The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

STORIES AND SKETCHES.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by
LEE & SHEPARD,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

CONTENTS.

[The Skeleton at the Banquet.]

DR. GRAHAM sat in his office, his book closed on his knee, and his eyes fixed upon the street. There was nothing of interest to be seen. A light snow was falling, making the pavement dreary; but it was Christmas, and his thoughts had gone back to other days, as people's thoughts will go on anniversary occasions. He was thinking of the young wife he had buried three years and three months ago; of the great fireplace in his boyhood's home, and his mother's face lit up by the glow; of many things past which were pleasant; and reflecting sadly upon the fact that life grew duller, more commonplace, as one grew older. Not that he was an elderly man,—he was, in reality, but twenty-eight; yet, upon that Christmas day, he felt old, very old; his wife dead, his practice slender, his prospects far from promising,—even the slow-moving days daily grew heavier, soberer, more serious. It was a holiday, but he had not even an invitation for dinner, where the happiness of friends and the free flow of thought might lend a momentary sparkle to his own stale spirits.

The doctor was not of a melancholy, despondent nature, nor did he rely for his pleasures upon others. He was a self-made man, and self-reliant to an unusual degree, as self-made men are apt to be. His tussle with circumstances had awakened in him a combative and resistant energy, which had served him well when means were scant and the rewards of merit few. But there is something in the festal character of Christmas which, by luring from the shadows of our struggle-life the boy nature of us, makes homeless men feel solitary; and, from being forlorn, the mood soon grows to one of painful unrest; all from beholding happiness from which we are shut out. On this gray afternoon not the most fascinating speculations of De Boismont and the hospital lectures,—not the consciousness of the originality and importance of his own discoveries in the field of Sensation and Nerve Force,—had any interest for Dr. Graham.

That he had talent and a good address; that he studied and experimented many hours every day; that he as thoroughly understood his profession as was consistent with a six years' actual experience as an actual practitioner; that there was nothing of the quack or pretender in him;—all this did not prevent his rent from being high, his patients few, and his means limited. With no influential friends to recommend and introduce him, he had resolutely rented a room in a genteel locality up town, had dressed well, and had worn the "air" of a man of business, ever ready for duty; but success had not attended upon his efforts, and the future gave no promise of a change. Of this he was thinking, somewhat bitterly; for what proud soul is not stung with unmerited neglect? Then a deep sadness stole over him at thoughts of the loss which had come upon his early manhood,—a loss like which there is none other so abiding in strong, wise hearts. A cloud seemed to be sifting down and closing around him, which, with unusual passivity, he seemed unable or unwilling to shake off. A carriage obstructed his view, by passing in front of his window. It stopped; then the footman descended, opened the carriage-door, and turned to the office-bell. He was followed by his master, who awaited the answer to the bell, and was ushered into the practitioner's presence by the single waiting-servant of his modest establishment. The doctor arose to receive his guest, who was a man still younger than himself, with something of a foreign air, and dressed with a quiet richness in keeping with his evident wealth and position.

"Dr. Graham?"

The doctor bowed assent.

"If you are not otherwise engaged, I would like you to go home with me, to see my sister, who is not well. There is no great haste about the matter, but if you can go now, I shall be glad to take you with me. It will save you a walk through the snow."

"He knows," thought the doctor, "that I do not drive a carriage;" and that a stranger, of such ability to hire the most noted practitioners, should call upon him, was a source of unexpressed surprise and suspicion.

"What do you think is the matter with your sister?" he unconcernedly asked, taking his overcoat from the wardrobe.

"That is for you to decide. It is a case of no ordinary character—one which will require study." He led the way at once to the door, as if unwilling to delay, notwithstanding he had at first stated that no haste was necessary. "Step in, doctor, and I will give you an inkling of the case during the drive, which will occupy some fifteen or twenty minutes."

"In the first place," continued the stranger, as they rolled away, "I will introduce myself to you as St. Victor Marchand, at present a resident of your city, but recently from the island of Madeira. My house is upon the Fifth Avenue, not far from Madison Square. My household consists only of myself and sister, with our servants. I have the means to remunerate you amply for any demands we may make upon your time or skill; and I ought to add, one reason for selecting so young a physician is, that I think you will be the more able and willing to devote more time to the case than more famous practitioners. However, you are not unknown to me. I have heard you well-spoken of; and I remember that, when you were a student in Paris, you were mentioned with honor by the college, for an able paper read before the open section upon the very subject to which I now propose to direct your attention,—mental disease," he added, after a moment's hesitation.

"A case of insanity?" bluntly asked the doctor.

"Heaven forbid! And yet I must not conceal from you that I fear it."

"Give me some of the symptoms. Insanity in strong development, or aberration of faculties, or hallucination?"

"I cannot reply. It is one and all, it seems to me. The fact is, doctor, I wish to introduce you to your patient simply as a friend of mine, so as to give you an opportunity for studying my sister's case, unembarrassed by any suspicion on her part. To excite her suspicions is to frustrate all hopes of doing anything for or with her. Can you—will you—do me the favor to dine with me this evening? It is now only about an hour to six, and if you have no other engagement, I will do my best to entertain you, and you can then meet my sister as her brother's guest. Shall it be so?"

The young man's tones were almost beseeching, and his manner betrayed the most intense solicitude. Quite ready to accede to the request, from curiosity as well as from a desire to reässure the young man, Dr. Graham did not hesitate to say, "Willingly, sir, if it will assist in a professional knowledge of the object of my call."

The change from the office to the home into which the physician was introduced was indeed grateful to the doctor's feelings. The light, warmth, and splendor of the rooms gave to the home an air of tropical sensuousness; and yet an exquisite taste seemed to preside over all. Though not unfamiliar with elegance, this home of the brother and sister wore, to the visitor, an enchanted look, as well from the foreign character of many of its adornments and the rare richness of its works of art, as from the gay, friendly, enthusiastic manner of his entertainer,—a manner never attained by English or Americans. Sending word to Miss Marchand that there would be a guest to dinner, St. Victor fell into a sparkling conversation, discoursing most intelligibly of Paris, Madeira, the East Indies, and South America, taking his guest from room to room to show this or that curious specimen of the productions or handicraft of each country. As the articles exhibited were rare, and many of them of scientific value, and as the young man's knowledge kept pace with his eloquence of discourse, Dr. Graham was agreeably absorbed.

An hour passed rapidly. Then the steward announced dinner; but it was not until they were about seating themselves at table that the patient made her appearance. It was now twilight out of doors. The curtains were drawn and the dining-room lit only by wax tapers, under whose soft radiance bloomed an abundance of flowers, mostly of exotic beauty and fragrance. It was evident that the young master of the house brought with him his early tastes.

"We have an extra allowance of light and flowers, and a little feast, too, I believe; for neither myself nor my English steward here forget that this is Christmas. Don't you think it a beautiful holiday? My mother always kept it with plenty of wax candles and flowers."

"It is a sacred day to me," answered the doctor, sadly, thinking of his lost wife and of the three times they had kept it together, with feasting and love's delights.

At this moment Miss Marchand floated into the room and to her place at the head of the table,—a girlish creature, who gave their guest a smile when the brother said,—

"Dr. Graham is not entirely a stranger, Edith; he was in Paris when we were there. You were a child, then. I was indeed glad to meet him in this strange city, and I mean that we shall be friends upon a visiting footing, if he will permit it."

It was but natural for the physician to fix a piercing look upon the face of her whom he had been given to understand was to be his patient, and whose disease was of a character to command his best skill. His physician's eye detected no outward tokens of ill health, either of body or of mind. A serene brow, sweet, steady, loving eyes, cheeks rosy and full with maiden health, a slender though not thin figure, all were there before him, giving no indication even of the "nervousness" assumed to be so common with young ladies of this generation. Exquisite beauty, allied with perfect health, seemed to "blush and bloom" all over her; and the medical man would have chosen her, with professional enthusiasm, as his ideal of what a young woman ought to be. Her pink-silk robe adapted itself to her soft form as naturally as the petals of a rose to its curving sweetness. Only to look upon her gladdened the sad heart of Dr. Graham, the wifeless and childless. He felt younger than he had felt for years, as thirsty grass feels under the influence of a June sun after a morning of showers. His spirits rose, and he talked well, even wittily,—betraying not only his varied learning as a student and his keen powers of observation as a man of the world, but also the gentleness and grace which, in his more active, worldly life, were too much put aside. It was a little festival, in which the dainty dishes, the fruit, and wine played but a subordinate part.

Nothing could be more apparent than the pride and affection with which Mr. Marchand regarded his sister. Was there, indeed, a skeleton at this feast? The doctor shuddered as he asked himself the question. All his faculties were on the alert to deny and disprove the possibility of the presence of the hideous visitor. His sympathies were too keenly enlisted to be willing to acknowledge its existence even in the background of that day or the days to come to that household. Yet, ever and anon, in the midst of their joyousness, a strange look would leap from the quick, dark eyes of St. Victor, as he fixed them upon his sister's face, and an expression would flit across his own face inscrutable to the watchful physician. With a slight motion of his hand or head he would arrest and direct the doctor's attention, who would then perceive Miss Marchand's luminous glance changing into a look expressive of anxiety and terror, the glow of her cheeks fading into a pallor like that of one in a swoon. But, strange! an instant would change it all. The pallor, lingering but a moment, would melt away as a mist before the sun, and the roses would come back to the cheeks again in all their rosiness. The host would divert his companion's startled attention by gracefully pressing the viands upon his notice, or by some brilliant sally, so scintillating with wit or droll wisdom, as to have brought the smile to an anchorite's eyes.

"I pray you watch her! Did you not notice that slight incoherency?" he remarked, in a whisper, leaning over toward the doctor.

The doctor had noticed nothing but the playful badinage of a happy girl.

