I was much more pleased when he told the curé that a supper was ready for us in the adjoining room, at which he begged we would excuse his absence; and truly a most admirable little meal it was, and served with great elegance. "The count expects you to stop here; there is a chamber prepared for you," said the curé, as we took our seats at table. "He has evidently taken a fancy to you. I thought, indeed I was quite certain, he would. Who can tell what good fortune this chance meeting may lead to, Monsieur Maurice! A votre sante, mon cher!" cried he, as he clinked his champagne glass against mine, and I at last began to think that destiny was about to smile on me. "You should see his Chateau in the Ardêche; this is nothing to it! There is a forest, too, of native oak, and a 'Chasse' such as royalty never owned!" Mine were delightful dreams that night; but I was sorely disappointed on waking to find that Laura was not riding at my side through a forest-alley, while a crowd of "Piqueurs" and huntsmen galloped to and fro, making the air vibrate with their joyous bugles. Still, I opened my eyes in a richly-furnished chamber, and a Jaques handed me my coffee on a silver stand, and in a cup of costliest Sèvres. (TO BE CONTINUED.) RECOLLECTIONS OF COLTON, THE AUTHOR OF "LACON." Colton was remarkable for the extent and profundity of his talents, the various mutations of fortune, self-entailed, which he underwent, and for his inordinate addiction to a vice of all others the most degrading and destructive to intellectual strength--who was yet great in intellect and purpose amidst all the strange vicissitudes of which he was the self-constituted victim, and beneath the pressure of moral and physical degradation which he would never have undergone but for the influence of one fatal and overwhelming passion. One of the very first objects of my boyish reverence and veneration was, as might be expected with a child religiously educated, the parson of the parish in the market town where I was brought up. Parson C----, who, I believe, held the benefice of St. Peter's in my native place, was a man whom, having once known, it was not very easy to forget. I could have been hardly six years of age when I first saw him without his canonical garb, on which occasion he was playing a trout on the end of his line under one of the weirs in the river Exe. At that time the town was pretty well stocked with French prisoners. The jails were crammed with the miserable soldiery of Napoleon's generals, captured in the Peninsular war, then raging, and numbers of French officers on parole were installed with the housekeepers of the place in the capacity of lodgers. With these our all-accomplished divine was almost the only man in the place who could hold converse. A part of my father's house was occupied by a couple of Gallic strangers, to whom the parson's visits were many and frequent. As they dined at the common table, their society, together with that of the