Miss Lauriana St. Clare then addressed her—“If any feeling of mercy yet warms your stubborn heart, come home to us and see your father, ere he breathe his last. ’Tis a fearful sight to see him: he raves for you, and calls you his darling and his favourite—his lost lamb, who has strayed from the flock, but was dearer than all the rest. Miss Elinor, I have little hopes of stirring your compassion; for in the days of babyhood you were hard and unyielding, taking your own way, and disdaining the counsel of such as were older and wiser than you. Go too, child; you have played the wanton with your fortune, and the hour of shame approaches.” Miss St. Clare heard not the summons—upon her horse she rode swiftly over the moors—it came too late—Camioli had sickened in the morning, and ere night, he had died. They wrote again: “Your father’s spirit has forsaken him: there is no recall from the grave. With his last words he bequeathed his curse to the favourite of his heart; and death has set its seal upon the legacy. The malediction of a father rests upon an ungrateful child!” Elinor stood upon the cliff near Craig Allen Bay, when her father’s corpse was carried to the grave. She heard the knell and the melancholy dirge: she saw the procession as it passed: she stopped its progress, and was told that her father in his last hour had left her his malediction. Many were near her, and flattered her at the time; but she heard them not. Elinor stood on the barren cliff, to feel, as she said, the morning dew and fresh mountain air on her parched forehead. “My brain beats as if to madden me:—the fires of hell consume me:—it is a father’s curse,” she cried; and her voice, in one loud and dreadful shriek, rent the air. “Oh it is a father’s curse:” then pausing with a fixed and horrid eye: “Bear it, winds of heaven, and dews of earth,” she cried: “bear it to false Glenarvon:—hear it, fallen angel, in the dull night, when the hollow wind shakes your battlements and your towers, and shrieks as it passes by, till it affrights your slumbers:—hear it in the morn, when the sun breaks through the clouds, and gilds with its beams of gold the eastern heavens:—hear it when the warbling skylark, soaring to the skies, thrills with its pipe, and every note of joy sound in thy ear as the cry of woe. The old man is dead, and gone: he will be laid low in the sepulchre: his bones shall be whiter than his grey hairs. He left his malediction upon his child. May it rest with thee, false Glenarvon. Angel of beauty, light, and delight of the soul, thou paradise of joys unutterable from which my heart is banished, thou God whom I have worshipped with sacrilegious incense, hear it and tremble. Amidst revels and feastings, in the hour of love, when passion beats in every pulse, when flatterers kneel, and tell thee thou art great, when a servile world bowing before thee weaves the laurel wreath of glory around thy brows, when old men forget