GRAPES AND THORNS.

GRAPES AND THORNS.BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE.”CHAPTER I.CRICHTON, AND THE CRICHTONIANS.Thedelicate exuberance of a New England spring was making amends for the rigor of a New England winter, and for its own tardy coming. Up through the faded sward pushed multitudinously all the little budding progeny of nature; out through rough bark burst the tender foliage; and all the green was golden-green. Light winds blew hither and thither; light clouds chased each other over the sky, now and then massing their forces to send a shower down, the drops so entangled with sunshine as to look like a rain of diamonds. Birds soared joyously, singing as they flew; and the channels of the brooks could scarcely contain their frolicsome streams. Sometimes a scattered sisterhood of snowflakes came down to see their ancestresses, and, finding them changed into snowdrops, immediately melted into an ecstasy, and so exhaled.This vernal freshness made the beautiful city of Crichton fairer yet, with curtains waving from open windows, vines budding over the walls, and all the many trees growing alive. It set a fringe of grasses nodding over the edges of three yellow paths ravelled out from a new road that, when it had travelled about a mile westward from the city, gave up being a road for the present. One of these paths started off southward, and sank into a swamp. In summer, this swamp was as purple as a ripe plum with flower-de-luce, and those who loved nature well enough to search for her treasures could find there also an occasional cardinalflower, a pink arethusa, or a pitcherblossom full to the brim with the last shower, or the last dew-fall. The second path ran northward to the bank of the Cocheco River, and broke off on the top of a cliff. If you should have nerve enough to scramble down the face of this cliff, you would find there the most romantic little cave imaginable, moss-lined, and furnished with moss cushions to its rock divans. A wild cherry-tree had in some way managed to find footing just below the cave, and at this season it would push up a spray of bloom, in emulation of the watery spray beneath. Fine green vines threaded all the moss; and, if one of them were lifted, it would show a line of honey-sweet bell-flowers strung under its round leaves.The third path kept on westward to a dusky tract of pine-woods about two miles from the town. No newly-sprouting verdure was visible amid this sombre foliage; but there was aglistening through it all like the smile on a dark face, and the neighboring air was embalmed with its fine resinous perfume.Out from this wood came sounds of laughter and many voices, some shrill and childish, others deeper voices of men, or softer voices of women. Occasionally might be heard a fitful song that broke off and began again, only to break and begin once more, as though the singer’s hands were busy. Yet so dense was the border of the wood with thick, low-growing branches that, had you gone even so near as to step on their shadows, and slip on the smooth hollows full of cones and needles they had let fall, not a person would you have seen.A girlish voice burst out singing:“‘The year’s at the spring,And day’s at the morn;Morning’s at seven;The hillside’s dew-pearled.The lark’s on the wing,The snail’s on the thorn;God’s in his heaven—All’s right with the world!’Only day is not at the morn,” the voice added correctingly; “for it is near sunset. But,” singing again,“‘The year’s at the spring;The lark’s on the wing;God’s in his heaven—And all’s right with the world!’—which may be called making a posy out of a poem.”A young man’s voice spoke: “All will soon be wrong in a part of the world, Pippa, if I do not call the sheep to fold.” And immediately a loud bugle-call sounded through the forest, and died away in receding echoes.Presently a Maying-party came trooping forth into sight.First, stooping low under the boughs, a score of boys and girls appeared, their cheeks bright with exercise and pure air, their silken hair dishevelled. After them followed, more sedately, a group of youths and maidens, “Pippa,” otherwise Lily Carthusen, and the bugler, among them. All these young people were decked with wreaths of ground pine around their hats, waists, and arms, and they carried hands full of Mayflowers.Lastly, two gentlemen, one at either hand, held back the branches, and Miss Honora Pembroke stepped from under the dark-green arch.If you are a literal sort of person, and make a point of calling things by their everyday names, you would have described her as a noble-looking young woman, dressed in a graceful brown gown, belted at the waist, after a Grecian fashion, and some sort of cloudy blue drapery that was slipping from her head to her shoulders. You would have said that her hair was a yellowish brown that looked bright in the sun, her eyes about the same color, her features very good, but not so classical in shape as her robe. You might have added that there was an expression that, really—well, you did not know just how to name it, but you should judge that the young woman was romantic, though not without sense. If you should have guessed her age to be twenty-eight, you would have been right.If, on the other hand, you are poetically Christian, ever crowning with the golden thorns of sacrifice whatever is most beautiful on earth, you would have liked to take the Mayflower wreath from this womanly maiden’s hand, place the palm-branch in its stead, and so send her to heaven by the way of the lions. Her face need hardly have changed to go that road, so lofty and delicate was the joy that shone under her quiet exterior, so full of light the eyes that, looking straight before her intospace, seemed to behold all the glory of the skies.The girl who came next was very different, not at all likely to suggest poetical fancies, though when you looked closely you could see much fineness of outline in the features and form. But she was spoilt in the coloring—a sallow skin, “sandy” hair, and light eyes giving a dingy look to her face. She was spoilt still more by the expression, which was superficial, and by being overdressed for her size and the occasion, and a little ragged from the bushes. This is Miss, or, as she likes to be called, Mademoiselle, Annette Ferrier. If at some moment, unawares, you should take the liberty to call her Niñon, with an emphatic nasal, she would forgive you beamingly, and consider you a very charming person. Mademoiselle, who, like three generations of her ancestors, was born in America, and who had spent but three months of her life in France, had no greater ambition than to be taken for a French lady. But do not set her down as a simpleton. Her follies are not malicious, and may wear off. Have you never seen the young birds, when they are learning to fly, how clumsily they tumble about? yet afterward they cleave the air like arrows with their strong pointed wings. And have you not seen some bud, pushing out at first in a dull, rude sheath that mars the beauty of the plant, open at last to disclose petals of such rare beauty that the sole glory of the plant was in upbearing it? Some souls have to work off a good deal of clinging foolishness before they come to themselves. Therefore, let us not classify Miss Ferrier just yet.She had scarcely appeared, when one branch was released with a discourteous haste that sent it against her dress, and a gentleman quickly followed her, and, with a somewhat impatient air, took his place at her side. Mr. Lawrence Gerald had that style of beauty which suggests the pedestal—an opaque whiteness of tint as pure as the petal of a camellia, clustering locks of dark hair, and an exquisite perfection of form and feature. He and Miss Ferrier were engaged to be married, which was some excuse for the profuse smiles and blushes she expended on him, and which he received with the utmost composure.The second branch swung softly back from the hand that carefully released it, and Mr. Max Schöninger came into sight, brushing the brown pine-scales from his gloves. He was the last in order, but not least in consequence, of the party, as more than one backward glance that watched for his appearance testified. This was a tall, fair-haired German, with powerful shoulders, and strong arms that sloped to the finest of sensitive hands. He had a grave countenance, which sometimes lit up beautifully with animated expression, and sometimes also veiled itself in a singular manner. Let anything be said that excited his instinct of reserve or self-defence, and he could at once banish all expression from his face. The broad lids would droop over those changeful eyes of his, and one saw only a blank where the moment before had shone a cordial and vivid soul.When we say that Mr. Schöninger was a Jew who had all his life been associated more with Christians than with his own people, this guarded manner will not seem unnatural. He glanced over the company, and was hesitatingly about to join Miss Pembroke, when one of the children left her playmates, and ran to take his hand. Mr. Schöninger was never on his guard with children, and thosehe petted were devotedly fond of him. He smiled in the upturned face of this little girl, held the small hand closely, and led her on.The order of march changed as the party advanced. Those who had been last to leave the wood were made to take precedence; the youths and maidens dropped behind them, and, as both walked slowly forward, the younger ones played about them, now here, now there. It was like an air with variations.The elders of the company were very quiet, Miss Carthusen a little annoyed. She need not have wasted her eloquence in persuading Mr. Schöninger to come with them, if he was going to devote himself to that baby. Miss Carthusen was clever, and rather pretty, and she liked to talk. What was the use of having ideas and fancies, if one was not to express them? Why should one go into company, if one was to remain silent? She considered Mr. Schöninger too superb by half.The sun was setting, and it flooded all the scene with a light so rich as to seem tangible. Whatever it fell upon was not merely illuminated, it was gilded. The sky was hazy with that radiance, the many windows on the twin hills of Crichton blazed like beacons, and the short green turf glistened with a yellow lustre. Those level rays threw the long shadows of the flower-bearers before them as they walked, dazzled the faces turned sidewise to speak, turned the green wreaths on their heads into golden wreaths, and sparkled in their hair. When Miss Pembroke put her hand up to shade her eyes in looking backward, the ungloved fingers shone as if transparent. She had been drinking in the beauty of the evening till it was all ready to burst from her lips, and there seemed to be no one who perceived that beauty but herself. She would have liked to be alone, with no human witness, and to give vent to the delight that was tingling in her veins. A strong impulse was working in her to lift a fold of her dress at either side, slide out that pretty foot of hers now hidden under the hem, and go floating round in a dance, advancing as she turned, like a planet in its path. It would have been a relief could she have sung at the very top of her voice. She had looked backward involuntarily at Mr. Schöninger, expecting some sympathy from him; but, seeing him engrossed in his little charge, had dropped her hand, and walked on, feeling rather disappointed. “I supposed he believed in the creation, at least,” she thought.Miss Pembroke was usually a very dignified and quiet young woman, who said what she meant, who never effervesced on small occasions, and sometimes found herself unmoved on occasions which many considered great ones. But when, now and then, the real afflatus came, it was hard to have her lips sealed and her limbs shackled.As she dropped her hand, faintly and fairylike in the distance she heard all the bells of Crichton ringing for sunset.Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, she sang softly, clasping her hands, still walking forward; and so went on with the rest of the hymn, not minding where the others of the party were, or if there were any others, till she felt a little pull at her dress, and became aware that Mr. Schöninger’s young friend had urged him forward to hear the singing, and was holding up her hand to the singer. But the Jew’s visor was down.Miss Pembroke took the child’s hand, which thus formed a link between the two, and continued her singing:Benedictus qui venit innomini Domini. She felt almost as if the man, thus linked to her by that transparent, innocent nature of the little girl between them, were spiritually joining her in the Hosanna. How deep or bitter his prejudices might be she knew not. Their acquaintance had been short, and they had never spoken of their theological differences. That his unbelief could be profound, yet gentle and tolerant toward her belief, had never occurred to her mind. She would have been scarcely more shocked than astonished could she have known the thought that almost escaped his lips. “She is too noble to be a worshipper of strange gods,” he thought. “When will this miserable delusion be swept away!”A slim, light hand stole into Miss Pembroke’s arm on the other side, and Miss Carthusen’s cheek pressed close to her shoulder. Miss Carthusen was a foundling, and had been adopted by a wealthy and childless couple. Nothing whatever was known of her parentage.