CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE,

LADY MARABOUT'S TROUBLES,

OTHER STORIES.

By "OUIDA,"

AUTHOR OF "IDALIA," "STRATHMORE," "CHANDOS," "GRANVILLE DE VIGNE," ETC.

CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE,

AND OTHER STORIES.

ADVERTISEMENT.

The Publishers have the pleasure of offering to the many admirers of the writings of "Ouida," the present volume of Contributions, which have appeared from time to time in the leading Journals of Europe, and which have recently been collected and revised by the author, for publication in book-form.

They have also in press, to be speedily published, another similar volume of tales, from the same pen, together with an unpublished romance entitled "Under Two Flags."

Our editions of Ouida's Works are published by express arrangement with the author; and any other editions that may appear in the American market will be issued in violation of the courtesies usually extended both to authors and publishers.

Philadelphia, May, 1867.

CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE;

THE STORY OF A BROIDERED SHIELD.

Cecil Castlemaine was the beauty of her county and her line, the handsomest of all the handsome women that had graced her race, when she moved, a century and a half ago, down the stately staircase, and through the gilded and tapestried halls of Lilliesford. The Town had run mad after her, and her face levelled politics, and was cited as admiringly by the Whigs at St. James's as by the Tories at the Cocoa-tree, by the beaux and Mohocks at Garraway's as by the alumni at the Grecian, by the wits at Will's as by the fops at Ozinda's.

Wherever she went, whether to the Haymarket or the Opera, to the 'Change for a fan or the palace for a state ball, to Drury Lane to see Pastoral Philips's dreary dilution of Racine, or to some fair chief of her faction for basset and ombre, she was surrounded by the best men of her time, and hated by Whig beauties with virulent wrath, for she was a Tory to the backbone, indeed a Jacobite at heart; worshipped Bolingbroke, detested Marlborough and Eugene,