who was present, disguised as a French waiter, and who gave him a prominent place in his next letter.

Whether Mrs. Robinson ever explained the matter to the Duchess, or whether she even sent her back her handkerchief, I really do not know. Like Robinson after he made the discovery, and story-tellers generally 'I came away then.'

THE GREEN MONSTER.

PERANCE TALE.

- A TEM

Translated for the Literary World, from the French of Gérard de Nerval, and respectfully dedicated to the T-totallers of Armerica.

April 1853.

I. THE DEVIL'S CASTLE.

DIFFERENT evil spirits are known to have different localities.

The devil Vauvert is essentially an inhabitant of Paris; he has resided there for several centuries, if the historians are to be believed. Sauval, Felibien, Sainte-Foix and Delacroix have told us of his pranks at length.

He appears at first to have inhabited Castle Vauvert, which was situated on the very spot now occupied by the merry Chartreuse ball; that is to say, at the end of the Luxembourg, and opposite the alleys of the Observatory.

This castle, of sad reputation, was partly demolished, and its ruins became out-houses and offices to the convent of Chartreux, in which convent Jean de la Lune, nephew of the anti-pope Benedict XIII., died in 1414. Jean de la Lune was suspected of holding intercourse with a certain devil, probably the familiar spirit of the old Castle Vauvert, for each of these feudal edifices had its familiar spirit, as is well known. History, however, has left us no positive information on this interesting point.

But the devil Vauvert made himself talked about again in the time of Louis XII.

For a long time there was heard every night a great noise in a house constructed of the ruins of the old convent, and deserted by its owners several years previous.

The neighbors, in a great fright, applied to the lieutenant of police, who sent some archers. What was the astonishment of these soldiers, on their arrival, to hear the clinking of glasses, mingled with boisterous laughter!

The first supposition naturally was, that some robbers or coiners were holding an orgie, and, judging of their number from the noise they made, it was deemed prudent to send for a reinforcement. But the noise seemed to increase with the arrival of the new squadron; and the sergeants were in no hurry to lead their troops into this den, where they heard disturbance enough to have been the work of a whole army.

At last, about morning, a sufficient body of troops. arrived. They entered the house just as its obscurest corners were lighted up by the rays of the rising sun. Nothing was to be seen, and all was silent!

The examination lasted all day. When every part of the premises above ground had been ransacked, some one suggested that the noise might have come from the cellar. The catacombs were in this quarter, and there might very possibly be a communication.

But while the police were preparing to act upon the hint, night set in again, and the noise recommenced louder than ever.

Some of the soldiers, however, had previously looked into the cellar and discovered nothing there but bottles. "It must be the devil that has set them a dancing," said they; and no one dared to descend and disturb his Satanic Majesty's amusement.

The authorities contented themselves with occupying the approaches to the street and asking the prayers of the clergy.

The clergy prayed to any extent, and even squirted a large amount of holy water into the cellar through the trap-door.

The noise went on all the same.

II. THE SERGEANT.

During a whole week the neighborhood was blocked up by a crowd of citizens, half frightened and half curious.

At length, a provost-sergeant, bolder than the rest. offered to descend into the accursed cellar, in consideration of a pension, to revert, in case he perished in the attempt, to a dress-maker named Peggy.

He was a brave man, this sergeant, very little superstitious, and very much in love. He adored the dressmaker, who was a very neat and very frugal person indeed, one might almost call her miserly.

She would not marry a simple sergeant with no income. But on gaining a pension, the sergeant would seem quite another man in her eyes.

Encouraged by this prospect, he exclaimed that he believed in neither God nor the devil, and that he would find out what this noise was.

"What do you believe in, then ?" asked one of his comrades.

"I believe," he replied, "in the Lieutenant of Police and the Provost of Paris."

Having enunciated this laconic and pregnant creed, he took his sabre between his teeth, a pistol in each hand, and ventured boldly down the steps.

A most extraordinary spectacle awaited him on reaching the floor of the cellar.

All the bottles were rolling in a voluptuous dance and forming most exquisite figures. The green-seals represented the men, and the red-seals the ladies.