“Lady Honora,” she whispered, “this scene reminds me of something. I am like Mignon, with my recollections gathering fast into a picture; only my past is further away than hers was. I almost know who I am, and where I came from. It flashes back now. We were dancing on the green, a ring of us. It was not in this land. The air was warm, the sward like rose-leaves; there were palms and temples not far away. I had this hand stretched forward to one who held it, and the other backward to one who held it, and so we danced, and there were wreaths on our heads, vine-leaves tangled in our hair. Suddenly something swept over and through us, like a cold wind, or a sharp cry, or both, and we all became fixed in a breath, the smile, the wreath, the tiptoe foot, and we hardened and grew less, and the air inside the ring died with our breaths in it, and the joy froze out of us, and the recollection of all we were faded. We were like flames that have gone out. There was nothing left but an antique vase with Bacchantes dancing round it in a petrified circle. Have you ever seen such a vase, with one figure missing?”“Silly child!” said Honora, smiling, but shrinking a little. This girl was too clinging, her imagination too pagan. “It is said that, at the birth of Christ, that wail was heard through all the hosts of pagan demons. ‘Pan is dead!’ they cried, and fled like dry leaves before a November wind. Pan is dead, Lily Carthusen; and if you would kindle his altars again, you must go down into the depths of perdition for the spark.”She spoke with seriousness, even with energy, and a light blush fluttered into her cheeks, and faded out again.Miss Carthusen, still clinging to the arm she had clasped, leaned forward to cast a laughing glance into the face beyond. “To Mr. Schöninger,” she said, “we are both talking mythology.”Miss Pembroke freed her arm decidedly, and stepped backward, so as to bring herself between Miss Ferrier and Lawrence Gerald. She took an arm of each, and held them a moment as if she were afraid. “Annette, Lily Carthusen must not help us to trim the altar,” she said. “It is not fitting. We will do it ourselves, with Mother Chevreuse.”“But Lily has such taste,” was the reluctant answer. “And she may be displeased if we do not ask her.”“Our Lady thinks more of devotion than of taste, Annette,” Miss Pembroke said earnestly. “It seems to me that every flower ought to be placed there by the hand of faith and love.”The other yielded. People always did yield when Miss Pembroke urged. And Miss Carthusen, fortunately, saved them the embarrassment of declining her assistance by walking on, engrossed in a gay conversation with the German. When she recollected, they were already far apart. She and her companion were close to the town, and the others had stopped where the three paths met.The children gathered about Miss Ferrier, and began piling their Mayflowers and green wreaths into her arms; for the flowers were all to decorate the altar of Mary in the beautiful church of S. John the Evangelist. These children were not half of them Catholic; but that made no difference in Crichton, where the people prided themselves on being liberal. Moreover, Miss Ferrier was a person of influence, and could reward those who obliged her.Then they scattered, dropping into different roads, one by one, and two by two, till only three, heavily laden with their fragrant spoil, were left walking slowly up South Avenue, into which the unfinished road expanded when it reached the city. They were to take tea at Mrs. Ferrier’s, and afterward go to the church; for this was the last day of a warm and forward April, and on the next morning the exercises of the Month of Mary were to begin. At the most commanding spot on the crown of the hill stood Mrs. Ferrier’s house; and one has but to glance at it to understand at once why mademoiselle is a person of influence.Seventeen years before, those who knew them would have imagined almost any change of fortune sooner than that the Ferriers should become people of wealth. There was Mr. Ferrier, a stout, dull, uneducated, hard-working man, who had not talent nor ambition enough to learn any trade, but passed his life in drudging for any one who would give him a day’s work. A man of obtuse intelligence, and utterly uncultivated tastes, but for the spark of faith left in that poor soul of his, he would have been a clod. But there the spark was, like a lamp in a tomb, showing, with its faint but steady light, the wreck of the beautiful, and the noble, and the sublime that was man as God made him; showing the dust of lost powers and possibilities, and the dust of much accumulated dishonor; showing the crumbling skeleton of a purpose that had started perfect; and showing also, carven deep, but dimly seen, the word of hope,Resurgam!Those human problems meet us often, staggering under the primal curse, ground down to pitiless labor from the cradle to the grave, losing in their sordid lives, little by little, first, the strength and courage to look abroad, then the wish, and, at last, the power, the soul in them shining with only an occasional flicker through thedébrisof their degraded natures. But if faith be there buried with the soul in that earthy darkness, the word of hope is still for themResurgam!There was Mrs. Ferrier, a very different sort of person, healthy, thrifty, cheerful, with a narrow vein of stubborn good sense that was excellent as far as it went, and with a kind heart and a warm temper. The chief fault in her was a common fault: she wished to shape and measure the world by her own compasses; and, since those were noticeably small, the impertinence was very apparent. She was religiously obedient to her husband when he raised his fist; but, in most matters, she ruled the household, Mr. Ferrier being authoritative only on the subject of his three meals, his pipe and beer, andhis occasional drop of something stronger.And there were five or six young ones, new little souls in very soiled bodies, the doors of life still open for them, their eyes open also to see, and their wills free to choose. These little ones, happy in their rags, baked mud pies, squabbled and made up twenty times a day, ate and slept like the healthy animals they were, their greatest trial being when their faces were washed and their hair combed, on which occasion there was an uproar in the family. These occasions were not frequent.The Ferrier mansion had but one room, and the Ferrier plenishing was simple. The wardrobe also was simple. For state days, monsieur had a state costume, the salient points of which were an ample white waistcoat and an ancient and well-preserved silk hat which he wore very far back on his head, both these articles being part of his wedding gear. Madame had also her gala attire, with which she always assumed an expression of complacent solemnity. This toilet was composed of a dark-red merino gown, a dingybrochéshawl, and a large straw bonnet, most unconsciously Pompadour, with its pink flowers and blue ribbons. For great occasions, the children had shoes, bought much too large that they might not be outgrown; and they had hats nearly as old as themselves. The girls had flannel gowns that hung decently to their heels; the boys, less careful of their finery, had to go very much patched.On Sundays and holidays, they all walked two miles to hear Mass, and each one put a penny into the box. On Christmas Days, they each gave a silver quarter, the father distributing the coin just before the collector reached them, all blushing with pride and pleasure as they made their offering, and smiling for some time after, the children nudging and whispering to each other till they had to be set to rights by their elders. Contented souls, how simple and harmless they were!Into the midst of this almost unconscious poverty, wealth dropped like a bombshell. If the sea of oil under their cabin and pasture had suddenly exploded and blown them sky-high, they could not have been more astounded; for oil there was, and floods of it. At almost any part of the little tract of land they had bought for next to nothing, it was but to dig a hole, and liquid gold bubbled up by the barrelful.Mr. Ferrier, poor man! was like a great clumsy beetle that blunders out of the familiar darkness of night into a brilliantly lighted room. Perhaps something aspiring and only half dead in him cried out through his dulness with a voice he could not comprehend; perhaps the sudden brightness put out what little sight he had: who knows? He drank. He was in a dream; and he drank again. The dream became a nightmare; and still he drank—drank desperately—till at last nature gave way under the strain, and there came to him an hour of such utter silence as he had not known since he lay, an infant, in his mother’s lap. During that silence, light broke in at last, and the imprisoned light shone out with a strange and bewildered surprise. The priest, that visible angel of God, was by his side, instructing his ignorance, calming his fears, calling up in his awakening soul the saving contrition, leaving him only when the last breath had gone.After the husband went child after child, till but two were left, Annette and Louis. These, the eldest, the mother saved alive.We laugh at the preposterous extravagance and display of the newly enriched. But is there not something pitiful in it, after all? How it tells of wants long denied, of common pleasures that were so distant from those hopeless eyes as to look like shining stars! They flutter and run foolishly about, those suddenly prosperous ones, like birds released from the cage, like insects when the stone is lifted from them; but those who have always been free to practise their smooth flight through a sunny space, or to crawl at ease over the fruits of the world, would do well not to scorn them.The house Mrs. Ferrier had built for herself in the newest and finest avenue of Crichton was, it must be confessed, too highly ornamented. Ultra-Corinthian columns; cornerstones piled to the very roof at each angle, and so laboriously vermiculated that they gave one an impression of wriggling; cornices laden with carving, festoons, fancy finials wherever they could perch; oriels, baywindows, arched windows with carven faces over them—all these fretted the sight. But the view from the place was superb.When our three flower-bearers reached the gate, they turned to contemplate the scene.All round, a circle of purple hills stood bathed in the sunset. From these hills the Crichtonians had borrowed the graceful Athenian title, and called their fair city the “city of the violet crown.” Forming their eastern boundary flowed the stately Saranac, that had but lately carried its last float of ice out to sea, almost carrying a bridge with it. Swollen with dissolving snows, it glided past, a moving mirror, nearly to the tops of the wharves. Northward was the Cocheco, an untamed little river born and brought up amid crags and rocks. It cleft the city in twain, to cast itself headlong into the Saranac, a line of bubbles showing its course for half a mile down the smoother tide.The Cocheco was in high feather this spring, having succeeded at last in dislodging an unsightly mill that had been built at one of its most picturesque turns. Let trade go up the Saranac, and bind its gentler waters to grind wheat and corn, and saw logs, and act as sewer; the Cocheco reserved itself for the beautiful and the contemplative. It liked that lovers should walk the winding roads along its banks; that children should come at intervals, wondering, half afraid, as if in fairy-land; that troubled souls, longing for solitude, should find it in some almost inaccessible nook among its crags; but, best of all, it liked that some child of grace, divinely gifted to see everything in God, should walk rejoicingly by its side. “O my God! how sweet are those little thoughts of thine, the violets! How thy songs flow down the waters, and roll out from the clouds! How tender is the shadow of thy hand when at night it presses our heavy eyelids down, and folds us to sleep in thy bosom, or when it wakens us silently to commune with thee!” For such a soul, the river had an articulate voice, and answered song for song.Yes; that was what it had to do in the world. Away with mills and traffic! Let trade go up the Saranac.So for three years watery tongues had licked persistently at posts and timbers, legions of bubbles had snapped at splinters till they wore away, and the whole river had gathered and flung itself against the foundations, till at last, when the spring thaw came, over went the mill, and was spun down stream, and flung into the deeper tide, and so sweptout to sea. Let trade go up the Saranac!But the patient Saranac sawed the logs, and carried away their dust and refuse, and took all the little fretted brooks and rivers into its bosom, and soothed their murmurs there. And both did God’s will, and both were good.Half hidden by the steep slope of the hill, as one stood in Mrs. Ferrier’s porch, was the church of S. John the Evangelist. Only the unfinished tower of it was visible, and a long line of slated roof seen in glimpses between spires and chimneys.