Reissue of the Great Histories. The Only Complete Edition. HUME, GIBBON, AND MACAULAY. In Duodecimo Volumes, Muslin, FORTY Cents Each. The volumes sold separately, and sent, postage free (for any distance in the United States under 3000 miles), HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE, NEW YORK, Lord Macaulay's History of England. In Five Volumes. DUODECIMO EDITION, COMPLETE. With Portrait and elaborate Index. Hume's History of England. History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Abdication of BON. Gibbon's Rome. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. By EDWARD GIB- FINE OCTAVO EDITION OF LORD MACAULAY'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. OCTAVO LIBRARY EDITION, COMPLETE. With Portrait and elaborate Index. "THE QUEEN OF HEARTS," "ANTONINA," "THE DEAD SECRET,' &c., &c., &c. ""AFTER DARK," ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN MCLENA N. NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE. 1861. PUBL LIBRARY ASTOR LENOX AND R BRYAN WALLER PROCTER; FROM ONE OF HIS YOUNGER BRETHREN IN LITERATURE, WHO SINCERELY VALUES HIS FRIENDSHIP, AND WHO GRATEFULLY REMEMBERS MANY HAPPY HOURS SPENT IN HIS HOUSE. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and sixty, by HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. THE WOMAN IN WHITE. stances under notice from their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively as he has spoken before them. Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offense against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness-with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word. Let Walter Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight years, be heard first. THE NARRATIVE OF WALTER HART- I. IT was the last day of July. The long hot summer was drawing to a close; and we, the weary pilgrims of the London pavement, were beginning to think of the cloud-shadows on the corn-fields, and the autumn breezes on the seashore. For my own poor part, the fading summer left me out of health, out of spirits, and, if the truth must be told, out of money as well. During the past year, I had not managed my professional resources as carefully as usual; and my extravagance now limited me to the prospect of spending the autumn economically between my mother's cottage at Hampstead, and my own chambers in town. The evening, I remember, was still and cloudy; the London air was at its heaviest; the distant hum of the street-traffic was at its faintest; the small pulse of the life within me and the great heart of the city around me seemed to be sinking in unison, languidly and more languidly, with the sinking sun. I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs. It was one of the two evenings in every week which I was accustomed to spend with my mother and my sister. So I turned my steps northward, in the direction of Hampstead. But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse; and the story is left to be told, for the first time, in this place. As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on Events which I have yet to relate make it hearsay evidence. When the writer of these necessary to mention in this place that my faintroductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) ther had been dead some years at the period of happens to be more closely connected than oth- which I am now writing, and that my sister ers with the incidents to be recorded, he will Sarah and I were the sole survivors of a famdescribe them in his own person. When his ily of five children. My father was a drawingexperience fails, he will retire from the position master before me. His exertions had made of narrator; and his task will be continued, him highly successful in his profession; and from the point at which he has left it off, by his affectionate anxiety to provide for the fuother persons who can speak to the circum-ture of those who were dependent on his la bors, had impelled him, from the time of his marriage, to devote to the insuring of his life a much larger portion of his income than most men consider it necessary to set aside for that purpose. Thanks to his admirable prudence and self-denial, my mother and sister were left, after his death, as independent of the world as they had been during his lifetime. I succeeded to his connection, and had every reason to feel grateful for the prospect that awaited me at my starting in life. The quiet twilight was still trembling on the topmost ridges of the heath; and the view of London below me had sunk into a black gulf in the shadow of the cloudy night, when I stood before the gate of my mother's cottage. I had hardly rung the bell, before the housedoor was opened violently; my worthy Italian friend, Professor Pesca, appeared in the servant's place; and darted out joyously to receive me, with a shrill foreign parody on an English cheer. On his own account, and, I must be allowed to add, on mine also, the Professor merits the honor of a formal introduction. Accident has made him the starting-point of the strange family story which