"I am afraid her loveliness blinds my judgment. I must see what there is in all this," he answered to himself, deprecatingly.

They sat long at table. Not that any one ate to excess, though the pompous English steward served up one delicious dish after another, including the time-honored Christmas feast requisite,—the plum-pudding,—which was tasted and approved, not to wound the Briton's national and professional vanity, but sent off, but slightly shorn of its proportions, to grace the servants' table.

The guest noticed that St. Victor partook very sparingly of food, although he fully enjoyed the occasion. Save tasting of the wild game and its condiment of real Calcutta currie, he ate nothing of the leading dishes or entrées. Neither did he drink much wine, whose quality was of the rarest, being of his own stock drawn from his father's rich store in his Madeira cellar. Of the luscious grapes and oranges which formed a leading feature of the dessert, he partook more freely, as if they cooled his tongue. That there was fever, and nervous excitement, in the young man's frame, was evident. Indeed, to the doctor's observant eye, the brother appeared more delicate, and of a temperament more highly nervous than his sister.

The frankness, the almost childish confidence and open-heartedness of the young people formed one of their greatest attractions to the usually reticent, thoughtful physician. He felt his own impulses expanding under the warmth of their sunny natures until the very romance of his boyhood stirred again, and sprouted through the mould in which it lay dormant. There was nothing in their past history or present prospects which, seemingly, they cared to conceal, so that he had become possessed of a pretty fair history of their lives before the last course came upon the board. Both were born in the island of Madeira. St. Victor was twenty-four, Edith nineteen, years of age. Their mother was the daughter of an American merchant, long resident on the island; their father was a French gentleman of fortune, who had retired to the island for his health, had loved and won the fair American girl, and lived with her a life of almost visionary beauty and happiness. Their father had joined their grandfather in some of his mercantile ventures; hence those voyages to the Indies, to South America, to the Mediterranean in which the children were participants. They also had spent a couple of years in France, cultivating the acquaintance of their relatives there, and adding some finishing touches to St. Victor's education, which, having been conducted under his father's eye by accomplished tutors, was unusually thorough and varied for one so young. This fact the doctor surmised during the progress of the banquet, though he did not ascertain the full extent of the young man's accomplishments until a future day. Nor was Edith's education overlooked. She was in a remarkable degree fitted to be the companion and confidante of her brother,—sympathizing in his tastes, reading his books, enjoying his pastimes, and sharing his ambitions to their utmost. It was a beautiful blending of natures,—such as the world too rarely beholds,—such as our received "systems" of education and association cannot produce.

Their grandfather had been dead for several years; their father for three, their mother for two. "She faded rapidly after father's death,—drooped like a frost-blighted flower," said St. Victor. "They had been too happy in this world to remain long apart in the next."

"You now see, doctor," the narrator of these family reminiscences at length said, "why Edith and myself are so unlike. My sister is her mother over again, fair and bright, like your New York ladies,—among the most beautiful women, in many respects, I have ever seen. I am dark and thin,—a very Frenchman in tastes, temperament, and habits."

He toyed a few moments with an orange; then, again leaning toward the physician, he said, in that sharp whisper which once before during the evening he had made use of,—

"I will tell you all, doctor. My father died insane. We afterwards learned that it was one of the inheritances of his haughty and wealthy family. The peace and delight which he had with his wife and children long delayed the terrible legacy; but it fell due at last. He died a maniac,—a raving maniac. She does not know it. It killed her mother. Imagine, doctor, imagine, if you can, how I watch over her! how I pity! how I dread! O God! to think that I must detect those symptoms, as I have done during the last six months. I have seen the virus in her eyes to-night. I have not breathed a word to her of my knowledge and convictions; but I am as certain of it as that she sits there. Look at her now, doctor,—now!"—with a stealthy side-glance at the beautiful girl who, at the moment, was smiling absently over a flower which she had taken from its vase,—smiling only as girls can,—as if it interpreted something deeper than a passing thought.

It is impossible to describe the strain of agony in the young man's voice; his sudden pallor; the sweat starting from his forehead; or to describe the piercing power of his eye, as he turned it from the face of his sister to that of his guest. Accustomed as he was to every form of suffering, Dr. Graham shrank from the appeal in that searching look, which mutely asked him if there were any hope.

The clear whisper in which St. Victor had spoken aroused Edith from her revery; she darted a glance at both parties, so full of suspicion and dread, so in contrast with her natural sunny expression, that it was as if her face had suddenly withered, from that of a child, to the thin features of the careworn woman of fifty. She half rose in her chair, faltered, sank back, and sat gazing fixedly at the two men; yet silent as a statue.

St. Victor was the first to recover himself. He burst into a light laugh,—sweet as a shower of flowers,—and, taking up a slender-necked decanter of pale wine, passed it to his guest, remarking,—

"We are forgetting that this is Christmas night. Fill your glass, my friend, with this wine,—the oldest and rarest of our precious store,—and I will fill mine. Then, we will both drink joyously to the health of my only darling—my one beloved—my sister."

He said this so prettily, poured out the wine with such arch pleasantry of gesture, that the color came back to Edith's cheeks; and when the two men bowed to her, before drinking, she gave them a smile, steeped in melancholy, but very sweet, and brimming with affection. It thrilled Dr. Graham's veins more warmly than the priceless wine.

"After our mother's death," continued St. Victor, in his natural voice, "we found ourselves quite alone. We had formed no great attachment to our relatives in France; and, as one branch of our father's business remained still unsettled in this country, we resolved to come hither. Then, too, we had a longing to behold the land which was our mother's. When we had arranged and closed up our affairs in Madeira, we sailed for France, where we spent one winter only. I thought"—with a tender glance at his sister—"that a sea voyage would do Edith good. I was not satisfied about her health; so I drew her away from Paris, and, last spring, we fulfilled our promise to see our mother's land, and came hither. I am afraid the climate here does not agree with her. Do you think she looks well?"

The girl moved uneasily, casting a beseeching look at the speaker.

"It is not I who am not strong," she said; "it is you, St. Victor. If your friend is a doctor, I wish he would give a little examination into the state of your health. You are thin and nervous; you have no appetite,—while he can see, at a glance, that nothing in the world ails me."

Again her brother laughed; not gayly as before, but with a peculiar and subtle significance; while he gave the doctor another swift glance, saying to him in a low voice,—

"I have heard that persons threatened with certain mental afflictions never suspect their own danger."

Dr. Graham did not know if the young lady overheard this remark; he glanced toward her, but her eyes again were upon the flowers, which she was pulling to pieces. He perceived that her lips trembled; but she still smiled, scattering the crimson leaves over the white clothes.

At this period of his novel visit,—just then and there, when St. Victor laughed that subtle laugh and his sister vacantly destroyed the red flower,—a conviction rushed into the physician's mind, or rather, we may say, pierced it through like a ray of light in a darkened room.

Instantly all was clear to him. From that moment he was cool and watchful, but so pained with this sudden knowledge of the true state of the case that he wished himself well out of that splendid house, back in his own dreary office. He wished himself away, because he already loved these young people, and his sympathy with them was too keen to allow him further to enjoy himself; yet, in all his medical experience, he had never been so interested with a professional interest. As a physician, he felt a keen pleasure; as a friend, a keen pain. His faculties each sprang to its post, awaiting the next development of the scene.

While Mr. Marchand was giving some order to his steward, the beautiful girl at his other hand leaned toward him, and also whispered confidentially in his ear: "Dr. Graham, if you really are my brother's friend, I pray you watch him closely, and tell me at some future time if you have any fears—any suspicions of—Oh, I implore you, sir, do not deceive me!"

Her eyes were filled with tears, her voice choked.

The thing was absurd. Its ludicrous aspect struck the listener, almost forcing him to laugh; while the tears, at the same time, arose responsive in his own eyes.

A clock on the mantel chimed nine. The steward placed on the board the last delicacies of the feast,—Neapolitan creams and orange-water ice.

"Edith chooses luscious things like creams," remarked her brother. "Which will you have, doctor? As for me, I prefer ices; they cool my warm blood, which is fierce like tropic air. Ah, this is delicious! I am feverish, I believe; and the scent of the orange brings back visions of our dear island home."

He paused, as if his mind were again on the vine-clad hills of the "blessed isle." Then he spoke, suddenly,—

"Edith, have some of this?"

She smiled, shaking her head.

"But you must. I insist. You need it. Don't you agree with me, doctor, that it is just what she requires?"

He spoke in a rising key, with a rapid accent. Edith reached forth her hand, and took the little dish of orange ice. It shook like a lily in the wind; but she said, softly and with apparent calmness,—

"Anything to please you, brother. I will choose this every day if you think it good for me."

He gave her a satisfied look. Then there was a brief silence, which their guest was about to dissipate with a playful remark, when St. Victor turned abruptly to the steward,—

"Thompson," he cried, "now bring in the skeleton!"

"What, sir?" stammered the astonished servant.

"Bring in the skeleton, I said. Do you not know that the Egyptians always crown their feasts with a death's head? Bring it in, I say, and place it—there!"

Half-rising in his seat, he pointed to the vacant space behind his sister's chair.

The man now smiled, thinking his master jested; but his expression grew more questioning and anxious as the bright eyes turned upon him glittering in anger.

"Why am I not obeyed? Bring in the skeleton, I repeat, and place it behind my sister's chair. It is in the house; you will have no difficulty in finding it. It has lurked here long. I have been aware of its presence these many months,—always following, following my dear Edith,—a shadow in her steps. You see how young and fair she is; but it is all hollow—ashes—coffin-dust! She does not know of it; she has never even turned her head when it lurked behind her; but to-night she must make its acquaintance. It will not longer be put off. Our feast is nearly over. Bring it in, Thompson, and we will salute it."

