When the first excitement--caused by the escape of a prisoner so highly esteemed as was the bold crusader--had ceased to agitate the mussulman divan, and affairs had returned to their usual course--easily escaping from the vigilance of the harem guard, she had made good her flight to the seabathed towers of Venice, and thence to the classic plains of Italy. Then it was that the loneliness of her situation, the perils, the toils, the miseries which she must necessarily endure, weighed no less heavily on her tender spirits, than the unwonted labor of so toilsome a journey on her delicate and youthful frame. Ignorant of any European language, save the name of her lover, and the metropolis of his far-distant country, her sole reply to every query was the repetition, in her musical, although imperfect accents, of the words--“London,” “Gilbert.” Marvellous it is to relate--and were it not, in good sooth, history too marvellous--that her talismanic speech did at length convey her through nations hostile to her race, through the almost uninhabited forest, and across the snowy barrier of the Alps, through realms laid waste by relentless banditti, and cities teeming with licentious and merciless adventurers, to the chalky cliffs and verdant meadows of England! For weeks had she wandered through the streets of the vast metropolis, jeered by the cruel, and pitied, but unaided, by the merciful--tempted by the wicked, and shunned by the virtuous--repeating ever and anon her simple exclamation, “Gilbert, Gilbert!” till her strength was well nigh exhausted, and her spirits were fast sinking into utter despondency and despair. On the morning of the festival she had gone forth with hopes renewed, when she perceived the concourse of nobles crowding to greet their king--for she knew her Gilbert to be high in rank and favor--and fervently did she trust that this day would be the termination of her miseries. Again was she miserably deceived; so miserably that, perchance, had not the very assault which had threatened her with death or degradation restored her, as it were by magic, to the arms of him whom she had so tenderly and truly loved, she had sunk that night beneath the pressure of grief and anxiety, too poignant to be long endured. But so it was not ordained by that perfect Providence, which, though it may for a time suffer bold vice to triumph, and humble innocence to mourn, can ever bring real good out of seeming evil; and whose judgments are so inevitably, in the end, judgments of mercy and of truth, that well might the minstrel king declare of old, in the inspired language of holy writ-- “I have been young, and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.” THE TRIALS OF A TEMPLAR; A SKETCH OF THE CRUSADES. “The Lord is on my side; I will not fear what can man do unto me.” PSALM cxviii. 6.