“I really believe, Lawrence, that Crichton is the pleasantest place in the world,” remarked Miss Pembroke, after a short silence.A servant had taken away their flowers to keep fresh for the evening, and Miss Ferrier had gone in to change her dress. The mother being away, there was no need the other two should enter, when the lovely evening invited them to remain outside.Receiving no reply, the lady glanced inquiringly at her companion, and saw that his silence was a dissenting one. He had thrown himself into a chair, tossed his hat aside, and was looking off into the distance with fixed and gloomy eyes. The tumbled locks of hair fell over half his forehead, his attitude expressed discontent and depression, and there was a look about the mouth that showed his silence might proceed only from the suppression of a reply too bitter or too rude to utter.Seeing that her glance might force him to speak, she anticipated him, and continued, in a gentle, soothing tone: “If one loves religion, here is a beautiful church, and the best of priests; if one is intellectual, here is every advantage—books, lectures, and a cultivated society; if one is a lover of nature, where can be found a more beautiful country? Oh! it is not Switzerland nor Italy, I know; but it is delightful, for all that.”She had spoken carefully, like one feeling her way, and here she hesitated just for a breath, as though not sure whether she had better go on, but went on nevertheless. “Here every one is known, and his position secure. He need not suffer in public esteem from adverse circumstances, if they do not affect his character. There never was a place, I think, where a truly courageous and manly act would be more heartily applauded.”“Ah! yes,” the young man said, with hasty scorn; “they applaud while the thing is new, and then forget all about it. They like novelty. I don’t doubt that all the people would clap their hands if I should take to sweeping the streets, and that for a week the young ladies would tie bouquets to the end of the broomstick. But after the week was over, what then? They would find me a dusty fellow whose acquaintance they would gradually drop. Besides, their applause is not all. I might not enjoy street-sweeping, even though I and my broomstick were crowned with flowers as long as we lasted.”Miss Pembroke had blushed slightly at this sudden and violent interpretation of her hidden meaning; but she answered quietly: “No: their applause is not all—the applause of the world is never all, but it helps sometimes; and, if they give it to us for one moment when we start on the right path, it is all that we ought to expect. Life is not a theatre with a few actors and a great circle of spectators: we all have our part to play, and cannot stop long to admire others.”“Especially when that other isonly the scene-shifter,” laughed the young man, throwing the hair back from his face.“I know well that ordinary, inelegant work would come very hard to you, Lawrence,” she said kindly; “and, if it were to be continued to the end of your life, I might think it too hard. But there must be ways, for other men have found them, of beginning at the lower end of the ladder, even very low down, even in the dust, and climbing steadily to a height that would satisfy the climber’s ambition. It needs only a strong will and perseverance; and I firmly believe, Lawrence, that, to a strong will, almost anything is possible.”“A strong will is a special gift,” he replied stubbornly.“Yes; and one for which we may ask,” she said; then, seeing that he frowned, added: “And for you I like Crichton, as I said. One is known here, and motives and circumstances are understood. A thousand little helps might be given which in a strange city you would not have. All would be seen and understood here.”“All would be seen, yes!” he exclaimed, with a shrug and a frown. “That is the trouble. One would rather hide something.”She would not be repelled. “There is, of course, sometimes a disadvantage in living where everything is known,” she admitted. “But there must be disadvantages everywhere in the world. Look at the bright side of it. If you were in a great city, where all sorts of crimes hide, where men the most abandoned in reality can for a long time maintain a fair reputation before the world, how your difficulties would be increased! You would not then know whom to trust. Here, on the contrary, no wrong can remain long hidden.”He had not looked at her before, but at these words his eyes flashed into her face a startled glance. Her eyes were looking thoughtfully over the town.Feeling his gaze, she turned towards him with a quick change of expression and manner. A friendly and coaxing, almost caressing, raillery took the place of her seriousness: “Come! drive away your blues, Lawrence, and take courage. Study out some course for yourself where you can see far ahead, and then start and follow it, though you should find obstacles grow up in the way. Bore through them, or climb over them. There must be a way. There is something in you for honor, something better than complaining. Cheer up!”She extended her hand to him impulsively.“What motive have I?” he asked. But his face had softened, and a faint smile showed that the cloud had a silver lining.“For your mother’s sake,” she said. “How happy she would be!”“I can make my mother happy by kissing her, and telling her she is an angel,” he answered.It was but too true.“For poor Annette, then. There is a good deal in her, and she is devoted to you.”He shrugged his shoulders, and lifted his eyebrows: “She loves me as I am, and would love me if I were ten times as worthless, poor silly girl!”Miss Pembroke withdrew her hand, and retired a step from him. Again he had spoken the truth, this spoiled favorite of women!“For God’s sake, then.”He did not dare give another shrug, for his mentor’s face was losing its kindness. “You know I am not at all pious, Honora,” he said, dropping his eyes.She still retained her patience: “Can you find no motive in yourself, Lawrence? Do you feel no necessity for action, for courageous trial of what life may hold for you?”His pale face grew bright with an eager light. “If life but held for me one boon! O Honora....”She made a quick, silencing gesture, and a glance, inconceivably haughty and scornful, shot from her eyes.“Are you two people quarrelling?” Miss Ferrier inquired, behind them. “If you are, I am in good time. Tea is ready, and I suppose the sooner we are off, the better.”“I sent the flowers to the church,” she continued, as they went in through the gorgeous hall, “and directed John to tell Mother Chevreuse that we should come down in about an hour. But he brings me word that she is out with some sick woman, and may not come home till quite late. So we are but three.”Mother Chevreuse was the priest’s mother. It had grown to be a custom to give her that title, partly out of love for both mother and son, partly because Father Chevreuse himself sometimes called her so.“It will require one person to carry your train, Annette,” Mr. Gerald said, looking at the length of rustling brown silk over which he had twice stumbled. “And that takes two out; for, of course, you can do nothing in that dress. Honora will have the pleasure of decorating the altar, while we look on.”Only the faintest shade of mortification passed momentarily over the girl’s face, and vanished. She knew well the power her wealth had with this man, and that she could not make it too evident. Miss Ferrier was frivolous and extravagant, but she was not without discernment.“Did you ever know me to fail when I attempted anything?” she asked, with a little mingling of defiance and triumph in her air. “Honora goes calmly and steadily to work; but when I begin....”She stopped, embarrassed, for a rude speech had been at her lips.“You do twice as much as I,” Miss Pembroke finished, with sweet cordiality. “It is true, Annette, though you did not like to say it. You have great energy.”She put her hand out, and touched caressingly the shoulder of her young hostess in passing. “You are just what Lawrence needs.”Tears of pleasure filled Annette’s eyes. For all her wealth and the flatteries it had brought her, she had seldom heard a word of earnest commendation.To be praised by Honora was sweet; but to be praised before Lawrence was sweetest of all.They hurried through their tea, and went to the church. Mother Chevreuse had not returned home, and the priest also was away. The pleasant task of adorning the altar of Our Lady was left to them.The stars were beginning to show faintly in the sky when they commenced their work, and all the church was full of that clear yellow twilight. The pillars and walls, snowy white, with only delicate bands of gilding, reflected the softened beams, and seemed to grow transparent in them. But around the side-altar burned a ring of brilliant gas-jets; and through the open door of the sacristy was visible, ruddily lighted, a long passage and stairway leading to the basement.The light of heaven and the light of earth were thus brought face to face—the one pure, tender, and pervading, the other flaring, thick, and partial. But as daylight faded away, that inner light brought out strangeeffects. There was no longer anything white in the church: it was all turned to rose-color and deep shadow. Carven faces looked down with seeing eyes from arch, capital, and cornice; the pillars, standing up and down in long rows, appeared to lean together, to move, and change places with each other; there was a tremor in the dimly-seen organ-pipes, as though the strong breath of music were passing through them, and would presently break out in loud accord. A picture of S. John beside the grand altar showed nothing but the face, and the face was as glowing as if it had just been lifted from the bosom of the Lord to look into the Lord’s eyes.One might fancy that this fair temple in which God had taken up his dwelling only waited for those three to go away, that it might break into joy and adoration over its divine Guest.On a pedestal at the gospel side of the altar stood the statue of Our Lady, lovely eyelids downcast, as she gazed on those below, loving hands and arms outstretched, inviting all the world to her motherly embrace. An arch of white lilies had already been put up against a larger arch of green that was to be set with candles and a crown of light. They were now engaged in putting under the lilies a third and smaller arch of Mayflowers, that the whole might be like the Lady it was meant to honor—radiant with glory, mantled in purity, and full of tender sweetness.Annette had redeemed her promise of usefulness. Her long train was pinned about her, leaving a white skirt with the hem close to her ankles, and the flowing drapery of her sleeves was bound above the elbow, her arms being quite free. Mounted on the topmost step of an unsteady ladder, she fastened the higher flowers; lower down, at either side, Lawrence Gerald and Honora tied the lower ones. Not much was said, the few necessary words were lowly spoken; but they smiled now and then in each other’s lighted faces.It was ten o’clock when they went out through the basement, leaving a man to extinguish the gas and lock the door. On their way to the street, they passed the priest’s house. Only one light was visible in it, and that shone in a wide-open stairway window. The light, with a shadow beside it, was approaching the window, and presently a man’s head and shoulders appeared above the high sill. Father Chevreuse had returned home, and was going up to his chamber. He stopped, holding a candle, and put out his right hand to close the window, but paused, hearing a step outside. “Who’s there?” he asked authoritatively, peering out, but seeing nothing in the darkness.“Three friends who are just going home,” answered a voice.“And who are the other two, Honora Pembroke?” demanded the priest.“Annette and Lawrence. We have been arranging flowers for Our Lady.”“That’s well. Good-night!”He pulled the sash down with a bang; but Honora, smiling in the dark, still held her companions beneath the window. It opened again with another bang.“Children!” he called out.