The executioner had wreathed his hand in her dark, flowing tresses; already his dreadful weapon was brandished in the air, when it was crossed by the bright Toledo blade of the young cavalier, and flew from his grasp, clanging against the prison wall.
"Unhand her, dog!" cried Julio, "or die the death!"
Sullenly the executioner released his hold, and sullenly listened to the royal pardon.
Magdalena was soon beneath her father's roof,—soon in the arms of her cousin Juanita. Long did she resist the importunities of Julio; for though innocent in fact, judicially she stood convicted of a capital offence. But as time rolled on,—as her innocence became the popular belief,—she finally relented, accepted his hand, and beneath the beautiful sky of Italy, forgot, or remembered only as a dream, the perils and sorrows of her early life.
PHILETUS POTTS.
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.
Philetus Potts is dead. Like Grimes, he was a "good old man!" A true gentleman of the old school, he clung to many of the fashions of a by-gone period with a pertinacity, which, to the eyes of the thoughtless, savored somewhat of the ludicrous. It was only of late years that he relinquished his three-cornered hat; to breeches, buckles, and hair powder he adhered to the last. He was also partial to pigtails, though his earliest was shorn from his head by a dangerous rival, who cut him out of the good graces of Miss Polly Martine, a powdered beauty of the past century, by amputating his cue; while his latest one was sacrificed on the altar of humanity—but thereby hangs a tale.
If Mr. Potts was behind his age in dress, he was in advance of it in sentiment. In his breast the milk of human kindness never curdled, and his intelligent mind was ever actively employed in devising ways and means to alleviate the sufferings of humanity, and to change the hearts of evil doers. His comprehensive kindness included the brute creation as well as mankind, in the circle of his active sympathy.