The steward, with a puzzled look, turned from one to another of the company. Miss Marchand had risen to her feet, and was regarding her brother with terrified eyes, stretching out her hands toward him. The doctor, too, arose, not in excitement, but with commingled pain and resolution stamped upon his features; while his gaze rested upon the face of St. Victor until the eyes of the young man were riveted and arrested by the doctor's demeanor. A flush then diffused itself gradually over Marchand's pale countenance; his thin nostrils quivered; his fingers twitched and trembled and sought his bosom, as if in search of something concealed there. Then he laughed once more that short, nervous laugh so significant to the physician's ears, and cried, in a high tone,—

"So, Edith, you did not know that you were going mad? I did. I've watched you night and day this long time. I have all along been afraid it would end as it has—on Christmas night. That was the day our father tried to murder our mother. An anniversary, then, we have to-night celebrated. Ha, ha! And you didn't know the skeleton was awaiting admittance to the banquet!"

His eyes gleamed with a light at once of delight and with malice; but he quietly added,—

"But I shall not harm you, you demented thing, you beautiful insanity. There! doctor, didn't I tell you to watch her—to read her—to comprehend the subtle thing? So full of art and duplicity! But look at her now—now! She is as mad as the serpent which has poisoned itself with its own fangs—mad—mad! O God! has it come to this? But, I knew it—knew the skeleton was her skeleton—the bones without her beautiful flesh. We've had enough of it now. Take it away, Thompson,—hurry it away!"

"Appear to obey him. Pretend that you take something from the room," said Dr. Graham, in an undertone, to the servant, while St. Victor's eyes were fixed glaring and lurid upon his trembling, agonized, speechless sister.

The skeleton had, in truth, appeared at the Christmas feast.

Laying his hand firmly upon the young man's wrist the doctor said,—

"Mr. Marchand, you're not well, to-night. You are over-fatigued. Shall we go upstairs?"

St. Victor's quickly flashing gaze was met by that clear, resolute, almost fierce response in the physician's eye, before which he hesitated, then shrank. The madman had his master before him.

"You are right. I am not very well; my head aches; I'm worn out with this trouble about Edith, doctor. Do you think it is hopeless? She had better come with us. I don't like to leave her alone with that hideous shape at her back."

Obeying the gentle but firm pull upon his wrist, the brother turned to leave the room, looking back wistfully upon his sister. She was following them with clasped hands, and a face from which all youth and color had fled. St. Victor suddenly paused, gave a scream like the cry of a panther, wrenched himself quickly from the grasp upon his arm, and, in an instant, his teeth were buried in the white shoulder of his sister. But only for an instant, for almost as quickly as the madman's movement had been the doctor's. One terrible blow of his fist sent the maniac to the floor like a clod.

"O doctor! why did you do it?"

"To save your life, Miss Marchand."

"Poor St. Victor! His fate is on him at last."

Her voice was calm in its very despair. She sank down beside the senseless man, lifting the worn, white face to her lap and covering it with kisses. "I saw it,—yet I did not think it would come so soon. O God! be pitiful! Have I not prayed enough?"

The lips of the injured man began to quiver. "We must bind him and get him to bed before he fully recovers," said the doctor, lifting Edith to her feet. "Here, Thompson, help me to carry him to his bed."

When the maniac recovered consciousness fully, his ravings were fearful. It was the malady of frenzy in its most appalling condition. The extent of the mental wreck Dr. Graham had, for the last half hour of the feast, been trying to fathom. When he dealt that dreadful blow he knew the wreck was complete: reason had gone out forever with that panther-like shriek. All that could be done was to secure the maniac against injury to himself or others, and to administer such anti-spasmodics or anæsthetics as, in some degree, would control the paroxysms.

Poor St. Victor! So young, so gifted, so blest with worldly goods; his fate was upon him, as Edith had said.

From that hour he had but brief respite from torment. Not a gleam of sanity came from those fiery eyes; all was fierce, untamable, inhuman, as if the life had been one of storm and crime, instead of peace and purity. Did there lay upon that racking bed a proof of the natural depravity of the creature man, when the creature was uncontrolled by a reasoning, responsible will? Or, was it not rather a proof that the mental machine was in disorder, by a distention of the blood-vessels and their engorgement in the brain,—that cerebral excitement was a purely physical phenomenon, dependent upon simple, physical causes, which science some day shall define and skill shall counteract?

Happily, the fire in the sufferer's brain scorched and consumed the sources of his life, as flames drink up the water that is powerless to quench them. Day by day he wasted; and, in less than a month from that night,—Christmas evening,—St. Victor Marchand's form was at peace in death.

During all that time Dr. Graham never left the sufferer's bedside. Day and night he was there at his post, doing all that was possible to alleviate the pain. The skill of a physician and the love of a brother were exhausted in that battle with death in its most dreaded form.

His care was, too, required for Miss Edith. Her life was so interwoven with that of her brother, that the doctor doubted if she could survive the shock to her sympathies and affection. When the surprise of the tragedy was over, on the day following the first outburst of the malady, she told him that for months she had feared the worst. She had remarked symptoms so like her father's as to excite her fears; yet, with the happiness of youth, the sister persuaded herself that her apprehensions were groundless. His sunny nature seemed proof against the approach of an evil so blasting; and her momentary fears were banished by the very mood of heightened vivacity and excitement which had awakened them. Having no intimate friend in whom to confide, none to counsel, she had borne the weight of her inward sorrow and dread alone.

At intervals, during Christmas day, she had observed an incoherency in her brother's speech, and an unwonted nervousness of manner, which had inspired her with serious alarm. When he proposed to drive out, she encouraged the suggestion, hoping that the cold air might restore him to his usual state. Upon his return with Dr. Graham, he had seemed so entirely like himself, so happy, so disposed to enjoyment, that she once more dismissed every thought of danger, until she overheard the sharp whispers in which he addressed his guest.

"And oh, to think," she cried, while the tears rained down her cheeks, "that in his love for me, his madness should take the shape of beholding the conditions of his own brain reflected in mine! He was so afraid harm would come to me,—thoughtful of me so long as even the shadow of sanity remained. Dear, dear St. Victor,—so good, so pure, so wise! Why was not I the victim, if it was fated that there must be one?" Then lifting her tearful eyes,—"Doctor, perhaps the poison lurks in my veins, too! Tell me, do you think there is danger that I, too, shall one day go mad?"

"No, poor child, most emphatically, I do not. You must not permit such a fancy to enter your mind. As St. Victor said, you are your mother's image and counterpart, in temperament and mental quality, while he, doubtless, in all active or positive elements of constitution and temperament, was his father's reflex. Is it not true?"

"I believe so. My dear father used, I know, to think St. Victor nearer to him than I could be. When together, they looked and acted very much alike. Poor, dear brother!" and again the tears coursed down her cheeks.

The doctor was deeply moved; this grief was so inexpressibly deep as to stir in his heart every emotion of tenderness and sympathy it was possible for a gentle-souled man to feel.

"I loved him," he said, gently, "before I had known him an hour. His nature was like a magnet, to draw love. Alas! it is sad, when the promise of such a life is blighted. I would have given my life for his, could it have averted this terrible blow from this house."

A radiant, soul-full look dwelt in her tear-dimmed eyes. That this man—a comparative stranger—should manifest this interest in her brother aroused all the gratitude and affection of her warm nature.

"And I love you, Dr. Graham, for loving him," she said, in the pathos of the language that never speaks untruthfully,—the pathos of irrepressible feeling. Then she added: "Do not leave us, doctor. You are all the friend we have here in this great city. If you leave us I shall, indeed, be alone."

"I will remain, my dear child, so long as there is need of my services."

He did not tell her, in so many words, that the case was hopeless; but her eye was quick to see the wasting form and the growing prostration which followed each paroxysm. How those two faithful attendants watched and waited for the end! And in the grief for the sister, the physician's gentleness found that road to a mutual devotion, which is sure to open before those who love and wait upon a common object of affection. The doctor and sister became, without a consciousness of their real feeling, mutually dependent and trusting.

In less than a month, as we have written, the skeleton which came to the feast on Christmas night departed from the house to abide on St. Victor Marchand's grave.

At the next meeting of the Institute, Doctor Graham gave a full account of the case, remarking upon the singular feature in it of the madness assuming an embodiment in the sanity of another. From much that Edith told him, as well as from his own observation and knowledge, he was convinced that, for months, the young man had detected every minute symptom and development of his disease in his sister; and had a physician been at hand, he could have traced the insidious progress of the malady in the strength of the brother's suspicions regarding his sister. The facts cited to the Institute touched the compassion of the most practice-hardened physician when Dr. Graham related the strange and pitying tenderness with which young Marchand had watched his sister, and strove to divert from her mind the madness which tainted his blood alone.

"Alone in this great city. If you leave me, I shall be alone indeed." The words were like an angel's rap upon the heart's door. In his own great trouble,—the loss of his wife,—the physician deemed himself afflicted beyond his deserts; but what was his condition compared with that of this youthful, tender, dependent woman, whose loss isolated her from all others?

No, not all others. After the first black cloud of her sorrow had drifted away, she turned to him, whose hand had sustained her, even when prayer had left her helpless and hopeless,—turned to him with a love that was more than a love, with an adoration, before which the physician bent, in wonder and satisfaction. He drew her to his bosom as something to be kept with all the truth and tenderness of an abiding love.

The dull office has been exchanged for a home that is like a palace of dreams; and Edith Graham, never forgetting her great sorrow, yet became one of the happiest of all who ever loved.

LET THOSE LAUGH WHO WIN.

[Let those Laugh who Win.]

MR. PONTIFEX POMPADOUR was a gentleman whose family record testified to his having breathed the breath of life sixty years, and yet his appearance bore witness to not more than forty. Appearances, however, though they are deceitful, result from causes more or less palpable; and, in this case, they could be naturally accounted for.

Ecce testem!