“Yes, father!”“God bless you! Good-night!”Again the sash came down, more gently this time, and the light and the kind heart went on climbing up the stairway.“He wouldn’t have slept well to-night if he had not said ‘God bless you!’ to us,” said Miss Pembroke. “And I believe we shall sleep better for it, too, God bless him!”They walked up the steep hillside from the lower part of the town toward South Avenue. Half-way up the hill, on a cross-street that led out toward the country, was the cottage in which Lawrence Gerald lived with his mother, his aunt, and Honora Pembroke. As they approached this road, Annette Ferrier’s heart fluttered. Lawrence had been very amiable that evening. He had praised her, had twice smiled very kindly, and had put her shawl over her shoulders before they came out, as though he were really afraid she might take cold. Perhaps he would leave Honora at home first, and then go up with her.What great good this would do her she could not have explained; for seldom had she heard from him a word too tender to be spoken before witnesses. Still, she wished it. He might say something kind, or listen willingly to some word of affection from her. At any rate, she would be a little longer in his company.Miss Pembroke anticipated her wish, or had some other reason for making the proposal. “Just go as far as the gate with me, and then you can escort Annette,” she said. “You will not mind a few extra steps, Annette?”“Oh! come up with us,” the young man interposed hastily. “It is a beautiful night for walking, and I know you are not tired yet. You can bear twice the walking that Annette can.”She hesitated a moment, then went on with them. His request displeased her on more than one account: she did not like his indifference to the company of his promised wife, and she did not like his preference for being with herself. But his mother would be anxiously watching for him; and it would be something if he could be lured in at an early hour after a quiet evening.Down in the black heart of the town, among the offices, was a certain back room where the windows were not so closely curtained but those who watched outside could see a thread of light burning all night long. To this room men went sometimes in the hope of mending their fortunes, or, after the demon of gambling had caught them fast, to taste of that fiery excitement which had now become to them a necessity. Honora more than suspected that Lawrence Gerald’s steps had sometimes turned in there. A year or two before, in one of his good moods, he had confessed it to her, with an almost boyish contrition, and had promised never to go again. It was his last confession of the sort, but, she feared, not his last sin. Of what worth were the promises of a weak, tempted man who never sought earnestly the help of God to strengthen his resolution? Of no more value than an anchor without a cable. Lawrence needed to be watched and cared for; so she went on with them.“I am so sorry to trouble you both,” Miss Ferrier exclaimed, in a voice trembling with anger and disappointment. “I could have had John come for me, if I had thought.” She snatched her hand from the arm of her escort, and pulled her shawl about her with nervous twitches.“It would have been better to have had John,” Honora said; “for he could have gone home with me. I am the troublesome third, as it is. But then,” speaking lightly, “if I am the last, Lawrence will be obliged to go in early.”With another twitch of her shawl, Annette took her escort’s arm again as abruptly as she had left it, and, held it closely.Careless as the last words had sounded, she knew their meaning, for there had been something said on this subject before. She chose to take it defiantly now, and it comforted her to do so. Others might blame and doubt him, but she would not. He seemed nearer to her in the light of her superior devotedness than to any one else. She would never fail him; and by-and-by he would know her worth. The glow of this fervent hope warmed the girl’s chilled heart, and gave her a sort of happiness.And so they reached the house, and, after a quiet good-night, separated.The walk back was passed in silence; and Miss Pembroke did not choose to lean on her companion’s arm; she wished to hold her dress out of the dust.The street they went through was one of those delightful old ones which a city sometimes leaves untouched for a long time. Over-arching elms grew thickly on either side, and the houses were all detached.Midway up this street stood the cottage of the Geralds, with a garden in front and at the back, and a narrow green at right and left. Three long windows in front, lighting the parlor, reached almost to the ground. The steep roof slanted to a veranda at each side, leaving but one upper window over the three—a wide window with casements swinging back from the middle. The cottage was in the shape of a cross, and at one arm of it a lighted window shone out on the veranda.At sound of the gate-latch, the curtain was drawn aside a little, and a woman looked out an instant, then hastened to open the door.“Are we late, Mrs. Gerald?” Honora asked, and stepped forward into the sitting-room.“Oh! no, dear; I did not expect you any sooner.”Mrs. Gerald lingered in the doorway, looking back at her son as he stopped to leave his hat and overcoat in the entry, and only entered the sitting-room when she had caught a glimpse of his face as he came toward her. He was looking pleasant, she saw, and was contented with that.“Well, mother!” he said, and sank indolently into the arm-chair she pushed before the open fire for him. It was the only arm-chair in the room.She drew another chair forward, and seated herself beside him. Honora, sitting on a low stool in the corner, with the firelight shining over her, told what they had been doing that afternoon and evening. The son listened, his eyes fixed on the fire; the mother listened, her eyes fixed on her son.Mrs. Gerald was an Irish lady of good descent, well educated, and well mannered, and had seen better days. We do not call them better days because in her girlhood and early married life this lady had been wealthy, but because she had been the happy daughter of excellent parents, and the happy wife of a good man. All were gone now but this son; the husband dead for many a year, the daughters married and far away, the wealth melted from her like sunset gold from a cloud; but Lawrence was left, and he filled her heart.One could read this in her face as she watched him. It revealed the pride of the mother in that beautiful manhood which she had given to the world, and which was hers by an inalienable right that no one could usurp; and it revealed, too, the entire self-forgetfulness of the woman who lives only in the life so dear to her.The face showed more yet; for, hovering over this love and devotion as the mist of the coming storm surrounds the full moon, and rings its softened brightness with a tremulous halo, one could detect even in the mother’s smile the mist of a foreboding sadness.How ineffable and without hope is that sadness which is ever the companion of a too exclusive affection!Honora Pembroke looked at the two, and pain and indignation, and the necessity for restraining any expression of either, swelled in her heart, painted her cheeks a deep red, and lifted her lids with a fuller and more scornful gaze than those soft eyes were wont to give. Where was the courtesy which any man, not rudely insensible, should show to a lady? Where the grateful tenderness that any child, not cruelly ungrateful, pays to a mother? This man could be gallant when he wished to make a favorable impression; and she had heard him make very pretty, if very senseless, speeches about chivalry and ideal characters, as if he knew what they were. He had even, in the early days of their acquaintance, maintained for a long time an irreproachable demeanor in her presence. She was learning a doubt and distrust of men, judging them by this one, of whom she knew most. Were they often as selfish and insensible as he was? Were they incapable of being affected by any enchantment except that which is lent by a delusive distance? Here beside him was an ideal affection, and he accepted it as he accepted air and sunshine—it was a matter of course. The mother was in person one who might satisfy even such a fastidious taste as his; for though the face was thin and faded, and the hands marred by household labor, there were still the remains of what had once been a striking beauty. Mrs. Gerald carried her tall form with undiminished stateliness, her coal-black hair had not a single thread of white among its thick tresses, and her deep-blue eyes had gained in tenderness what they had lost in fire. To use one of Miss Pembroke’s favorite expressions, it was not fitting that the son, after having passed a day without fatigue, should lounge at ease among cushions, while the mother, to whom every evening brought weariness, should sit beside him in a chair of penitential hardness.But even while she criticised him, he looked up from the fire, his face brightening with a sudden pleasant recollection.“O mother! I had almost forgotten,” he said, and began searching in his pockets for something. “Neither you nor Honora mentioned it; but I keep count, and I know that to-day your ladyship is five times ten years old.”He smiled with a boyish pleasure more beautiful than his beauty, and the little touch of self-satisfaction he betrayed was as far as possible from being disagreeable. He could not help knowing that he was about to give delight, and cover himself with honor in the eyes of these two women.“Now, mother,” opening a tiny morocco case, “this is the first ring I ever gave any woman. The one I gave Annette was only a diamond of yours reset, and so no gift of mine. But this your good-for-nothing son actually earned, and had made on purpose for you.”He drew from the case a broad gold ring that sparkled in the firelight as if set with diamonds, and, taking the trembling hand his mother had extended caressingly at his first words, slipped the circlet onto her finger.“I had no stone put in it, because I want you to wear it all the time,” he said. “Doesn’t it fit nicely?”“My dear boy!” Mrs. Gerald exclaimed, and could say no more; for tears that she wished to restrain were choking her.A fiftieth birthday is not a joyful anniversary when there is no one but one’s self to remember that it has come. Just as the mother had given up hope, and was making to herself excuses for his not remembering it, her son showed that it had been long in his thought. The joy was as unexpected as it was sweet.When she said her prayers that night, Mrs. Gerald’s clasped hands pressed the dear gift close to her cheek; and no maiden saying her first prayer over her betrothal-ring ever felt a tenderer happiness or more impassioned gratitude.“Dear Lawrence! it was so nice of you!” whispered Honora, and gave him her hand as she wished him good-night.He threw himself back in the arm-chair again when he was left alone, and for a few minutes had a very pleasant sense of being happy and the cause of happiness. “Who would think that so much fun could be got out of a quiet evening spent in tying Mayflowers round a pole, and giving a gold birthday ring to one’s mother?” he mused. “After all, the good people have the best of it, and we scape-graces are the ones to be pitied. If I were rich, I should be all right. If I had even half a chance, I would ask no more. But the poverty!” He glanced about the room, then looked gloomily into the fire again.Yes; poverty was there—that depressing poverty which speaks of decayed fortunes. The carpet, from which the brilliant velvet pile was worn nearly off, the faded and mended covers of the carved chair-frames, the few old-fashioned ornaments which had been retained when all that would sell well had gone to the auction-room, each showed by the scrupulous care with which it had been preserved a poverty that clung to the rags of prosperity in the past because it saw no near hope of prosperity in the future. Miles of unbroken forest could be seen from the cupolas of Crichton; yet in this room the very stick of wood that burned slowly on the andirons was an extravagance which Mrs. Gerald would not have allowed herself.