CHAPTER THE THIRD. THE VALLEY OF THE BOWL. THE SCENE CHANGES TO THE MOUNTAIN LAKE, WHERE THE TRAGEDY OF THE HOUSE OF ALBARONE WILL AT LAST COME TO AN END. (continued 3)

Onward! and onward! sped the wild horses, tracking their course with blood, and rushing past the cottages of the affrighted peasantry, like beings of the unreal world, fired with the soul of Arimanes, cursed with the Spirit of the Evil One! Onward and Onward!

One brave barb, came plunging from the depths of a wood, and a precipice mighty and steep, was before him, but he heeded it not. Down an hundred fathoms into the boiling water he fell.

Another black steed sank into the calm waters of a placid river; another reached the sea, and plunging in its depths, swam far, far, into the wide expanse of the waters and was heard of no more.

The last—swept like the wind, by hamlet and tower and town. The live-long day he urged on his career. The blood streaming from his nostrils, his limbs weakened, and his sinews unstrung, he entered the confines of a long valley, where a calm lake, gave its bosom to the evening sun.

His pace was unsteady and he staggered to and fro, yet still the bloody fragment hung at his back. At last he fell and died, and the scene of his death was before a pleasant cottage on the green hill side. Much wondered the solitary Student of the cot, as he surveyed the carcass of the gallant steed. Little did he wot from whence he sped or the cause of his flight.

Meanwhile gathering around the shapeless trunk, the men of Albarone built a pile of the branches of oaks, that had lain mouldering for years in the forest, and soon a broad bright flame arose, and it burned till the setting of the sun, when a storm gathered in the west, and heralded by thunder, and armed with lightning, it swept over the earth, and the ashes of the fratricide, mingling with the whirlwind, never more polluted the green bosom of the earth.

Thus runs the legend of the Doom of the Poisoner, thus runs the legend of the death that befel.

Aldarin the Fratricide.