Mr. Pompadour's complexion was clear and transparent,—but it was not his own. His teeth were white and regular,—but they were artificial. His hair was black and glossy,—but it was dyed. His whiskers were ibid.,—but they were ditto. His dress was the perfection of fashion and taste, though rather youthful; and withal he carried himself with a jaunty air, and a light and springing step, smiling blandly on all he met, as if smiles were dollars and he were dispensing them right royally.

He had an only son,—Augustus Fitz Clarence Pompadour,—who was heir-apparent to the very considerable property supposed to belong to the "said aforesaid." This son was twenty-three, and had graduated at college with some knowledge of some things, if not of some others. He was a modern Mithridates in his power to withstand strychnine and nicotine; and he had devoted much attention to that branch of geometry which treats of the angles of balls on a cushion. One beautiful trait in his character, however, was his tender affection for his father, which showed itself most touchingly—whenever he was in need of money.

In person he was prepossessing, having light-blue eyes, dark-brown hair, and a drooping moustache. Nor will I allow that he was a vicious lad. Indolent and useless he certainly was,—an insignificant numeral in the great sum of humanity, but a roué he certainly was not. The worst thing about him was his name, and that he received from a weak, silly novel-reading mother, who gave her life for his, and, with her dying breath, charged his father to pay this homage to the yellow-covered world in which she had lived.

If there was anything wanting in the comfortable mansion, where the Pompadours, father and son, kept bachelor's hall, it was the refining and softening influence of woman. And this brings us to the consideration of the skeleton which abode in the closets of Pompadour and son.

The late Mrs. Pompadour had possessed some property which she had retained after marriage. Before her death she made a will, leaving to Augustus the fee, and to his father the income of the estate. In case, however, Augustus should marry before his father did, he was to enter into full possession of the property. Wives, in dying, do not generally offer their husbands a premium for replacing them; and so the judges inferred that the real meaning of the testatrix would be arrived at by inserting the letter e in the word "did;" thus making the contingency turn upon Augustus' marrying before his father died. Moreover, the lawyer who drew the will (his ancestor was limned by Æsop in the fable of the Ass in the lion's skin) swore positively to this rendering being in accordance with the wish of the deceased, and so the courts decided that in the event of Mr. Pompadour's marrying before his son, he should retain his interest during life.

Now Mr. Pompadour, aside from mercenary motives, was very uxoriously inclined; and would doubtless have married years before, had he not set too high an estimate on himself.

His condition of mind at the beginning of this history might be expressed logically somewhat as follows:—

First, he must get married.

Second, Augustus must not.

And Augustus, by analogous reasoning on identical premises, mutatis mutandis, had arrived at a dual conclusion.

First, he must get married.

Second, his father must not.

A vigorous system of espionage had been instituted by father and son, on the actions of each other. Skirmishes had been frequent; and if neither gained any decided advantage, neither lost. But the great battle of the war was yet to be fought, and it has been reserved for my pen to inscribe its history.

In the suburban village where Mr. Pompadour resided was a handsome residence; and its owner, "about visiting Europe," offered it for rent. The house was elegant, and the grounds especially fine. They were flanked by two shady streets and fronted on a third. A widow lady with one daughter became the tenant; and, as is usual in such cases, the whole village called upon her,—three persons prompted by politeness, and three hundred by curiosity. The cards which did duty for the lady in returning these calls, announced her to be "Mrs. Telluria Taragon, née Trelauney." By the same token her daughter was discovered to be "Miss Terpsichore Taragon."

Mrs. Taragon was one of the most bewitching of widows. About forty (she acknowledged to thirty-three), she was the very incarnation of matronly beauty. She was just tall enough to be graceful, and just plump enough not to be unwieldy. Her eyes were black and dangerous. Her hair was short, and it clustered over her forehead in little ringlets,—rather girlish, but very becoming. Her teeth were white and natural, and she had a most fascinating smile, which showed her teeth in a carefully unstudied manner, formed a pretty dimple in her chin, and enabled her to look archly without apparent intention.

Her daughter, Miss Terpsichore, was twenty, with a slender, graceful form, and a pair of rosy cheeks, before whose downy softness the old simile of the peach becomes wholly inadequate. She had hazel eyes, whose liquid depths reflected the brightest and sunniest of tempers, and dark brown hair, with just a suspicion of golden shimmer filtering through its wavy folds.

Mrs. Taragon, on the bare charge, could not have escaped conviction as a "designing widow." She not only was on the lookout, perpetually, for an investment of her daughter, but she was flying continually from her cap a white flag of unconditional surrender to the first man bold enough to attack herself.

Mr. Pontifex Pompadour "availed himself of an early opportunity" to call upon Mrs. Taragon. His fame had preceded him; and that estimable lady, who was in her boudoir when he was announced, gave a small shriek of dismay at her dishevelled appearance. However, no one need be alarmed at such a manifestation on the part of a "lady of fashion." It is indicative of perfect satisfaction with her general effect. Mrs. Taragon flew to her mirror to shake out another curl—and her flounces; smiled bewitchingly by way of rehearsal; bit her lips frantically to bring the blood to them, and walked aimlessly about the room for a few moments with her hands above her head, to send the blood out of them. Then picking up her handkerchief daintily, and going downstairs slowly, that her cheeks might not be too much flushed, she acquired sudden animation at the parlor-door, and burst into the room with an elaborate rustle, and a thousand apologies for having kept Mr. Pompadour waiting so long,—and wasn't "the day perfectly lovely?"

If a conversation be interesting, or serve in any way to develop the plot of a story, I hold that it should be given at full length; but the polite nothings which were repeated at this interview, came under neither of these heads. They served only to display Mr. Pompadour's false teeth, and Mrs. Taragon's real ones (and the dimple) through the medium of Mr. P.'s real smile and Mrs. T.'s false one.

The two parted mutually pleased, and Mrs. Taragon said to herself, as she resumed the novel she had dropped at Mr. Pompadour's entrance, "If I marry him, I will have that set of sables, and those diamonds I saw at Tiffany's."

Mr. Pompadour beheaded a moss rose with his cane, as he stepped jauntily down the walk, and remarked to his inner self, "A monstrous fine woman that, and I may say, without vanity, that she was struck with my appearance. Why, ho! who the devil's that?"

The acute reader will perceive a slight incoherence in the latter portion of this remark. It was due to a sight which met Mr. Pompadour's gaze on stepping into the street from Mrs. Taragon's domain. This was nothing else than Augustus Fitz Clarence walking leisurely up the street with a young lady whom we know—but the illustrious parent did not—to be Miss Terpsichore Taragon.

"Confound the boy!" said the old gentleman, "I wonder who he's got there? Just like his father, though! For I may say, without vanity, that I was a tremendous fellow among the girls."

Augustus Fitz Clarence was not at all pleased at this chance rencontre. The intimacy with the charming widow, which it strongly hinted at, brought vividly to his mind its possible results upon his own prospects. And, moreover, he was conscious of a peculiar and novel sensation in regard to the young lady, which made him rather shamefaced under the paternal eye. In short, he was in love. All the symptoms were apparent: a rush of blood to the face, and a stammering in the speech, whenever proximity to the infecting object induced a spasm. He also had the secondary symptoms,—a sensation of the spinal cord, as if molasses were being poured down the back, and a general feeling "all over," such as little boys call "goose-flesh," and which is ordinarily occasioned by a ghost story, or a cold draught from an open door-way.

To the writer, who stands upon the high level of the philosophic historian, it is evident that the same feelings warmed the gentle breast of Terpsichore that burned in the bosom of Augustus. To furnish food, however, for the unextinguishable laughter of the gods, this fact is never made clear to the principals themselves till the last moment. "And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe ... and thereby hangs a tale."

With the foregoing paragraph, I bridge over an "hiatus, as it were," of several months.

Respect for truth obliges me to record the fact, that Mrs. Taragon regarded her daughter with that unchristian feeling called jealousy. But, if a heartless, she was a shrewd woman, and she meant to dispose of Terpsichore advantageously.

There was, at this time, and I believe there is still, in the village of which I write, an "order of the garter," under the control of one Mrs. Grundy, the motto of which was: "Those are evil of whom we evil speak." Its evening meetings were familiarly known as the "nights of the sewing-circle;" and it was the duty of each member to attend to everybody's business but his own. An agent of this order promptly put Mrs. Taragon in possession of everything which had been discovered or invented concerning Mr. Pompadour, not forgetting to enlarge upon the conditions of the will. Mrs. Taragon thereupon resolved to marry Mr. Pompadour; for, in addition to other reasons, she confessed to herself that she really liked him. As may be supposed, therefore, she looked with much disfavor on the increasing intimacy between the young people; but she feared that any violent attempt to rupture it would precipitate the very result she would avoid. She sat, one day, in a brown study, regarding the subject in all its bearings, with her comely cheek resting upon her plump hand, and, at last, arrived at a conclusion.

"I think it would not be wise," she said, consulting the mirror to see if her hand had left any mark upon her cheek,—"to interfere just at present; at any rate, not till I am sure of Mr. Pompadour; but I will keep a close watch upon them."

Not many days afterwards, a picturesque group occupied the bow-window of Mrs. Taragon's drawing-room. Mrs. T. herself, quite covered with an eruption of worsted measles, was the principal figure. At her feet, like Paul at Gamaliel's, sat Augustus; but, unlike Paul, he held a skein of worsted. Nestling on an ottoman in the recess of the window was Terpsichore, inventing floral phenomena in water-colors, and looking very bewitching.

"'Twas a fair scene." As under the shade of some far-spreading oak, when noon holds high revel in the heavens, the gentle flock cluster in happy security, fearing no dire irruption of lupine enemy, so—

"Mr. Pompadour," announced the servant.

"The devil!" echoed Augustus Fitz Clarence.

