“Since that night, how fearful have been my vicissitudes! Sometimes, as the splendidly-dressed mistress of private gambling-rooms, I have received the selected dupes in a luxurious boudoir, decoying the victims by fascinating smiles into the snare laid for them by Gilbert and his associates. Sometimes, encamping with the wild gipsy tribe in some hidden dell or woodland haunt, where their varied spoils were in safe keeping. Anon, the painted and tinseled queen of an itinerant show, where Gilbert enacted the mountebank, and by the brilliance of his fascinating eloquence drew into his treasury the hard-earned savings of the rustic gazers. “To all those degredations have I submitted, and now, oh, now, more than ever, has the iron entered into my soul! He has ceased to love me. I have become an encumbrance; my beauty has faded from exposure and neglect. I have sunk beneath his blows, have writhed beneath the bitterness of his sarcasms, his brutal jests, his scornful mockery of my penitence and tears. I have endured the agony of hunger while he rioted with his companions in profligate luxury; and yet, if the old smile lights up his countenance, the old look shines forth from his lustrous eyes, he is again to me the lover of my youth, and the past is a hideous dream. Oh, woman’s heart, how unfathomable is thy mystery!” The manuscript here ended abruptly. How sad a moral might be drawn from the history of this unfortunate! What rare gifts of mind and beauty had the want of religion marred and blighted! Had the Sun of Righteousness shone upon that ardent heart, its aspirations had been glorious, its course “Upward! upward! Through the doubt and the dismay Upward! to the perfect day!” What mournful tragedies are ever around us, flowing on with the perpetual under-current of human life, each hour laden with its mystery and sorrow, sweeping like dim phantoms through the arch of time, and burying the fearful records in the oblivion of the abyss beyond! How few of the floating wrecks are snatched from the darkening tide! I returned the next day to the dwelling of Helen, but it was shut up, and in the day-time appeared as if long deserted. To all inquiries, the neighbors answered reluctantly that it had long been uninhabited, and that its last occupants had been a gang of coiners, who were now suffering the penalty of transportation. I often visited the same district, but all my after-search was in vain, and the fate of Helen Corrie still remains an undiscovered mystery. THE GOOD OLD TIMES IN PARIS.