to have been made on horseback, but one of his biographers, Herr Viehoff, conjectures with much plausibility that in this as in some other respects the memory of the poet was at fault, and that the two students footed it to Sesenheim. In either case their road lay northward from Strasburg, close to the left bank of the Rhine; at about eighteen English miles from the city they would reach Drusenheim, a considerable village, which may be found on any large map of France in the northern part of the department of the Bas

Rhin. About two and a-half miles north of Drusenheim and on the outskirts of the forest of Haguenau lies Sesenheim, then as now a mixed Protestant and Catholic village of about 500 souls, but owned at that time by the Prince de Rohan-Soubise, and still held by the descendants of that Prince's peasants. Notwithstanding the many social changes which have taken place in Alsace since 1770, the physical aspect of Sesenheim and the vicinity has not altered in any material degree. Sesenheim is one of the very numerous pleasant villages which dot the fertile, well-cultivated Alsatian plain. On the east the long line of poplar trees indicates the course of the Rhine. On the west stands a densely-wooded range of hills, studded at its base by more villages, beyond which range rises the imposing chain of the Vosges. On all sides the eye takes in detached villages, standing like islets on the broad hedgeless prairie, and the rural life of Alsace is purely a hamlet life, without isolated houses belonging to the gentry or tenant-farmers to connect one village with another and diversify the landscape.

As they approach Sesenheim Weyland points out the house of the Protestant pastor, which stood then, as the new parsonage stands now, opposite to the only, and that the Lutheran, church in Sesenheim. The house has a tumbledown aspect. Weyland says to Goethe, "Do not let the ancient external appearance of the house shock you, you will find it only the more young within."

Let us stop at the threshold of the pastor's house and take a survey of the family within. Johann Jakob Brion, the pastor, was a zealous and dogmatical minister of the Gospel, aged fifty-three years. The leading idea of his life was to get the old parsonage rebuilt. He had procured some plans for the projected new house, which were laid before every visitor and tediously discussed. The charm of the house did not lie in this worthy but testy and commonplace functionary. It was the ladies of the humble establishment who invested it with that reputation for a genial and graceful hospitality to which Weyland had made allusion. Madame Maria Magdalena Brion (née Schoell) was a native of Strasburg, and she is described by Goethe as a lady of cultivated mind, and of manners at once elegant and dignified. She seems to have been a mother worthy of such a daughter as Frederika. The children of this couple were four in number; three daughters, Maria Salome (called by Goethe Olivia), Frederika, aged sixteen, and Sophie, aged ten years, and one

* The Catholics, however, use it as well as the Protestants, by virtue of an old law of the time of Louis XIV., which allowed any six Catholics in an Alsatian village the privilege of using the choir of the Protestant church.

"At this instant she really entered the door and then truly a most charming Star arose in this rural heaven. Both daughters still wore nothing but German,' as they used to call it, and this almost obsolete national costume became Frederika particularly well. The short white full skirt, with the furbelow not so long but that the neatest little feet were visible up to the ankle; a tight white bodice and a black taffeta apron-thus she stood on the boundary between country girl and city girl. Slender and light, she tripped along as if she had nothing to carry, and her neck seemed almost too delicate for the large fair braids of her elegant little head. From cheerful blue eyes she looked very intelligently around, and her pretty turned-up nose peered as freely into the air as if there could be no care in the world; her straw hat hung on her arm, and thus at the first glance I had the delight of seeing her and appreciating her at once in all her grace and loveliness."

In another passage he touches upon her moral qualities :—

* * *

"I repeated to myself the good qualities she had just unfolded so freely before me; her circumspect cheerfulness, her naïveté combined with self-consciousness, her hilarity, with foresight-qualities which seem incompatible, but which nevertheless were found together in her, and gave a pleasing character to her outward appearance. There are some women who especially please us in a room, others who look better in the open air-Frederika belonged to the latter. Her whole nature, her form never appeared more charming than when she moved along the elevated foot-path, the grace of her deportment seemed to vie with the flowery earth, and the indestructible cheerfulness of her countenance with the blue sky. This refreshing atmosphere which surrounded her she carried home, and it might soon be perceived that she understood how to reconcile difficulties and to obliterate with ease the impression made by little unpleasant contingencies. The purest joy which we can feel with respect to the beloved is to find that she pleases others. Frederika's conduct in society was beneficent to all. In walks she floated about as the animating spirit, and knew how to supply the gaps that might arise here and there. The lightness of her movements we have already commended, and she was most graceful when she ran. As the deer seems exactly to fulfil its destination when it lightly flies over the sprout

ing corn, so did her peculiar nature seem most plainly to express itself when she ran with light steps over mead and furrow to fetch something which had been lost, to summon a distant couple, or to order something necessary. On these occasions she was never out of breath and always kept her equilibrium.”

It is not the object of the writer to recount the idyllic story of the love of Frederika Brion and Wolfgang Goethe. The Autobiography* of Goethe has been long before the English public in an English dress; moreover, Mr. Lewes has gone over the same ground in artistic style and with sympathising soul. The interest in the Maid of Sesenheim and her family awakened by those two works is, however, not satisfied by them. Having recently made a pilgrimage to Sesenheim and pursued some investigations into the subject, the writer proposes to fill up a portion of the void left in the mind of the reader of those works as to the ulterior destiny of the individuals who composed that highly interesting family group.

After taking his degree, Goethe left Strasburg on the twenty-fifth of August, 1771. He had taken an abrupt leave of the Brions. The recollection of this parting was so painful to him that he has passed hurriedly over it in his narrative. He recalls only the image of Frederika, with tearful eyes, holding out her hand to bid him farewell when he was already in the saddle. To that "indestructible cheerfulness" of hers there was already an end!

After Goethe's return to Frankfort he sent a letter of final adieu to Frederika and received from her a reply which, he says, rent his heart. Neither of these letters has been preserved. So ceased for ever their written communications. The shock of severance brought Frederika to death's door. After her recovery she was wooed by Jacob Lenz, another poet of promise, a fellow-student and friend of Goethe at Strasburg, a translator of Shakspeare and Plautus. It was at the end of May or early in June, 1772, that Lenz left Strasburg for Fort Louis, a French fortress on the Rhine, now in ruins. He carried with him, if not a letter of introduction, at least messages to the Brion family from Actuary Salzmann, a mutual friend in Strasburg. Fort Louis is in the vicinity of Sesenheim, and young Lenz lost no time in paying a visit to the parsonage. In his letters to Salzmann, dated in June 1772, he describes his meeting with Frederika, and

* The Autobiography states that the first visit to Sesenheim only lasted two days, but in a contemporary letter Goethe states that he spent there "several days" (einige Tage). In several other respects, the Autobiography is inaccurate. It confounds winter and summer visits, and omits to bring into due relief Goethe's six weeks' sojourn at Sesenheim, in May and June, 1771.-See Vichoff's "Goethe's Leben," vol. i.