Mrs. Taragon's first impulse was to spring up and greet her visitor cordially. Her second, to do no such thing. Napoleon said, "An opportunity lost is an occasion for misfortune." Here was her Austerlitz or her Waterloo! With the rapidity of genius, she laid the plot for a little comedy of "The Jealous Lovers," to the success of which the actors themselves unwittingly contributed.

Half rising, she acknowledged Mr. Pompadour's elaborate bow, and, motioning him gracefully to a seat, sank back into her chair. Then, pretending that the worsted was knotted, she bent her curls so near Augustus' face, and made a whispered remark with such a conscious air, that the blood rushed to that young man's face in an instant.

"I saw you out riding yesterday, Mr. Pompadour," said the cheerful widow, pleased that her first shot had taken effect. "And what a beautiful horse! and you ride so gracefully!"

"Thank you, madam," said Mr. Pompadour, stiffly; "I think I may say, without vanity, that I do ride tolerably well."

"And you," to the son, "now your father is present, I must call you Mr. Augustus,—may I not?" she said, coaxingly. The "Mr." was emphasized, as if when alone she did not use it. But this was, of course, unintentional.

Now Augustus, for some time, had endeavored to ingratiate himself with Mrs. Taragon, but with little success, and, therefore, he was utterly unable to comprehend her sudden benignity. He glanced at his father, and met the eyes of that individual glaring on him with the look of an ogre deprived of his baby lunch. He glanced at Terpsichore, but that young lady was absorbed with a new discovery in botany. He glanced at Mrs. Taragon, but she was calmly winding worsted.

"Terpy, dear," said her mother, "do show Mr. Pompadour some of your drawings. My dear little girl is so devoted to art!" she exclaimed, enthusiastically, as the daughter rose to bring her portfolio. "Take care, Mr. Augustus; you know worsted is a dreadful thing to snarl." Augustus had involuntarily sprung up to offer his assistance, but he sank back in confusion.

"Are you fond of engravings, Mr. Pompadour?" asked the young lady, sweetly.

"Ah! yes! I—I think I may say without vanity,"—began Mr. Pompadour, but he finished silently to himself,—"D—me, I'll make her jealous!" Whose Austerlitz or Waterloo should it be? He put on his eye-glass to inspect the volume, and for a little while almost forgot his egotism in admiration of the beauty of nature beside him, if not of the beauties of art before him.

Augustus was not slow in perceiving that, for some unknown reason, Mrs. Taragon's attention was gained, and he tried desperately to improve the occasion. Every once in a while, however, his eyes would wander toward his father, who played his part with so much skill that the bosom of Augustus was soon filled with burnings, and the mind of the widow with perplexities. The gentle heart of Terpsichore was grieved also, and her mind sorely puzzled at the enigmatical conduct of those about her, while she was somewhat annoyed at the pertinacious attentions of the elder P.

The distinguished gentleman who wrote so graphically about the "Elbows of the Mincio," must confess that our Quadrilateral is only second to that which he has helped to embalm in history. The Irishman's experience with the large boot and the small one, and the other pair similarly mismated, was here reproduced with painful reality. Some evil genius had scattered wormwood on the air, and asphyxia, or something worse, seemed likely to supervene, when the entrance of another visitor broke the charm, and the téte-à-téte, and the gentlemen fled.

The thermometer of Mr. Pompadour's temper indicated boiling heat. He sputtered and fumed like an irascible old gentleman as he was, and managed to work himself into a crazy fit of jealousy, about his son and the too fascinating widow; and, oddly enough, this feeling thus aroused by the green-eyed monster, for the time being, quite eclipsed his mercenary muddle. So, upon poor Augustus, as the available subject, fell palpable and uncomfortable demonstrations of paternal displeasure.

For several days Mr. Pompadour stayed away from Mrs. Taragon's, and that good lady began to fear lest she had overdrawn her account at the bank of his heart, and that further drafts would be dishonored. The thought of such a catastrophe was torture of the most refined quality. By an illogical system of reasoning, peculiar to the female mind, she imagined that Terpsichore was the cause of his desertion, and that young lady thereupon became the recipient of an amount of small spite and aggravated vindictiveness, which reflected great credit upon Mrs. Taragon's inquisitorial capabilities.

She had, it must be obvious, set her heart upon having those diamonds from Tiffany's.

At the end of a week, however, Mr. Pompadour called upon Mrs. Taragon, and this time he found her alone. His countenance gave proof of some desperate resolution. His attire was more than usually elegant. His hair and whiskers were a trifle blacker and glossier than ever. He had a rose in his button-hole, and yellow kids on his hands. Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed (I sincerely trust) like unto him! Mrs. Taragon rose cordially, and held out to him her plump little hand; it lay a moment in his, as if asking to be squeezed. Mr. Pompadour looked as if he would like to squeeze it, and perhaps he did.

The lady's cordiality soon gave place to a timid shyness. To use a military phrase, she was "feigning a retreat." Mr. Pompadour waxed bold and advanced. The conversation skirmished awhile, the widow occasionally making a sally, and driving in the enemy's outposts, his main body meanwhile steadily approaching. The tone in which they conducted hostilities, however, gradually fell, and if one had been near enough he might have heard Mr. Pompadour remark, with a kind of quiet satisfaction, "For I think I may say, without vanity, I still possess some claim to good looks." The widow's reply was so low that our reporter failed to catch it, and then—military phraseology avaunt!—the old veteran knelt on the carpet, and surrendered at discretion.

"Good gracious, Mr. Pompadour!" exclaimed the widow, with well-feigned alarm, at the same time picking a thread off her dress, "Do get up, somebody may come in!"

"Never!" said the old hero stoutly, seeing his advantage, and determined to have its full benefit, "at any rate, not till you promise to marry me!"

A form passed the window. This time Mrs. Taragon was really frightened. "I will," she said hurriedly; "now get up, and sit down."

Mr. Pompadour leaped to his feet with the agility of a boy—of sixty, and imprinted a kiss lovingly upon the lady's nose, there not being time to capture the right place on the first assault. What followed we will leave to the imagination of the reader.

It was now October, and the trees had adorned themselves in their myriad dyes. The maple had put on crimson, the hickory a rich gold, and the oak a deep scarlet; while the pine and the hemlock "mingled with brighter tints the living green."

To the woods one balmy day Augustus and Terpsichore went together, to gather leaves for wreaths and screens. Both were carelessly happy, and the pines echoed their merry voices as they laughed and sang. At length the basket, which Augustus carried, was filled with gorgeous booty, and they sat down upon a fallen log, while Terpsichore wove a garland for her hair. No wonder that in the tranquil beauty of the scene their noisy mirth should become hushed. No wonder that, as the sun stole through the branches, and like Jove of old fell in a shower of gold about them, upon both their hearts fell the perfect peace of love! With the full tide of this feeling came to Augustus the resolve to know his fate; for he felt that upon that answer hung his destiny.

They sat in silence while he tried to teach his tongue the language of his heart. Then he glanced timidly at the maiden, but her head was drooped low over the wreath, and her cheeks reflected its crimson dye.

"Miss Taragon," he said, at length, abruptly, "were you ever in love?"

She started like a frightened bird. The rich blood fled to her heart, and left her face pallid as marble.

"I—I—don't know," she stammered. "Why do you ask me such a question?"

"Because," he said, "then you may know how I feel, and pity me! O Terpsichore!" he added passionately, "I love you with my whole soul, and if you will but bless me with your love, my whole life shall be devoted to your happiness."

And so he talked on in an impetuous strain, of mingled prayer and protestation, which was stereotyped long before the invention of printing.

Terpsichore's heart beat wildly. The color came and went in her cheeks, and she turned her head away to conceal her emotion.

The wreath lay finished in her lap; and at last, with a bright smile, she placed it on his forehead; and, clasping his hand in both her own, she kissed him on the forehead. And now we might as well leave them alone together.

Mrs. Taragon, having made sure of Mr. Pompadour, now proceeded to carry out her plan of throwing obstacles in the way of the young people. Augustus, of course, was not aware of her complete information in regard to his "property qualifications," and attributed her disfavor to personal dislike. Whatever her motives, however, her actions were unequivocal; and Terpsichore, especially, had a sorry time of it. So uncomfortable did matters become, that, upon a review of the situation, and an eloquent appeal from Augustus, she consented to take with him that irrevocable step, to which Virgil undoubtedly alluded under the fine figure of "Descensus Averni." In plain English, they resolved to run away and be married.

I will not weary the reader with details of the preliminaries. They are unimportant to my narrative. A note, dispatched by Augustus to the Rev. Ebenezer Fiscuel, informed that gentleman that about half-past ten o'clock of an appointed evening he would be waited on by a couple desirous of being united in holy matrimony.

Augustus arranged to have a carriage in waiting under Terpsichore's window about ten o'clock, and, with the aid of a ladder and the above-mentioned clergyman, he hoped to settle the vexed question of the property, and render all further opposition to their union of an ex post facto character.

The evening came, and it found Mrs. Taragon and her daughter seated together in the parlor. Terpsichore was crocheting a net, which, like Penelope's, grew very slowly. She was nervous and fidgety. Her eyes wandered restlessly from her mother to the door, and she started at the slightest sound. Mrs. Taragon seemed uncommonly suspicious and alert. She was reading, but had not turned a leaf for half an hour. She glanced furtively and continually about the room.

"She has found us out," thought Terpsichore, and her heart almost stopped beating. With a great effort she controlled herself, and had recourse to stratagem.

"Mother, dear," she said, dropping the net in her lap, "you look tired; why don't you go to bed?"

"Oh, no, darling," said the widow, cheerfully, "I don't feel a bit weary. But your eyes look red, and I think you had better retire."

"No, mamma, not yet," she replied. "I want to finish this net. I have done so little upon it lately."

A slight shade of vexation crossed the face of the widow.