“Yes; the good ones have the best of it,” the young man repeated, rousing himself.He drew the andirons out, and let the unconsumed stick down into the ashes, lighted a candle, and turned the gas off. Then, candle in hand, he stood musing a moment longer, the clear light shining over his face, and showing an almost childlike smile coming sweetly to his lips. “After all,” he said softly, “I haven’t been a bad fellow to-night,” and with that pleased smile still lingering on his face, went slowly out of the room.And so the stillness of night descended, and deep sleep brooded over the town as the lights went out.Crichton was a well-governed city: no rude broils disturbed its hours of darkness. Decency was in power there, and made itself obeyed. You might see a doctor’s buggy whirl by, like a ghost of a carriage, its light wheels faintly crunching the gravel; for only the business streets were paved. Now and then, on still nights, might be heard the grating of ropes, as some vessel sailed up to the wharf after a long ocean voyage. Perhaps a woman in one of the houses on the hill above would hearthat sound through her dream, and start up to listen, fancying that, in the word of command the soft breeze bore to her casement, she could detect a familiar voice long unheard and anxiously waited for. Perhaps the sailor, whose swift keel had shot like an arrow past the heavy junk of Chinese waters, and scattered, as it approached the shore, clear reflections of tufted palms and dusky natives—perhaps he looked eagerly up the hill to that spot which his eyes could find without aid of chart or compass, and saw suddenly twinkle out the lamp in the window of his home.But except for such soft sounds and shadowy idyls, Crichton was at night as still as sleep itself.The Crichtonians had a pleasant saying that their city was built by a woman, and the best compliment we can pay them is that they made this saying proudly, and kept in honored remembrance the hand of the gentle architect. But not so much in brick and stone was it acknowledged, though they owed to her their first ideas of correct and symmetrical building: in their society, high and low, in many of their pretty customs, in their tastes, in their freedom from bigotry of opinions, even in their government, they felt her influence.While the city lies sleeping under the stars, strong, adult, and beautiful, full of ambitious dreams, full, too, of kind and generous feeling, let us go back to the time when, an infant town, it began to use its powers, and stammer brokenly the alphabet of civilization.Hush, fair city, all thy many thousands, while the angels watch above thee! and, sweeter marvel yet! while the dear Lord waits unsleeping in thy midst, where that solitary taper burns. Sleep in peace, “poor exiled children of Eve,” and be grateful at least in dreams.Not very long ago, this place was a wild forest, with a rude little settlement hewn out of it on the river’s banks. It was shut in from the world, though the world was not far distant. But the river was broad and deep, the ocean only ten miles away, and within a few miles were large and growing cities. Soon the sound of the axe and the saw were heard, and little craft, sloops and schooners, floated down the Saranac laden with lumber till the water rippled close to the rails. The story of her growth in this regard is the story of a thousand other towns. The vessels grew larger, their voyages longer, more houses were built, some men became comparatively wealthy and gave employment to others, while the majority kept the level of the employed. Social distinctions began to show themselves, detestable ones for the most part, since there was no social cultivation. Indeed, this poor settlement was in a fair way to become the most odious of towns. The two meeting-houses began to be called churches by the aspiring; the leading woman of the town ventured to call her help a servant (on which the indignant “help” immediately deserted her); and the first piano appeared. But let us mention this piano with respect, for it was the pioneer of harmony.When Crichton had about fifteen hundred inhabitants, a stranger came there one day, as a passenger on board a bark returning from a distant city. This bark was the chief vessel, and was owned by the three chief men of Crichton. It had gone away laden with laths, and it brought back tea, coffee, sugar, and other foreign groceries; and, more than all, it brought Mr. Seth Carpenter. He was not, apparently, a very remarkableman in any way, except as all strangers were remarkable in this young town. He was plain-looking, rather freckled, and had a pair of small and very bright eyes which he almost closed, in a near-sighted way, when he wished to see well. Behind those eyes was a good deal of will and wit, and the will to put the wit into immediate practice. Moreover, he knew how to hold his tongue very cleverly, and baffle the curious without offending them. Nothing but his name transpired. He might be a mountebank, a detective, a king’s son—how were these people to know?In fact, he was nothing more mysterious than a respectable young man twenty-five years of age, who, having his fortune to make, had thought best to leave his prim, sober, native town, where nothing was being done, and where the people were mummies, and seek what, in modern parlance, is called a “live” place. In his pockets he had nothing but his hands; in his valise was a single change of linen.The very morning of his arrival at Crichton, Mr. Seth Carpenter went to the highest hill-top, and from it viewed the town, the river, and the receding forests. He then strolled down to the river, and looked through the mills, and from there sauntered to the ship-yard, where he found a ship on the stocks, almost ready to be launched. He walked round the yard, whistling softly, with an air of critical indifference. He paused near two other men who were viewing the ship, and, since their conference was not private, listened to it.One of these men, a sailor, rather thought he might make up his mind to buy that ship. Did his companion know what was likely to be asked for it? The other reckoned, and calculated, and guessed, and expected, and finally owned that he did not know.Mr. Carpenter, his eyes winking fast with the sparks that came into them, and his fingers working nervously, walked out of the yard, and found the owner of the ship, and, still with nothing in his pockets but his hands, made his bargain with all the coolness of a millionaire. Before sunset, the ship was nominally his; and, before sunrise, it had changed owners again, and the young adventurer had made five hundred dollars by the bargain.“I will yet rule the town!” he said exultingly, when he found himself alone; and he kept his word. Everything prospered with him, and in a short time even rivalry ceased. Men who had been proud to add dollar to dollar shrank and bowed before this man who added thousand to unit. Half the men in town, after ten years, were in his employment, and business prospered as he prospered. In another ten years, Crichton was a city, with all barriers down between her and the great world; but a raw, unkempt city; jealous, superficially educated, quarrelsome, pretentious, and rapidly crystallizing into that mould. Only a person of supreme position and character could now change it. Mr. Carpenter had the position, but not the character. He thought only of money-making, and of the excitement of enterprise and power; the rest he viewed with a pleasant indifference not without contempt. At forty-five he was still a bachelor.We have mentioned the first piano with respect, because others followed in its train, rendering a music-teacher necessary; so that, after a succession of tyros, Miss Agnes Weston came, bringing the very spirit of harmony with her into the town she was to conquer.She did not come as a conqueror, however; nor probably did she anticipate the part she was to play any more than the Crichtonians did. She came to earn her bread, and, while doing so, was anything but popular. Nothing but her brilliant musical abilities, and the fact that she had been educated at Leipsic, saved her from utter failure. People did not fancy this self-possessed, unpretending young person, who could sometimes show such a haughty front to the presuming, and who was, moreover, so frightfully dark and sallow. They did not understand her, and preferred to leave her very much to herself.One person only found her not a puzzle. To Mr. Carpenter she was simply a refined woman among uncongenial associates; becoming discontented and unhappy there, too, before many months had passed. He did not choose that she should go away. He had become pleasantly accustomed to seeing her, had sometimes met her on her long walks out of town; and once, when he had politely offered to drive her home—an offer which any other lady in Crichton would have accepted beamingly, without the preliminary of an introduction—had been refreshed by receiving a cold refusal, and a surprised stare from a pair of large black eyes. The great man, surfeited with smiles and flatteries, was immensely pleased by this superciliousness.But though strangely disturbed at the prospect of Miss Weston’s leaving, he hesitated to speak the word which might detain her. A bachelor of forty-five does not readily determine on making a sensible marriage; it usually needs some great folly to spur him on to a change so long deferred. He had, moreover, two other reasons for delaying: he wanted a charming wife, and was in doubt whether even his power could transform this lady into his ideal: the other reason had blue eyes, and a dimple in its chin, and was a very silly reason.But no one who knew this gentleman would expect him to remain long in doubt on any subject. Within a month from the day he first entertained the thought of running such a risk, Crichton was electrified by the announcement that Mr. Carpenter was soon to be married to Miss Weston; and, before they had recovered from their first astonishment, the marriage had taken place, and the quiet, dark-faced music-teacher was established as mistress of an imposing mansion on North Avenue.It was now Mr. Carpenter’s turn to be astonished, and he was enchanted as well. Never had he pictured to himself a woman so charming as this grub, now become a butterfly, proved herself; and never had he imagined that even his wife could obtain so beautiful a supremacy as she gradually established and never lost. She was born to rule, and seldom had such power been placed in any woman’s hands. Mr. Carpenter was the first of her vassals. With a refined and noble arrogance, she esteemed him as the first man in the world, because he had been the first to appreciate and exalt her. For this she gave him a faithful, if condescending, affection, and quoted his wishes and opinions so constantly that one might have thought they were her only guides. So thorough was her tact and her courtesy toward her husband he scarcely guessed his own inferiority, and never dreamed that she was aware of it.She grew beautiful, too, as well as amiable. Now that the drudgery of toil was lifted from her, and hercramped talents had room for full and exhilarating play, the swarthy skin cleared, showing a peach-like bloom, the fine teeth lit a frequent smile, and the deep voice lost its dull cadence, and took a musical, ringing sound.Mrs. Carpenter used her power well. Crichton was as clay in her hands, and she moulded it after a noble model. What arrogance could never have done was accomplished by tact and sweetness. Her forming touch was strong and steady, but it was smooth, and nothing escaped it. Thoroughly womanly, speaking by her husband’s mouth when she deemed it not fitting that her proper voice should be heard, she could influence in matters where women do not usually care to interfere. She thought nothing out of her province which concerned the prosperity of the town she honored with her presence, and she inspired others with her own enthusiasm. That streets should be wide and well kept, that public buildings should be architecturally symmetrical, that neat cottages for the poor, replacing their miserable huts, should start up sudden as daisies along some quiet road—these objects all interested her, though she worked for them indirectly.But in social life she ruled openly; and there her good sense and good heart, her gentle gaiety and entire uprightness, became the mould of form. Ill-nature went out of fashion, and, in the absence of charity, self-control became a necessity. When people of opposite creeds met at her house, their feuds had to be laid aside for the time; and, once two foes have smiled in each other’s faces, the frown is not so easy to recall.Gradually the change which had been imposed outwardly became a real one; and, when Mrs. Carpenter died, full of years and of honors, her spirit continued to animate the place, in its opinions and actions, at least, if some fairer grace of heart and principle were wanting. She died as she had lived, out of the church; though the church had ever found her a friend, bountiful and tenderly protecting. Of its doctrines and authority she seemed never to have thought; but the copy of the Sistine Madonna in her drawing-room had always a vase of fresh flowers before it.She left no children. A niece whom she had adopted married in Crichton, and had one descendant, a grand-daughter, living there. This grand-daughter was Honora Pembroke.Wake again, Crichton, for morning is come. Long rays of golden light are shooting out of the east; and down the hillside, in the church of S. John, Father Chevreuse is saying,Sursum Corda!TO BE CONTINUED.

