Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 | Page 8

but it is just possible, that an entire confidence placed in Mr Gaskoin might have led to a happier issue; but her own conviction that her position was irrecoverable, her hopelessness and her pride, closed her lips. Her friends saw that there was something wrong; and when a few lines from Major Elliott announced his immediate departure for Paris, they concluded that some strange mystery had divided the lovers, and clouded the hopeful future that for a short period had promised so brightly.
Vincent Dunbar was not a man to break his heart at the disappointment which, it is needless to say, awaited him. Long years afterwards, when Sir Henry Elliott was not only married, but had daughters coming out in the world, he, one day at a dinner-party, sat next a pale-faced, middle-aged lady, whose still beautiful features, combined with the quiet, almost grave elegance of her toilet, had already attracted his attention in the drawing-room. It was a countenance of perfect serenity; but no observing eye could look at it without feeling that that was a serenity not born of joy, but of sadness--a calm that had succeeded a storm--a peace won by a great battle. Sir Henry felt pleased when he saw that the fortunes of the dinner-table had placed him beside this lady, and they had not been long seated before he took an opportunity of addressing her. Her eyelids fell as she turned to answer him; but there was a sweet, mournful smile on her lip--a smile that awoke strange recollections, and made his heart for a moment stand still. For some minutes he did not speak again, nor she either; when he did, it was to ask her, in a low, gentle voice, to take wine with him. The lady's hand shook visibly as she raised her glass; but, after a short interval, the surprise and the pang passed away, and they conversed calmly on general subjects, like other people in society.
When Sir Henry returned to the drawing-room, the pale-faced lady was gone; and, a few days afterwards, the Morning Post announced among its departures that Miss Seymour had left London for the continent.

THE CONTINENTAL 'BRADSHAW' IN 1852.
Bradshaw's Continental Railway Guide--the square, pale-yellow, compact, brochure which makes its appearance once a month, and which has doubled its thickness in its brief existence of five years--is suggestive of a multitude of thoughts concerning the silent revolution now passing over Europe. Presidents may have coups d'état; kings may put down parliaments, and emperors abrogate constitutions; Legitimists may dream of the past, and Communists of the future; but the railways are marking out a path for themselves in Europe which will tend to obliterate, or at least to soften, the rugged social barriers which separate nation from nation. This will not be effected all at once, and many enthusiasts are disappointed that the cosmopolitanism advances so slowly; but the result is not the less certain in being slow.
Our facetious contemporary Punch once gave a railway map of England, in which the face of the land was covered with intersecting lines at mutual distances of only a mile or two. A railway map of Europe has certainly not yet assumed such a labyrinthine character; still, the lines of civilisation (for so we may well term them) are becoming closer and closer every year. The outposts of Europe, where the Scandinavian, the Sclavonian, the Italian, and the Spaniard respectively rule, are scanty in their exhibition of such lines; but as we gradually approach the scenes of commercial activity, there do railways appear in greater and greater proximity. France strikingly exemplifies its own theory, that 'Paris is France,' by shewing how all its important railways spring from the metropolis in six directions. Belgium exhibits its compact net-work of railways, by which nearly all its principal towns are accommodated. The phlegmatic Dutchman has as yet placed the locomotive only in that portion of Holland which lies between the Rhine and the Zuiderzee. Rhineland, from Bale to Wiesbaden, is under railway dominion. North Germany, within a circle of which Magdeburg may be taken as a centre, is railed pretty thickly; and Vienna has become a point from which lines of great length start. Exterior to all these are solitary lines, the pioneers of the new order of things, pointing in directions which will one day come within the yellow covers of Bradshaw. There is one line straggling out to Rostock; another to Stettin and Bromberg, on its way to Danzig; another to Warsaw, on its way to meet the czar at St Petersburg; another to Pesth, whence it will be carried through the scenes of the late Hungarian war; another to the neighbourhood of the Adriatic; others from Central Germany southward to the Swiss highlands, which bar further progress; and a very modest