The paroxysm was over. Speechless, and all but motionless, the miserable queen was borne by her attendants to the barge; the tide had shifted, and was still in their favor, though their course was altered. On their return, they again passed the triumphant fleet of Cavendish, bearing the mightiest sovereign of the world, the envied of all the earth--a wretched, feeble, heart-broken woman, grovelling like a crushed worm beneath the bitterest of human pangs, the agonies of self-merited misery! A few hours found her outstretched upon the floor of her chamber, giving away to anguish uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Refusing the earnest prayers of her women, and of her physicians, to suffer herself to be disrobed, and to recline upon her bed; feeding on tears and groans alone; uttering no sound but the name of Essex, in one plaintive and oft-repeated cry; mocking at all consolation; acknowledging no comforter except despair--ten long days and nights she lingered thus, in pangs a thousand times more intolerable than those which she had inflicted on her Scottish rival: and when, at length, the council of the state assembled, in her last moments, around the death-bed of a sovereign truly and not metaphorically lying in dust and ashes--she named to them, as her successor in the kingdom, the son of that same rival. Who shall say that the death of Mary Stuart went unavenged? THE MOORISH FATHER. A TALE OF MALAGA. It was the morning of the day succeeding that which had beheld the terrible defeat, among the savage glens and mountain fastnesses of Axarquia, of that magnificent array of cavaliers which, not a week before, had pranced forth from the walls of Antiquera, superbly mounted on Andalusian steeds, fiery, and fleet, and fearless, with helm and shield and corslet engrailed with arabesques of gold, surcoats of velvet and rich broidery, plumes of the desert bird, and all in short that can add pomp and circumstance to the dread game of war. The strife was over in the mountain valleys; the lonely hollows on the bare hill-side, the stony channels of the torrent, the tangled thicket, and the bleak barren summit, were cumbered with the carcasses of Spain’s most noble cavaliers. War-steeds beside their riders, knights of the proudest lineage among their lowliest vassals, lay cold and grim and ghastly, each where the shaft, the stone, the assagay, had stretched beneath him, beneath the garish lustre of the broad southern sun. The Moorish foe had vanished from the field, which he had won almost without a struggle--the plunderer of the dead plied his hateful trade even to satiety, and, gorged with booty that might well satiate the wildest avarice, had left the field of slaughter to the possession of his brute comrades, the wolf, the raven, and the eagle.