"If you had devoted yourself to the net," she said, spitefully, "it would have been finished."

Terpsichore blushed guiltily. Augustus had spent more than two hours with her that day; and she felt a presentiment that impending wrath was about to descend on her devoted head.

"I am sure, mother," she said, quietly, "you can't complain of my seeing too much company."

This shot told; for Mr. Pompadour had been very attentive of late.

Mrs. Taragon nearly tore a leaf out of her book.

"At any rate," she retorted, "my visitors are respectable."

Terpsichore's lip quivered. The remark was cruel, but it roused her spirit.

"If my company is not respectable," she said, with an incipient sob, "it is the fault of his bringing up."

Mr. Pompadour was hit this time, right between his eyes. The widow blazed.

"You—you—you minx," she said, angrily, "I believe you'd like to see me dead, and out of your way!"

The remark was utterly irrelevant; but she saw it in the book, and thought it would be dramatic.

Terpsichore burst into tears, and beat a retreat in disorder. As she left the room, Mrs. Taragon said to herself, with a sigh of relief,—

"Well, the coast is clear for Pompadour,—and she's safe for to-night, any way."

Which was a slight mistake.

Ten o'clock came, and with it the carriage. A man glided silently underneath Terpsichore's window, and a ladder was reared against the wall. Silently the window opened, and a form descended the ladder, and was clasped in an equally silent embrace at the foot. Terpsichore had not entirely recovered her spirits, but she stifled her emotions for the sake of Augustus. For the same reason she did not scold him for rumpling her bonnet. Hurrying into the carriage, they drove rapidly away.

As they turned the corner into the principal street, another carriage, going in the same direction, came up behind them at a quick trot. Augustus sprang to his feet, and peered out into the darkness. "Betrayed," was the thought which flashed through his mind, and he muttered an eighteen-cornered oath. Terpsichore clung to his coat with an energy which indirectly reflected lasting credit upon his tailor.

"Put on more steam," whispered Augustus hoarsely to the driver, and the horses dashed onward at a break-neck pace, soon leaving the other carriage far behind.

At the rate they were going, it took but a few minutes to reach the parsonage. Directing the coachman to drive round the corner and wait, Augustus half-led, half-carried the trembling girl into the house. The Rev. Fiscuel's family and one or two neighbors were assembled in the parlor. The ceremony was soon performed, and an earnest blessing invoked upon the married life of the young people. As they were receiving the congratulations suited to the occasion, a juvenile Fiscuel came in, and whispered something to his father. Mr. Fiscuel, with a smile, turned to Augustus, saying, "My son tells me that your father is coming in at the gate with a lady."

The newly-married looked at each other in mute surprise. "I'll bet a hat," exclaimed Augustus, suddenly, "it's your mother; and they've come to get married!"

The Rev. Ebenezer spoke eagerly: "Did you send me two messages this morning?"

"No!" said Augustus; "of course I did not."

"Then they have, verily," exclaimed the clergyman, in a tone of very unclerical excitement; "for I received two messages from 'Mr. Pompadour.' I spoke of the singularity at the time."

"Can you hide us somewhere?" said Augustus, "till you've 'done' the old gentleman?"

"Come in here," said Mrs. Fiscuel, who had her share of that leaven of unrighteousness which is usually called fun. As she spoke, she opened the drawing-room door.

The Rev. Ebenezer sat down to write a certificate for Augustus; and, as one door closed upon the young couple, the other opened to admit the older one. If not in as great a hurry as their children, they seemed equally desirous of making assurance doubly sure. The family and the witnesses, who had followed Mrs. Fiscuel out of the apartment, were again summoned, and, for a second time that evening, the words were spoken which made a Pompadour and a Taragon "one bone and one flesh." Watching the proceedings through the crevice of the half-opened door, was a couple not counted among the "witnesses," and certainly not invited by the principals.

When the ceremony was over, Augustus and Terpsichore entered the room. Their appearance created what "Jenkins" would call "a profound sensation." Mr. Pompadour looked bowie-knives and six-shooters, Mrs. P., darning-needles and stilettoes. Augustus was self-possessed. Perhaps he remembered the old saying, "Let those laugh who win."

"We happened here not knowing you were coming," he said, addressing both; "wont you accept our congratulations."

Suddenly Mrs. Pompadour née Trelawney, gave a scream, and fell back in a chair, with symptoms of hysterics. She had caught sight of the ring on her daughter's finger, and comprehended everything in an instant,—the carriage which had fled before them as they left the house; this "accidental" visit to the minister's; and, worse than all, how she had been outwitted!

Terpsichore sprang forward to assist her.

"Go away from me! Go away! Don't let her touch me!" she screamed, throwing her arms about like a wind-mill. "I wont have it! I wont! I wont!"

Mr. Pompadour, during this outburst, showed signs of exasperation; apparently, however, he did not see the point, but was fast concluding that he had married a lunatic.

Terpsichore was frightened and began to cry. Augustus, to reässure her, put his arm around her waist. At this, the senior Mrs. Pompadour sprang up, and seized her husband by the arm, so energetically that it made him wince. Pointing to the tell-tale ring with a gesture worthy of Ristori, she managed to articulate: "Don't you see it? That undutiful girl has married Augustus, and—and he has married her!"

Mr. Pompadour "saw it," and uttered some words which were not a blessing.

THE PROPER USE OF GRANDFATHERS.

[The Proper use of Grandfathers.]

IF people without grandfathers are in need of any particular solace, they may find it in the fact that those cumbrous contingencies of existence cannot be continually stuck in their faces. A wise man has remarked, that the moderns are pigmies standing upon the shoulders of giants. He would have been wiser still, had he observed how frequently the giants change places with the pigmies, and ride them to death like Old Men of the Sea. If, at sixteen, I have the dyspepsia and a tendency to reflect on the problems of my being, I am begged to notice that, at a corresponding period old Jones, of the alternate generation, was gambolling o'er the dewy meads, a gleesome boy. If my baby cries and is puny at teething-time, the oracles, with an intuitive perception how my grandfather behaved a hundred years before they were born, tell me it was not so in his day; that heaven lay about him in his infancy; but that none of the article exists either in that loose condition or otherwise for the immature human animal who breaks out of darkness and mystery into this day of gum-rings. If the tremendous pace at which the modern world is going knocks me up at forty, and compels me to keep my stall for a year of valetudinarianism, I am asked to remember what a hale old fellow the same inevitable ancestor was at ninety; I am inundated with his exuberance of spirits, overwhelmed with the statistics of his teeth; and invited in the mind's eye (in my own, too, if I know myself!) to take six-mile walks with him before breakfast unassisted by a cane. It is not a pleasant state of mind to be disgusted with one's forefathers, who would, probably have been very jolly fellows to know, and not the least in the world like the people who are all the time boring us about them. If there is truth in spiritualism, a delegation from those fine old boys will, some of these days, take advantage of a sitting, and rap out an indignant disclaimer of the bosh that is talked in their name. If my grandfather was not a much more unpleasant person than myself, he would scorn to be made a boguey of for the annoyance of his own flesh and blood. Any man of well-regulated mind must prefer utter oblivion among his descendants to such perpetuation as that of Mr. Wilfer.

"Your grandpapa," retorted Mrs. Wilfer, with an awful look, and in an awful tone, "was what I describe him to have been, and would have struck any of his grandchildren to the earth who presumed to question it."

If our ancestors could return to the earth, it is little likely that their first inclination would be to goody themselves over the excellence of their own period, or pull faces at the degeneracy of ours. Sleepers in ill-ventilated, or rather entirely non-ventilated apartments, eaters of inordinate late suppers, five-bottle men, and for the most part wearers of sadly unphilosophical raiment, those sturdy old fox-hunters would acknowledge it just cause for astonishment that their children have any constitutions at all. Little motive for self-laudation would they find in the fact, that, after drawing out their account with Nature to the last dime, they had taken a respectable first-cabin passage to the Infinite Boulogne just before the great Teller said "No funds," and shoved back their checks through the window, leaving to their children the heritage of a spotless name and the declaration of physiological bankruptcy.

Nor would they content themselves, I fancy, with the negative ground of mere humility. They would have something very decided to say to the wiseacres, who taunt our wives in the agony of tic-doloureux with the statement that their grandmothers knew nothing of neuralgia. "No!" these generous ancients would retort, "that is the residuary legacy of a generation to whom we left a nervous system of worn-out fiddle strings." To such as talk of that woful novelty diphtheria as a crime of the present age, they would point out the impossibility of a race's throat descending to it without tenderness, a race's blood flowing to it without taint, from ancestors who swaddled their necks in fathoms of cravat, and despised the question of sewage. When I had the gout, and could not stand up for myself, those brave vieilles moustaches would stand up for me. "Many a fine old bin of our port," would they exclaim, "has been emptied down through the æons into those innocent toes of thine. I mind me how I smacked my lips over that very bottle whose broken glass now grinds around, red-hot, in the articulation of thy metatarsal phalanges. Dancing at thy fair great-grandmother's wedding, I slaked the thirst of many vigorous sarabands in that identical ruby nectar, which, turned by the alchemy of generations into acid blood, now through thy great toe distils in gouts of fiery torture. I danced;—thou, poor Serò-natus, dancest not, but dost pay the piper."

Suppose that our returning ancestors regarded us in the intellectual and spiritual, as well as the physical aspect, they must find still less reason to put on airs of superiority. If, in the sphere where they have been lately moving, improvement goes on as fast as we believe, they may be expected to wonder that the theological and scholastic training of their own earthly day has not resulted in a present race of imbeciles and fetish-worshippers, or Torquemadas and madmen. With thankful astonishment will they revere that nature whose boundless elasticity and self-repair has brought bright and self-reliant, even though sometimes a trifle too pert and iconoclastic, Young America from loins burdened, through all their period of cartilage, with five days and a half per week of grammar-grinding, a Saturday afternoon of "keeping in for marks," and a seventh day which should have been the Lord's, but was conspicuously liker the devil's.