GRAPES AND THORNS.BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE.”CHAPTER I.CRICHTON, AND THE CRICHTONIANS.Thedelicate exuberance of a New England spring was making amends for the rigor of a New England winter, and for its own tardy coming. Up through the faded sward pushed multitudinously all the little budding progeny of nature; out through rough bark burst the tender foliage; and all the green was golden-green. Light winds blew hither and thither; light clouds chased each other over the sky, now and then massing their forces to send a shower down, the drops so entangled with sunshine as to look like a rain of diamonds. Birds soared joyously, singing as they flew; and the channels of the brooks could scarcely contain their frolicsome streams. Sometimes a scattered sisterhood of snowflakes came down to see their ancestresses, and, finding them changed into snowdrops, immediately melted into an ecstasy, and so exhaled.This vernal freshness made the beautiful city of Crichton fairer yet, with curtains waving from open windows, vines budding over the walls, and all the many trees growing alive. It set a fringe of grasses nodding over the edges of three yellow paths ravelled out from a new road that, when it had travelled about a mile westward from the city, gave up being a road for the present. One of these paths started off southward, and sank into a swamp. In summer, this swamp was as purple as a ripe plum with flower-de-luce, and those who loved nature well enough to search for her treasures could find there also an occasional cardinalflower, a pink arethusa, or a pitcherblossom full to the brim with the last shower, or the last dew-fall. The second path ran northward to the bank of the Cocheco River, and broke off on the top of a cliff. If you should have nerve enough to scramble down the face of this cliff, you would find there the most romantic little cave imaginable, moss-lined, and furnished with moss cushions to its rock divans. A wild cherry-tree had in some way managed to find footing just below the cave, and at this season it would push up a spray of bloom, in emulation of the watery spray beneath. Fine green vines threaded all the moss; and, if one of them were lifted, it would show a line of honey-sweet bell-flowers strung under its round leaves.The third path kept on westward to a dusky tract of pine-woods about two miles from the town. No newly-sprouting verdure was visible amid this sombre foliage; but there was aglistening through it all like the smile on a dark face, and the neighboring air was embalmed with its fine resinous perfume.Out from this wood came sounds of laughter and many voices, some shrill and childish, others deeper voices of men, or softer voices of women. Occasionally might be heard a fitful song that broke off and began again, only to break and begin once more, as though the singer’s hands were busy. Yet so dense was the border of the wood with thick, low-growing branches that, had you gone even so near as to step on their shadows, and slip on the smooth hollows full of cones and needles they had let fall, not a person would you have seen.A girlish voice burst out singing:“‘The year’s at the spring,And day’s at the morn;Morning’s at seven;The hillside’s dew-pearled.The lark’s on the wing,The snail’s on the thorn;God’s in his heaven—All’s right with the world!’Only day is not at the morn,” the voice added correctingly; “for it is near sunset. But,” singing again,“‘The year’s at the spring;The lark’s on the wing;God’s in his heaven—And all’s right with the world!’—which may be called making a posy out of a poem.”A young man’s voice spoke: “All will soon be wrong in a part of the world, Pippa, if I do not call the sheep to fold.” And immediately a loud bugle-call sounded through the forest, and died away in receding echoes.Presently a Maying-party came trooping forth into sight.First, stooping low under the boughs, a score of boys and girls appeared, their cheeks bright with exercise and pure air, their silken hair dishevelled. After them followed, more sedately, a group of youths and maidens, “Pippa,” otherwise Lily Carthusen, and the bugler, among them. All these young people were decked with wreaths of ground pine around their hats, waists, and arms, and they carried hands full of Mayflowers.Lastly, two gentlemen, one at either hand, held back the branches, and Miss Honora Pembroke stepped from under the dark-green arch.If you are a literal sort of person, and make a point of calling things by their everyday names, you would have described her as a noble-looking young woman, dressed in a graceful brown gown, belted at the waist, after a Grecian fashion, and some sort of cloudy blue drapery that was slipping from her head to her shoulders. You would have said that her hair was a yellowish brown that looked bright in the sun, her eyes about the same color, her features very good, but not so classical in shape as her robe. You might have added that there was an expression that, really—well, you did not know just how to name it, but you should judge that the young woman was romantic, though not without sense. If you should have guessed her age to be twenty-eight, you would have been right.If, on the other hand, you are poetically Christian, ever crowning with the golden thorns of sacrifice whatever is most beautiful on earth, you would have liked to take the Mayflower wreath from this womanly maiden’s hand, place the palm-branch in its stead, and so send her to heaven by the way of the lions. Her face need hardly have changed to go that road, so lofty and delicate was the joy that shone under her quiet exterior, so full of light the eyes that, looking straight before her intospace, seemed to behold all the glory of the skies.The girl who came next was very different, not at all likely to suggest poetical fancies, though when you looked closely you could see much fineness of outline in the features and form. But she was spoilt in the coloring—a sallow skin, “sandy” hair, and light eyes giving a dingy look to her face. She was spoilt still more by the expression, which was superficial, and by being overdressed for her size and the occasion, and a little ragged from the bushes. This is Miss, or, as she likes to be called, Mademoiselle, Annette Ferrier. If at some moment, unawares, you should take the liberty to call her Niñon, with an emphatic nasal, she would forgive you beamingly, and consider you a very charming person. Mademoiselle, who, like three generations of her ancestors, was born in America, and who had spent but three months of her life in France, had no greater ambition than to be taken for a French lady. But do not set her down as a simpleton. Her follies are not malicious, and may wear off. Have you never seen the young birds, when they are learning to fly, how clumsily they tumble about? yet afterward they cleave the air like arrows with their strong pointed wings. And have you not seen some bud, pushing out at first in a dull, rude sheath that mars the beauty of the plant, open at last to disclose petals of such rare beauty that the sole glory of the plant was in upbearing it? Some souls have to work off a good deal of clinging foolishness before they come to themselves. Therefore, let us not classify Miss Ferrier just yet.She had scarcely appeared, when one branch was released with a discourteous haste that sent it against her dress, and a gentleman quickly followed her, and, with a somewhat impatient air, took his place at her side. Mr. Lawrence Gerald had that style of beauty which suggests the pedestal—an opaque whiteness of tint as pure as the petal of a camellia, clustering locks of dark hair, and an exquisite perfection of form and feature. He and Miss Ferrier were engaged to be married, which was some excuse for the profuse smiles and blushes she expended on him, and which he received with the utmost composure.The second branch swung softly back from the hand that carefully released it, and Mr. Max Schöninger came into sight, brushing the brown pine-scales from his gloves. He was the last in order, but not least in consequence, of the party, as more than one backward glance that watched for his appearance testified. This was a tall, fair-haired German, with powerful shoulders, and strong arms that sloped to the finest of sensitive hands. He had a grave countenance, which sometimes lit up beautifully with animated expression, and sometimes also veiled itself in a singular manner. Let anything be said that excited his instinct of reserve or self-defence, and he could at once banish all expression from his face. The broad lids would droop over those changeful eyes of his, and one saw only a blank where the moment before had shone a cordial and vivid soul.When we say that Mr. Schöninger was a Jew who had all his life been associated more with Christians than with his own people, this guarded manner will not seem unnatural. He glanced over the company, and was hesitatingly about to join Miss Pembroke, when one of the children left her playmates, and ran to take his hand. Mr. Schöninger was never on his guard with children, and thosehe petted were devotedly fond of him. He smiled in the upturned face of this little girl, held the small hand closely, and led her on.The order of march changed as the party advanced. Those who had been last to leave the wood were made to take precedence; the youths and maidens dropped behind them, and, as both walked slowly forward, the younger ones played about them, now here, now there. It was like an air with variations.The elders of the company were very quiet, Miss Carthusen a little annoyed. She need not have wasted her eloquence in persuading Mr. Schöninger to come with them, if he was going to devote himself to that baby. Miss Carthusen was clever, and rather pretty, and she liked to talk. What was the use of having ideas and fancies, if one was not to express them? Why should one go into company, if one was to remain silent? She considered Mr. Schöninger too superb by half.The sun was setting, and it flooded all the scene with a light so rich as to seem tangible. Whatever it fell upon was not merely illuminated, it was gilded. The sky was hazy with that radiance, the many windows on the twin hills of Crichton blazed like beacons, and the short green turf glistened with a yellow lustre. Those level rays threw the long shadows of the flower-bearers before them as they walked, dazzled the faces turned sidewise to speak, turned the green wreaths on their heads into golden wreaths, and sparkled in their hair. When Miss Pembroke put her hand up to shade her eyes in looking backward, the ungloved fingers shone as if transparent. She had been drinking in the beauty of the evening till it was all ready to burst from her lips, and there seemed to be no one who perceived that beauty but herself. She would have liked to be alone, with no human witness, and to give vent to the delight that was tingling in her veins. A strong impulse was working in her to lift a fold of her dress at either side, slide out that pretty foot of hers now hidden under the hem, and go floating round in a dance, advancing as she turned, like a planet in its path. It would have been a relief could she have sung at the very top of her voice. She had looked backward involuntarily at Mr. Schöninger, expecting some sympathy from him; but, seeing him engrossed in his little charge, had dropped her hand, and walked on, feeling rather disappointed. “I supposed he believed in the creation, at least,” she thought.Miss Pembroke was usually a very dignified and quiet young woman, who said what she meant, who never effervesced on small occasions, and sometimes found herself unmoved on occasions which many considered great ones. But when, now and then, the real afflatus came, it was hard to have her lips sealed and her limbs shackled.As she dropped her hand, faintly and fairylike in the distance she heard all the bells of Crichton ringing for sunset.Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, she sang softly, clasping her hands, still walking forward; and so went on with the rest of the hymn, not minding where the others of the party were, or if there were any others, till she felt a little pull at her dress, and became aware that Mr. Schöninger’s young friend had urged him forward to hear the singing, and was holding up her hand to the singer. But the Jew’s visor was down.Miss Pembroke took the child’s hand, which thus formed a link between the two, and continued her singing:Benedictus qui venit innomini Domini. She felt almost as if the man, thus linked to her by that transparent, innocent nature of the little girl between them, were spiritually joining her in the Hosanna. How deep or bitter his prejudices might be she knew not. Their acquaintance had been short, and they had never spoken of their theological differences. That his unbelief could be profound, yet gentle and tolerant toward her belief, had never occurred to her mind. She would have been scarcely more shocked than astonished could she have known the thought that almost escaped his lips. “She is too noble to be a worshipper of strange gods,” he thought. “When will this miserable delusion be swept away!”A slim, light hand stole into Miss Pembroke’s arm on the other side, and Miss Carthusen’s cheek pressed close to her shoulder. Miss Carthusen was a foundling, and had been adopted by a wealthy and childless couple. Nothing whatever was known of her parentage.