it is the purpose of these pages to unfold. my own nation, I should, of course, have looked after Pesca carefully; but, as foreigners are generally quite as well able to take care of themselves in the water as Englishmen, it never occurred to me that the art of swimming might merely add one more to the list of manly exercises which the Professor believed that he could learn impromptu. Soon after we had both struck out from shore, I stopped, finding my friend did not gain on me, and turned round to look for him. To my horror and amazement, I saw nothing between me and the beach but two little white arms, which struggled for an instant above the surface of the water, and then disappeared from view. When I dived for him, the poor little man was lying quietly coiled up at the bottom, in a hollow of shingle, looking by many degrees smaller than I had ever seen him look before. During the few minutes that elapsed while I was taking him in, the air revived him, and he ascended the steps of the machine with my assistance. With the partial recovery of his animation came the return of his wonderful delusion on the subject of swimming. As soon as his chattering teeth would let him speak, he smiled vacantly, and said he thought it must have been the Cramp. When he had thoroughly recovered himself and had joined me on the beach, his warm Southern nature broke through all artificial English restraints, in a moment. He overwhelmed me with the wildest expressions of affectionexclaimed passionately, in his exaggerated Italian way, that he would hold his life, henceforth, at my disposal-and declared that he should never be happy again, until he had found an op I had first become acquainted with my Italian friend by meeting him at certain great houses, where he taught his own language and I taught drawing. All I then knew of the history of his life was, that he had once held a situation in the University of Padua; that he had left Italy for political reasons (the nature of which he uniformly declined to mention to any one); and that he had been for many years respectably established in London as a teacher of lan-portunity of proving his gratitude by rendering guages. me some service which I might remember, on my side, to the end of my days. I did my best to stop the torrent of his tears and protestations, by persisting in treating the whole adventure as a good subject for a joke; and succeeded at last, as I imagined, in lessening Pesca's overwhelming sense of obligation to me. Little did I think then-little did I think afterward when our pleasant Brighton holiday had drawn to an end that the opportunity of serving me for which my grateful companion so ardently longed, was soon to come; that he was eagerly to seize it on the instant; and that, by so doing, he was to turn the whole current of my existence into a new channel, and to alter me to myself almost past recognition. Without being actually a dwarf-for he was perfectly well-proportioned from head to foot -Pesca was, I think, the smallest human being I ever saw, out of a show-room. Remarkable any where, by his personal appearance, he was still further distinguished among the rank and file of mankind, by the harmless eccentricity of his character. The ruling idea of his life appeared to be, that he was bound to show his gratitude to the country which had afforded him an asylum and a means of subsistence, by doing his utmost to turn himself into an Englishman. Not content with paying the nation in general the compliment of invariably carrying an umbrella, and invariably wearing gaiters and a white hat, the Professor further aspired Yet, so it was. If I had not dived for Proto become an Englishman in his habits and fessor Pesca, when he lay under water on his amusements, as well as in his personal appear-shingle bed, I should, in all human probability, ance. Finding us distinguished, as a nation, never have been connected with the story which by our love of athletic exercises, the little man, these pages will relate-I should never, perhaps, in the innocence of his heart, devoted himself have heard even the name of the woman, who impromptu to all our English sports and pas- has lived in all my thoughts, who has possessed times, whenever he had the opportunity of herself of all my energies, who has become the joining them; firmly persuaded that he could one guiding influence that now directs the puradopt our national amusements of the field, by pose of my life. an effort of will, precisely as he had adopted our national gaiters and our national white hat. I had seen him risk his limbs blindly at a fox-hunt and in a cricket-field; and, soon afterward, I saw him risk his life, just as blindly, in the sea at Brighton. We had met there accidentally, and were bathing together. If we had been engaged in any exercise peculiar to II. PESCA'S face and manner, on the evening when we confronted each other at my mother's gate, were more than sufficient to inform me that something extraordinary had happened. It was quite useless, however, to ask him for an immediate explanation. I could only con |