Woman, religion, and the forefathers are all the victims of a false quality of reverence. The world has immemorially paid them in the coin of lip-service for the privilege of using their sacredness as a yoke. They are defrauded of their true power by the hands that waft them hypocritical incense; bought off the ground where their influence might be precious and permanent, by the compliment of a moment, or the ceremony of a day. We pick up the fan of the first, and shoulder her out of her partnership in our serious business of living. We build temples for the second, that she may not gad about among our shops, or trouble the doors of our houses. In the third, we do superstitious homage to a mere accident of time, and feel free to neglect the genial lesson of humanity which is eternal.

It is impossible not to reverence our forefathers—those grand old fellows who, long before we rose, got up to build the fires, and shovel the sidewalks of this world. The amount of work which they did was immense; great was their poking and their pushing; their thrashing of arms, and their blowing of fingers. If they sometimes made a compromise with their job; if here and there they left the gutters uncleared, or a heavy drift to thaw over under the sun of modern conscience, and flood our streets with revolution; if they built some of their fires with wet wood, which unto this day smokes the parlors, or even the inmost bed-chambers of mankind,—let us remember how frosty the dawn was, how poorly made were the tools and mittens of the period. All honor to their work, and the will with which they went at it! But when we are asked to regret the rising of the sun; to despise a time of day when there are no more fires to build, no more walks to shovel; or, if such anywhere remain, when there are snow-ploughs and patent-kindling to use in their behoof—distinctly No!—a No as everlasting as Mr. Carlyle's, and spelt with as big a capital.

The mistake of that great writer and minor disciple of the Belated-Owl school to which he belongs, naturally arises, not from the over-development of reverence, to which it is generally ascribed, but from a constitutional divorce between the poetic imagination and the power of analysis. The former faculty, by itself, results in impatience with the meaner actualities of life,—a divine impatience in great poets, a petulant in small ones. Lacking the latter faculty, such persons are in the condition of a near-sighted man placed without chart or compass at the helm of a free-going clipper. Making no allowance for the fact that the blemished and the trivial disappear with distance, and, ignorant of the direction in which humanity must steer, they put out with disgust from a shore where every old clam-shell and rotten wreck is as conspicuous to those, at least, who look for it as the orange-groved cliffs, and the fair retiring stretches of greensward, to voyage for some scarce descried Atlantis gemming the horizon ring with an empurpled roundness born of vapor, time, and space. To such, the future might be a noble course to lay; but that lies beyond the horizon, and impatience is not consistent with faith. On, then, on to the farthest visible,—but westward, while the grand fleet of humanity sails last. Into shadow which drowns the petty details of existence,—not toward a shore which shall be reached only by long buffeting and weary watching, whose noble scenery, glorious with all the temples and trophies of the latest age, shall bear unshamed the scrutiny of the full-risen sun.

The application of scientific processes to the study of history has revealed the steady amelioration of the race. The mail of chivalric giants is brought out of romance's armory to the profane test of a vulgar trying on, and, behold, it is too small for the foot-soldier of to-day. Population everywhere increases, while the rates of mortality diminish. The average longevity of the people of London is greater, by something like twenty-five per cent., than it was a century ago. The improvement of machinery is more and more lifting the yoke of physical labor from the neck of man, leaving his mind freer to cope with the higher problems of his own nature and the universe without. Not as a matter of platform enthusiasm and optimist poetry, but of office statistics, do we know that the world is an easier and better place to live in, and that a man is luckier to be born into it, than in the day of the fathers. So much has changed, and changed for the better. That analysis, which the Carlylists lack, reveals still other changes worked by the course of time in the phenomena of the race,—such changes as concern the habits of society, the styles of literature, the systems of political economy and commercial order, the tenets of philosophy, the schools of art, the forms of government and religion. This analysis further reveals that, while all these functions of life are in their nature endlessly mutable, the organic man, from whom, under all variations, they get their vis viva, remains from age to age eternally the same. While each successive generation has its fresh, particular business on the earth,—something to do for the race, which succeeding generations will not have the time, even as prior generations had not the light, to do,—something which is wanted right away,—something for which it was sent and for which the whole machine-shop of time had been shaping the material to be worked by its special hand,—analysis discloses that the capital upon which every business is to be carried on undergoes neither increase nor diminution. There is just as much faith, just as much courage, just as much power in the world as there ever was. They do not show themselves in Runnymedes, because Runnymede has been attended to; nor in wondrous Abbot Sampsons, because monkery is mainly cured. They are not manifest in martyred Edwardses, because at this day Edwards could call a policeman; nor in burning Cranmers, because society has made a phenomenal change in her method with martyrs and shuts them in a refrigerator, where once she chained them to a stake. They do not appear in French Revolutions, because the world has grown through a second American Revolution, grander than the first, and a great representative native has plucked Liberty out of the fire without one scorch of license on her garments. They seek no outlet in crusade, for Jerusalem has been made of as little consequence as Barnegat, by the fulfilment of the promise,—

"The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet in Jerusalem, worship the Father, ... when the true worshippers shall worship him in spirit and in truth."

I have a little butcher, who is Cœur de Lion in the small. He does not split heads nor get imprisoned in castles, but has the same capricious force, the same capacity for affront-taking, the same terribleness of retribution, and the same power of large, frank forgiveness which belonged to the man who broke the skulls of the Saracens and pardoned his own assassin. I went to school to Frederick the Great. He did not take snuff nor swear in high Dutch, and it was his destiny to be at the head, not of an army of men, but of one hundred as unmanageable boys as ever played hawkey or "fought pillows" in the dormitory. His solution of difficulties was as prompt, his decisions were as inexorable, he had as irascible a temper and as admirable a faculty of organization as his Prussian prototype's. Calvin and Servetus discuss their differences at my dinner-table; the former possesses all his old faith in the inscrutable; the latter all his ancient tendency to bring everything alleged to the tribunal of science, and I may add that Calvin has as little doubt as ever of the propriety of having Servetus cooked,—only he postpones the operation, and expects to see it done without his help. I am acquainted with Sir Philip Sidney, the courtly knight and the melodious poet. The chivalry with which he jousted at Kenilworth and fought at Zutphen are hourly needed in the temptations and harassments of a broker's office, and many's the hard day through which it has borne him with honor. The pen which he devotes to the Muses is as facile as in the Arcadian time,—though the sturdy lance he used to set in rest is substituted by another pen, of the fat office type, consecrated to the back of gold certificates and the support of an unmediævally expensive family.

Looking in all directions round the world, I find the old nobleness,—the primeval sublimities of love and courage, faith and justice, which have always kept humanity moving, and will keep it to the end. In no age has the quantity of this nobleness been excessive, but so much of it as exists is an imperishable quantity. It is a good interred with no man's bones; it is the indispensable preventive of the world's annihilation. Carlyle has been praised for the epigrammatic assertion that nothing can be kept without either life or salt. This is true, but not the whole truth; salt will keep beeves, but as for nations and races which have lost their savor, wherewithal shall they be salted? The fact that mankind survive at all is the proof that ages have not tainted them with putrescence. Things live only by the good that there is in them, and the interests to which they appeal; the fields which open to man, in our own day, are so much vaster and massier than they were in the day of our fathers, that the tax on the activities of the race could not be met by our capital of life if we had lost one particle of the good which supported them.

When I look at the fathers, I recollect that courage and love, faith and justice, have no swallowing horizon, while all that is petty and base succumbs in one generation to the laws of perspective. It is pleasanter thus. At the grave of the old schoolmaster who flogged us, we remember the silver hair and the apple he gave us once,—never the rattan. "We had fathers after the flesh who corrected us, and we gave them reverence," nothing but reverence, when we leaned with tearful eyes over their vacant chairs. If I have ever quarrelled with my friend, when he can return to me no more, I make up with his memory by canonizing him. The tendency to do thus is among the loveliest and divinest things in our nature. But it is a still lovelier and diviner thing to anticipate the parallax of time and look upon the present with the same loving, teachable, and reverent eyes, which shall be bent upon it from the standpoint of coming generations. He to whom the beauty and nobleness of his own time are, throughout all that he deplores in it and in himself, the conspicuous objects of love and veneration,—who extends the allowance of the dead to the faults of the living,—from whom no personal disappointments can ever take away his faith in the abiding divinity of his kind,—need never fear that his judgment of the fathers will be a churlish and disrespectful one. The only object which such a man can have in recalling the vices and defects of older generations is to establish their kinship with his own, to prove his era's legitimacy against philosophers who find only pettiness in the present and grandeur in the past. If he cannot make them see the good side by which the modern family receives blood from the ancient, there shall not be any bend sinister on his escutcheon because he neglects to show them the bad one, though he would rather vindicate his lineage the other way. To him the organic unity of mankind, throughout all generations, is dearer than the individual reputation of any one of them.