“Lady Honora,” she whispered, “this scene reminds me of something. I am like Mignon, with my recollections gathering fast into a picture; only my past is further away than hers was. I almost know who I am, and where I came from. It flashes back now. We were dancing on the green, a ring of us. It was not in this land. The air was warm, the sward like rose-leaves; there were palms and temples not far away. I had this hand stretched forward to one who held it, and the other backward to one who held it, and so we danced, and there were wreaths on our heads, vine-leaves tangled in our hair. Suddenly something swept over and through us, like a cold wind, or a sharp cry, or both, and we all became fixed in a breath, the smile, the wreath, the tiptoe foot, and we hardened and grew less, and the air inside the ring died with our breaths in it, and the joy froze out of us, and the recollection of all we were faded. We were like flames that have gone out. There was nothing left but an antique vase with Bacchantes dancing round it in a petrified circle. Have you ever seen such a vase, with one figure missing?”“Silly child!” said Honora, smiling, but shrinking a little. This girl was too clinging, her imagination too pagan. “It is said that, at the birth of Christ, that wail was heard through all the hosts of pagan demons. ‘Pan is dead!’ they cried, and fled like dry leaves before a November wind. Pan is dead, Lily Carthusen; and if you would kindle his altars again, you must go down into the depths of perdition for the spark.”She spoke with seriousness, even with energy, and a light blush fluttered into her cheeks, and faded out again.Miss Carthusen, still clinging to the arm she had clasped, leaned forward to cast a laughing glance into the face beyond. “To Mr. Schöninger,” she said, “we are both talking mythology.”Miss Pembroke freed her arm decidedly, and stepped backward, so as to bring herself between Miss Ferrier and Lawrence Gerald. She took an arm of each, and held them a moment as if she were afraid. “Annette, Lily Carthusen must not help us to trim the altar,” she said. “It is not fitting. We will do it ourselves, with Mother Chevreuse.”“But Lily has such taste,” was the reluctant answer. “And she may be displeased if we do not ask her.”“Our Lady thinks more of devotion than of taste, Annette,” Miss Pembroke said earnestly. “It seems to me that every flower ought to be placed there by the hand of faith and love.”The other yielded. People always did yield when Miss Pembroke urged. And Miss Carthusen, fortunately, saved them the embarrassment of declining her assistance by walking on, engrossed in a gay conversation with the German. When she recollected, they were already far apart. She and her companion were close to the town, and the others had stopped where the three paths met.The children gathered about Miss Ferrier, and began piling their Mayflowers and green wreaths into her arms; for the flowers were all to decorate the altar of Mary in the beautiful church of S. John the Evangelist. These children were not half of them Catholic; but that made no difference in Crichton, where the people prided themselves on being liberal. Moreover, Miss Ferrier was a person of influence, and could reward those who obliged her.Then they scattered, dropping into different roads, one by one, and two by two, till only three, heavily laden with their fragrant spoil, were left walking slowly up South Avenue, into which the unfinished road expanded when it reached the city. They were to take tea at Mrs. Ferrier’s, and afterward go to the church; for this was the last day of a warm and forward April, and on the next morning the exercises of the Month of Mary were to begin. At the most commanding spot on the crown of the hill stood Mrs. Ferrier’s house; and one has but to glance at it to understand at once why mademoiselle is a person of influence.Seventeen years before, those who knew them would have imagined almost any change of fortune sooner than that the Ferriers should become people of wealth. There was Mr. Ferrier, a stout, dull, uneducated, hard-working man, who had not talent nor ambition enough to learn any trade, but passed his life in drudging for any one who would give him a day’s work. A man of obtuse intelligence, and utterly uncultivated tastes, but for the spark of faith left in that poor soul of his, he would have been a clod. But there the spark was, like a lamp in a tomb, showing, with its faint but steady light, the wreck of the beautiful, and the noble, and the sublime that was man as God made him; showing the dust of lost powers and possibilities, and the dust of much accumulated dishonor; showing the crumbling skeleton of a purpose that had started perfect; and showing also, carven deep, but dimly seen, the word of hope,Resurgam!Those human problems meet us often, staggering under the primal curse, ground down to pitiless labor from the cradle to the grave, losing in their sordid lives, little by little, first, the strength and courage to look abroad, then the wish, and, at last, the power, the soul in them shining with only an occasional flicker through thedébrisof their degraded natures. But if faith be there buried with the soul in that earthy darkness, the word of hope is still for themResurgam!There was Mrs. Ferrier, a very different sort of person, healthy, thrifty, cheerful, with a narrow vein of stubborn good sense that was excellent as far as it went, and with a kind heart and a warm temper. The chief fault in her was a common fault: she wished to shape and measure the world by her own compasses; and, since those were noticeably small, the impertinence was very apparent. She was religiously obedient to her husband when he raised his fist; but, in most matters, she ruled the household, Mr. Ferrier being authoritative only on the subject of his three meals, his pipe and beer, andhis occasional drop of something stronger.And there were five or six young ones, new little souls in very soiled bodies, the doors of life still open for them, their eyes open also to see, and their wills free to choose. These little ones, happy in their rags, baked mud pies, squabbled and made up twenty times a day, ate and slept like the healthy animals they were, their greatest trial being when their faces were washed and their hair combed, on which occasion there was an uproar in the family. These occasions were not frequent.The Ferrier mansion had but one room, and the Ferrier plenishing was simple. The wardrobe also was simple. For state days, monsieur had a state costume, the salient points of which were an ample white waistcoat and an ancient and well-preserved silk hat which he wore very far back on his head, both these articles being part of his wedding gear. Madame had also her gala attire, with which she always assumed an expression of complacent solemnity. This toilet was composed of a dark-red merino gown, a dingybrochéshawl, and a large straw bonnet, most unconsciously Pompadour, with its pink flowers and blue ribbons. For great occasions, the children had shoes, bought much too large that they might not be outgrown; and they had hats nearly as old as themselves. The girls had flannel gowns that hung decently to their heels; the boys, less careful of their finery, had to go very much patched.On Sundays and holidays, they all walked two miles to hear Mass, and each one put a penny into the box. On Christmas Days, they each gave a silver quarter, the father distributing the coin just before the collector reached them, all blushing with pride and pleasure as they made their offering, and smiling for some time after, the children nudging and whispering to each other till they had to be set to rights by their elders. Contented souls, how simple and harmless they were!Into the midst of this almost unconscious poverty, wealth dropped like a bombshell. If the sea of oil under their cabin and pasture had suddenly exploded and blown them sky-high, they could not have been more astounded; for oil there was, and floods of it. At almost any part of the little tract of land they had bought for next to nothing, it was but to dig a hole, and liquid gold bubbled up by the barrelful.Mr. Ferrier, poor man! was like a great clumsy beetle that blunders out of the familiar darkness of night into a brilliantly lighted room. Perhaps something aspiring and only half dead in him cried out through his dulness with a voice he could not comprehend; perhaps the sudden brightness put out what little sight he had: who knows? He drank. He was in a dream; and he drank again. The dream became a nightmare; and still he drank—drank desperately—till at last nature gave way under the strain, and there came to him an hour of such utter silence as he had not known since he lay, an infant, in his mother’s lap. During that silence, light broke in at last, and the imprisoned light shone out with a strange and bewildered surprise. The priest, that visible angel of God, was by his side, instructing his ignorance, calming his fears, calling up in his awakening soul the saving contrition, leaving him only when the last breath had gone.After the husband went child after child, till but two were left, Annette and Louis. These, the eldest, the mother saved alive.We laugh at the preposterous extravagance and display of the newly enriched. But is there not something pitiful in it, after all? How it tells of wants long denied, of common pleasures that were so distant from those hopeless eyes as to look like shining stars! They flutter and run foolishly about, those suddenly prosperous ones, like birds released from the cage, like insects when the stone is lifted from them; but those who have always been free to practise their smooth flight through a sunny space, or to crawl at ease over the fruits of the world, would do well not to scorn them.The house Mrs. Ferrier had built for herself in the newest and finest avenue of Crichton was, it must be confessed, too highly ornamented. Ultra-Corinthian columns; cornerstones piled to the very roof at each angle, and so laboriously vermiculated that they gave one an impression of wriggling; cornices laden with carving, festoons, fancy finials wherever they could perch; oriels, baywindows, arched windows with carven faces over them—all these fretted the sight. But the view from the place was superb.When our three flower-bearers reached the gate, they turned to contemplate the scene.All round, a circle of purple hills stood bathed in the sunset. From these hills the Crichtonians had borrowed the graceful Athenian title, and called their fair city the “city of the violet crown.” Forming their eastern boundary flowed the stately Saranac, that had but lately carried its last float of ice out to sea, almost carrying a bridge with it. Swollen with dissolving snows, it glided past, a moving mirror, nearly to the tops of the wharves. Northward was the Cocheco, an untamed little river born and brought up amid crags and rocks. It cleft the city in twain, to cast itself headlong into the Saranac, a line of bubbles showing its course for half a mile down the smoother tide.The Cocheco was in high feather this spring, having succeeded at last in dislodging an unsightly mill that had been built at one of its most picturesque turns. Let trade go up the Saranac, and bind its gentler waters to grind wheat and corn, and saw logs, and act as sewer; the Cocheco reserved itself for the beautiful and the contemplative. It liked that lovers should walk the winding roads along its banks; that children should come at intervals, wondering, half afraid, as if in fairy-land; that troubled souls, longing for solitude, should find it in some almost inaccessible nook among its crags; but, best of all, it liked that some child of grace, divinely gifted to see everything in God, should walk rejoicingly by its side. “O my God! how sweet are those little thoughts of thine, the violets! How thy songs flow down the waters, and roll out from the clouds! How tender is the shadow of thy hand when at night it presses our heavy eyelids down, and folds us to sleep in thy bosom, or when it wakens us silently to commune with thee!” For such a soul, the river had an articulate voice, and answered song for song.Yes; that was what it had to do in the world. Away with mills and traffic! Let trade go up the Saranac.So for three years watery tongues had licked persistently at posts and timbers, legions of bubbles had snapped at splinters till they wore away, and the whole river had gathered and flung itself against the foundations, till at last, when the spring thaw came, over went the mill, and was spun down stream, and flung into the deeper tide, and so sweptout to sea. Let trade go up the Saranac!But the patient Saranac sawed the logs, and carried away their dust and refuse, and took all the little fretted brooks and rivers into its bosom, and soothed their murmurs there. And both did God’s will, and both were good.Half hidden by the steep slope of the hill, as one stood in Mrs. Ferrier’s porch, was the church of S. John the Evangelist. Only the unfinished tower of it was visible, and a long line of slated roof seen in glimpses between spires and chimneys.