There was nothing wanting, not even the orchestra, which was posted on the shelves. The empty bottles sounded like wind instruments; the broken bottles like cymbals and triangles; the cracked bottles emitted a piercing harmony like that of violins.

The sergeant, who had imbibed a few horns before undertaking his expedition, seeing only bottles there, felt greatly reasured, and began to dance himself in imitation of them.

By-and-by, encouraged by the charming gayety of the spectacle, he caught up a nice, long-necked bottle, carefully sealed with red, and apparently containing white claret, and pressed it lovingly to his heart.

Mad laughter resounded on every side! The startled sergeant let fall the bottle it broke into a thousand pieces!

The dance stopped; cries of terror were heard in

every corner of the cellar, and the sergeant felt his hair stand on end as he beheld the spilt wine forming a pool of blood. The corpse of a naked female, whose fair hair swept the ground and dabbled in the red moisture, was stretched at his feet!

The sergeant would not have been afraid of the devil in person, but this sight filled him with terror; however, remembering that he must give some account of his adventures, he suddenly seized a green-seal that was grinning in his face, and cried "I'll have one at any rate!"

A thundering peal of fiendish laughter replied, but the sergeant was already half way up the steps. In another instant he stood among his comrades and showing them the bottle, exclaimed, "Here's a goblin for you! A pretty set of soldiers you are to be afraid of going into a wine-cellar!

The piqued archers rushed down the steps pell-mell, and sure enough, they found only a broken bottle of claret in the middle of the floor, and a quantity of whole ones in their places.

The archers lamented the fate of the broken bottle, but, brave enough now, thought it their duty to remount each with a bottle in his hand.

They had fairly earned them and were allowed to drink them.

The sergeant said "As for me, I will keep mine for my wedding."

There was no reason for refusing him the promised pension, so he married the dress-maker, and

You were going to say they had plenty of children. On the contrary they had only one.

III. WHAT FOLLOWED.

At the sergeant's wedding supper he put the famous green-seal bottle between himself and his bride, and the two had it all to themselves.

The bottle was green as grass; the wine red as blood. Nine months after the dress-maker was delivered of a little monster entirely green, except two red horns on his forehead.

Now, after that, young girls, go and Chartreuse, on the site of Castle Vauvert

dance at the

if you can!

The child grew in size if not in virtue. Two circumstances annoyed his parents, his green color and a caudal appendage, which at first seemed only a prolongation of the coccyx, but gradually assumed the character of a genuine tail!

The surgeons and learned men of Paris were consulted. They declared it impossible to extirpate the tail without endangering the infant's life. They added that it was a case exceedingly rare, but of which examples were cited in Herodotus and Pliny the Younger. (Fourier's system had not been then invented, nor Lord Monboddo's.)

As to the color, they attributed it to a predominance of the bilious system. Nevertheless they essayed several caustic applications in the hope of modifying the too decided tint of the epidermis. After a number of washes and frictions they succeeded in changing the original grass-green first to a bottle-green, then to a sea-green, and finally to an apple-green. Once the skin appeared quite white, but in the evening it re-assumed its verdant hue.

The sergeant and the dress-maker could find no consolation for the annoyance caused them by this little monster; for his moral qualities is no way compensated for his physical disadvantages; he grew more obstinate, ill-tempered, and malicious every day.

The melancholy which they experienced led them into a vice too common among people of their class. They gave themselves up to drink.

But the sergeant would only drink wine sealed with red, and his wife would only drink wine sealed with green.

Every time the sergeant was dead-drunk he saw in his sleep the bleeding woman whose apparition had so terrified him when he broke the bottle in the cellar. The phantom would say to him, "Why didst thou press me to thy heart and afterwards slay me? me, who loved thee so well!"

Every time the sergeant's wife had been too attentive to the green-seal, she saw in her sleep the apparition of a huge and hideous green devil, who said to her, "Why art thou astonished to see me? Didst thou not drink of the bottle? Am not I the father of thy child?"

When the child was thirteen years old he disappeared one day, and no one ever knew what became of him.