Having the faith of this organic unity he can look at the errors of the forefathers without pain. They lessen neither his love nor his respect for them. Who is there that would care to know king David only as a very respectable Jew, in a Sunday-school book, who was always successful, invariably pious, and passed his time wholly in playing hymns on a harp with a golden crown upon his head? To almost all young readers, and many an old one, the vindictive psalms seem a shocking inexplicability in the sacred canon. The philosopher, however, feels with the illiterate preacher, "It is a comfort to us poor erring mortals, my brethren, to remember that on one occasion even, David, beloved of the Lord, said not only, 'I am mad,' but 'I am fearfully and wonderfully mad?'" Not that it would be any comfort to us if that were all we possess of him; but we also have the record of his getting over it. I once knew a little boy who learned to swear out of the psalms, and it must be acknowledged that of good round curses there is in no tongue a much fuller armory. Conscientious persons, who want to damn their enemies without committing sin, no doubt often sit down and read an execratory psalm with considerable relief to their minds. Not in this spirit do men skilled in human nature peruse the grand rages of the many-sided fighting bard; not because they would cloak their errors with the kingly shadow of his own, do they rejoice that he exists for us to-day just where the rude, large simplicity of his original Hebrew left him, and that tame-handed biography has never been able to pumice him down into a demi-god. They are glad because these things prove him human and imitable. If his stormy soul triumphed over itself; if he could be beloved of the Infinite at a moment when the surges of both outer and inner vicissitude seemed conspiring to sweep him away, then we cease to hear his swearing or the clamor of his despair; and to us, whose modern spirits are not exempt from flood and hurricane, his grand voice chants only cheer down the centuries, and we know that there is love caring and victory waiting for us also in our struggle, since we are not the lonely anomalies of time.

As with David so with all the men of the past,—it gives us no pain to find that they were not a whit nearer perfection than ourselves. We do not regret their superseded customs, nor wish them restored in the living age. He who takes them from the time of which they are a congruous part and seeks to import them into a day which has no explanatory relevance to them, so far from showing them reverence, is like a man who, to compel the recognition of his grandfather's tombstone, strips it of its moss, scrubs it with soap and sand, and sets it up on Broadway among signs and show-cases. Their opinions are not final with us, because every age brings new proofs, and every generation is a new court of appeal. Their business methods are framed upon a hypothesis which does not include the telegraph or the steam-engine. Where a man can persuade his correspondents to send their letters by the coach and their goods by the freight-wagon, he may adjust himself very comfortably to the good old way by which his grandfather made a fortune and preserved his health to a great age. Until he gets his mail weekly and answers it all in a batch, recuperating from that labor by the sale of merchandise, one box to an invoice, he is simply absurd to lament over the rapidity with which fortunes are made at this day, and eulogize the "sure and slow" process by which a lifetime whose sole principle was the avoiding of risks attained the same object. As if the whole problem of life were not how to secure, as quick as possible, all the material good necessary for living, in order to leave the kind free for all its higher functions of self-development and discipline. As if money were not a mere expression of the extent to which a man has subordinated the forces of the world to his own use,—a thing, therefore, which naturally comes quicker to a generation which has taken all the great atmospheric and imponderable couriers into its service!

The true use of ancestors is not slavish; we do not want them for authority, but for solace. If my grandfather could come back, he certainly would be too much of a gentleman to sit down on my hat or put his feet on my piano; and how much less would he crush my convictions or trample on my opinions! He would be equally too much of a business-man to interfere in the responsibilities of any practical course I might take, when he had not looked into the books of the concern, taken account of its stock, or consulted the world's market-list for an entire generation. He would do what any man would be proud to have his grandfather do,—take the easiest and most distinguished chair at the fireside, and tell us night by night, the story of his life. What roars of laughter would applaud his recollection of jokes uttered by some playmate of his boyhood. They would seem so droll to us at the distance of a hundred years, though a contemporary might have uttered them without raising a smile on our faces. What mingling of tears and laughter would there be when he related some simple little family drama,—its pathos depending on incidents as slender as the death of Auld Robin Gray's cows, but like the wonderful song, in which those animals have part interest, going unerringly to the fountains of the human heart! How would we double up our fists, how red would we grow in the face when he told us, in the most unadorned, dispassionate way, about the cruel creditor who foreclosed a mortgage on him and turned him and our grandmother into the street, just after the birth of their first child, our father; and when he came to the passage where the kind friend steps in and says, "here are five hundred dollars,—pay me when you are able," how many girls there would be sobbing, and men violently blowing their noses! If we had belonged to the period of the foreclosure and been next-door neighbors to the mortgagor, the thing might have impressed us simply as the spectacle of a young couple with a baby who couldn't meet their quarterly payments, and were obliged to curtail their style of living. The thing still happens, and that is the way we look at it. But when grandpapa relates it, nothing in the domestic line we ever saw upon the stage seems half so touching. The littlest school-boy feels a roseate fascination hovering around the dogs that went after squirrels with that venerable man when he wore the roundabout of his far-off period; there is glamour about the mere fact that then, as now, there were dogs, and there were squirrels; and as the grandchild hears of the boughs which hung so full, the crisp leaves which crackled so frostily those many, many falls ago—a strange delight comes over him, and he seems to be going out chestnutting in the morning of the world.

What we want of one, we want of all the grandfathers of the race,—their story. Their value is that they take the experience of human life, and hold it a sufficient distance from us to be judged in its true proportions. That experience in all ages is a solemn and a beautiful, a perilous, yet a glorious thing. We are too near the picture to appreciate it, as it appears in our own day, though all its grand motives are the same. We rub our noses against the nobilities and cannot see them. The foreground weed is more conspicuous than the background mountain. When the grandfathers carry it from us, and hang it on the wall of that calm gallery where no confusing cross-lights of selfish interest any longer interfere, the shadows fall into their proper places, the symbolisms of the piece are manifest, and above all minor hillocks, above all clouds of storm, unconscious of its earthquake struggles and its glacier scars, Human Nature stands an eternal unity, its peak in a clear heaven full of stars. We recognize that unity and all things become possible to us, for thereby even the commonest living is glorified.

AT EVE.

[At Eve.]

“IT is almost time for John to come home, I guess," and the young wife rose from her sewing and put the tea-kettle over the bright fire on the clean-swept hearth. Then she pulled the table out into the middle of the floor, right to the spot where she knew the setting sun would soon shine through the latticed window; for John loved to see the light play upon the homely cups and saucers, and pewter spoons; he said it reminded him of the fairy stories, where they ate off gold dishes. She went about her work swiftly, but very quietly. Once there had been a time when the little cottage rang early and late with the sound of her glad voice. But then a pair of little feet crept over the floor, and a tiny figure had raised itself up by the very table whose cloth was now so smooth and unruffled by the small awkward hands.

When Margery had put the golden butter, the jug of cream, and the slice of sweet honey on the table, she went to the door to look for John. A narrow path, skirted on one side by waving corn-fields, on the other by pastures and orchards, stretched from the cottage down to the broader road that led to the village. The sun was already low in the sky, and threw across the path the shadow of the old apple-tree that stood beside the house. Margery remembered how full of pink and white blossoms the tree had been that spring when she first came here as John's bride, and how they showered down like snow, while now a ripe apple occasionally dropped from the branches with a heavy plump.

"Here comes John at last," she said in a low voice, as she saw him approaching from the village. He was yet a considerable distance off, but Margery's bright eyes discerned that he was not alone. Beside him walked a girl, whom Margery had known already while they were both children. Mary was called handsome by the village lads; but she was poor, and she and her father helped to do field work, on the neighboring farms, in the busiest seasons of the year.

As she and John advanced, Margery noticed that they seemed engaged in earnest conversation. Then John stood still and gave her his hand. The girl seized it eagerly and put it to her lips, and looking up at him once, turned around and walked back to the village, while John hastened on with longer steps.

Margery's lips quivered. She did not wait for John at the door, but turned back into the house, and was busied at the hearth when he came in.

"Well, wify, how goes it this evening?" he asked in his cheery voice, which always reminded Margery of the time when he used to add, "And how is my little pet darlint?" and pick the baby up from the floor. The tones of his voice had grown almost kinder and more cheerful since, if that were possible, though he always gazed around the room with a vague kind of look, as if he half-expected to see the baby toddle up to him from some corner.

"Thank you, John, all goes as well as usual. You are late to-night."

"Yes, there was something to detain me," he said, as he took down the tin-basin and filled it with water, to wash his sunburnt face and hands. A shadow flitted over Margery's face, but it was gone again when they sat down to table. It was still light enough to see without a candle, though the golden sunbeams John loved so much had faded long ago. He talked cheerily of the crops, and of harvest-time, and of the excellent prospects for the coming winter. There was no occasion for Margery to say much, and she was glad of it.

Then she quickly cleared the table, and John sat down by the hearth, lighted his pipe, and laid his evening paper across his knee to be read afterwards by candle-light. While Margery washed the dishes there was no sound in the room but the clatter of the cups and spoons, and the monotonous ticking of the old-fashioned clock in the corner. Margery sometimes glanced over at John, who sat smoking and looking into the fire. At last he got up, lit the candle, and, going up to Margery, he asked, "What's the matter, Margery? You are uncommonly silent to-night."

She stopped in her work, and hung the towel over her arm.

"John," she said, looking straight at him, with a strange light in her brown eyes, and her face rather pale, "I want to go home."

An expression half of pain, half of astonishment, came into John's honest face. He too was a shade paler, and the candle trembled a little in his hand as he asked,—

"Is the house too lonely again, Margery? You did say you wanted to go home for a spell, after, after—but I thought you had got contented again."

She had turned away from him as she answered,—

"Yes, John, the house is lonely again. I see the little hands on all the chairs, and hear the little feet crawling over the floor;" but there was something of coldness in her tone, very unlike the pleading voice in which she had once before made the same request.

"Well, Margery," he went on, after a pause, going to the table and putting the candle upon it, "if you think it will ease your heart to go and see the old folks a little while, I am willing you should."

He never spoke of the utter loneliness that fell upon him at the thought of her going away, and how to him, too, the dim room was full of the golden hair and the blue eyes of his child.

She said nothing.

"When will you come back, Margery?" he asked, after another pause.

"I don't know, John."

"When do you think of going?"

"On Monday morning, if you can spare the horse to take me over."

"I think I can, Margery; but I shall be sorry to lose my little wify so soon," he could not help saying, as he laid his rough hand on her hair, with so soft a touch that the tears started to her eyes.

"I shall ask Mary to come here and keep house for you, while I am away," she said. "Mary is used to our ways, and can do for you very well."