“I really believe, Lawrence, that Crichton is the pleasantest place in the world,” remarked Miss Pembroke, after a short silence.A servant had taken away their flowers to keep fresh for the evening, and Miss Ferrier had gone in to change her dress. The mother being away, there was no need the other two should enter, when the lovely evening invited them to remain outside.Receiving no reply, the lady glanced inquiringly at her companion, and saw that his silence was a dissenting one. He had thrown himself into a chair, tossed his hat aside, and was looking off into the distance with fixed and gloomy eyes. The tumbled locks of hair fell over half his forehead, his attitude expressed discontent and depression, and there was a look about the mouth that showed his silence might proceed only from the suppression of a reply too bitter or too rude to utter.Seeing that her glance might force him to speak, she anticipated him, and continued, in a gentle, soothing tone: “If one loves religion, here is a beautiful church, and the best of priests; if one is intellectual, here is every advantage—books, lectures, and a cultivated society; if one is a lover of nature, where can be found a more beautiful country? Oh! it is not Switzerland nor Italy, I know; but it is delightful, for all that.”She had spoken carefully, like one feeling her way, and here she hesitated just for a breath, as though not sure whether she had better go on, but went on nevertheless. “Here every one is known, and his position secure. He need not suffer in public esteem from adverse circumstances, if they do not affect his character. There never was a place, I think, where a truly courageous and manly act would be more heartily applauded.”“Ah! yes,” the young man said, with hasty scorn; “they applaud while the thing is new, and then forget all about it. They like novelty. I don’t doubt that all the people would clap their hands if I should take to sweeping the streets, and that for a week the young ladies would tie bouquets to the end of the broomstick. But after the week was over, what then? They would find me a dusty fellow whose acquaintance they would gradually drop. Besides, their applause is not all. I might not enjoy street-sweeping, even though I and my broomstick were crowned with flowers as long as we lasted.”Miss Pembroke had blushed slightly at this sudden and violent interpretation of her hidden meaning; but she answered quietly: “No: their applause is not all—the applause of the world is never all, but it helps sometimes; and, if they give it to us for one moment when we start on the right path, it is all that we ought to expect. Life is not a theatre with a few actors and a great circle of spectators: we all have our part to play, and cannot stop long to admire others.”“Especially when that other isonly the scene-shifter,” laughed the young man, throwing the hair back from his face.“I know well that ordinary, inelegant work would come very hard to you, Lawrence,” she said kindly; “and, if it were to be continued to the end of your life, I might think it too hard. But there must be ways, for other men have found them, of beginning at the lower end of the ladder, even very low down, even in the dust, and climbing steadily to a height that would satisfy the climber’s ambition. It needs only a strong will and perseverance; and I firmly believe, Lawrence, that, to a strong will, almost anything is possible.”“A strong will is a special gift,” he replied stubbornly.“Yes; and one for which we may ask,” she said; then, seeing that he frowned, added: “And for you I like Crichton, as I said. One is known here, and motives and circumstances are understood. A thousand little helps might be given which in a strange city you would not have. All would be seen and understood here.”“All would be seen, yes!” he exclaimed, with a shrug and a frown. “That is the trouble. One would rather hide something.”She would not be repelled. “There is, of course, sometimes a disadvantage in living where everything is known,” she admitted. “But there must be disadvantages everywhere in the world. Look at the bright side of it. If you were in a great city, where all sorts of crimes hide, where men the most abandoned in reality can for a long time maintain a fair reputation before the world, how your difficulties would be increased! You would not then know whom to trust. Here, on the contrary, no wrong can remain long hidden.”He had not looked at her before, but at these words his eyes flashed into her face a startled glance. Her eyes were looking thoughtfully over the town.Feeling his gaze, she turned towards him with a quick change of expression and manner. A friendly and coaxing, almost caressing, raillery took the place of her seriousness: “Come! drive away your blues, Lawrence, and take courage. Study out some course for yourself where you can see far ahead, and then start and follow it, though you should find obstacles grow up in the way. Bore through them, or climb over them. There must be a way. There is something in you for honor, something better than complaining. Cheer up!”She extended her hand to him impulsively.“What motive have I?” he asked. But his face had softened, and a faint smile showed that the cloud had a silver lining.“For your mother’s sake,” she said. “How happy she would be!”“I can make my mother happy by kissing her, and telling her she is an angel,” he answered.It was but too true.“For poor Annette, then. There is a good deal in her, and she is devoted to you.”He shrugged his shoulders, and lifted his eyebrows: “She loves me as I am, and would love me if I were ten times as worthless, poor silly girl!”Miss Pembroke withdrew her hand, and retired a step from him. Again he had spoken the truth, this spoiled favorite of women!“For God’s sake, then.”He did not dare give another shrug, for his mentor’s face was losing its kindness. “You know I am not at all pious, Honora,” he said, dropping his eyes.She still retained her patience: “Can you find no motive in yourself, Lawrence? Do you feel no necessity for action, for courageous trial of what life may hold for you?”His pale face grew bright with an eager light. “If life but held for me one boon! O Honora....”She made a quick, silencing gesture, and a glance, inconceivably haughty and scornful, shot from her eyes.“Are you two people quarrelling?” Miss Ferrier inquired, behind them. “If you are, I am in good time. Tea is ready, and I suppose the sooner we are off, the better.”“I sent the flowers to the church,” she continued, as they went in through the gorgeous hall, “and directed John to tell Mother Chevreuse that we should come down in about an hour. But he brings me word that she is out with some sick woman, and may not come home till quite late. So we are but three.”Mother Chevreuse was the priest’s mother. It had grown to be a custom to give her that title, partly out of love for both mother and son, partly because Father Chevreuse himself sometimes called her so.“It will require one person to carry your train, Annette,” Mr. Gerald said, looking at the length of rustling brown silk over which he had twice stumbled. “And that takes two out; for, of course, you can do nothing in that dress. Honora will have the pleasure of decorating the altar, while we look on.”Only the faintest shade of mortification passed momentarily over the girl’s face, and vanished. She knew well the power her wealth had with this man, and that she could not make it too evident. Miss Ferrier was frivolous and extravagant, but she was not without discernment.“Did you ever know me to fail when I attempted anything?” she asked, with a little mingling of defiance and triumph in her air. “Honora goes calmly and steadily to work; but when I begin....”She stopped, embarrassed, for a rude speech had been at her lips.“You do twice as much as I,” Miss Pembroke finished, with sweet cordiality. “It is true, Annette, though you did not like to say it. You have great energy.”She put her hand out, and touched caressingly the shoulder of her young hostess in passing. “You are just what Lawrence needs.”Tears of pleasure filled Annette’s eyes. For all her wealth and the flatteries it had brought her, she had seldom heard a word of earnest commendation.To be praised by Honora was sweet; but to be praised before Lawrence was sweetest of all.They hurried through their tea, and went to the church. Mother Chevreuse had not returned home, and the priest also was away. The pleasant task of adorning the altar of Our Lady was left to them.The stars were beginning to show faintly in the sky when they commenced their work, and all the church was full of that clear yellow twilight. The pillars and walls, snowy white, with only delicate bands of gilding, reflected the softened beams, and seemed to grow transparent in them. But around the side-altar burned a ring of brilliant gas-jets; and through the open door of the sacristy was visible, ruddily lighted, a long passage and stairway leading to the basement.The light of heaven and the light of earth were thus brought face to face—the one pure, tender, and pervading, the other flaring, thick, and partial. But as daylight faded away, that inner light brought out strangeeffects. There was no longer anything white in the church: it was all turned to rose-color and deep shadow. Carven faces looked down with seeing eyes from arch, capital, and cornice; the pillars, standing up and down in long rows, appeared to lean together, to move, and change places with each other; there was a tremor in the dimly-seen organ-pipes, as though the strong breath of music were passing through them, and would presently break out in loud accord. A picture of S. John beside the grand altar showed nothing but the face, and the face was as glowing as if it had just been lifted from the bosom of the Lord to look into the Lord’s eyes.One might fancy that this fair temple in which God had taken up his dwelling only waited for those three to go away, that it might break into joy and adoration over its divine Guest.On a pedestal at the gospel side of the altar stood the statue of Our Lady, lovely eyelids downcast, as she gazed on those below, loving hands and arms outstretched, inviting all the world to her motherly embrace. An arch of white lilies had already been put up against a larger arch of green that was to be set with candles and a crown of light. They were now engaged in putting under the lilies a third and smaller arch of Mayflowers, that the whole might be like the Lady it was meant to honor—radiant with glory, mantled in purity, and full of tender sweetness.Annette had redeemed her promise of usefulness. Her long train was pinned about her, leaving a white skirt with the hem close to her ankles, and the flowing drapery of her sleeves was bound above the elbow, her arms being quite free. Mounted on the topmost step of an unsteady ladder, she fastened the higher flowers; lower down, at either side, Lawrence Gerald and Honora tied the lower ones. Not much was said, the few necessary words were lowly spoken; but they smiled now and then in each other’s lighted faces.It was ten o’clock when they went out through the basement, leaving a man to extinguish the gas and lock the door. On their way to the street, they passed the priest’s house. Only one light was visible in it, and that shone in a wide-open stairway window. The light, with a shadow beside it, was approaching the window, and presently a man’s head and shoulders appeared above the high sill. Father Chevreuse had returned home, and was going up to his chamber. He stopped, holding a candle, and put out his right hand to close the window, but paused, hearing a step outside. “Who’s there?” he asked authoritatively, peering out, but seeing nothing in the darkness.“Three friends who are just going home,” answered a voice.“And who are the other two, Honora Pembroke?” demanded the priest.“Annette and Lawrence. We have been arranging flowers for Our Lady.”“That’s well. Good-night!”He pulled the sash down with a bang; but Honora, smiling in the dark, still held her companions beneath the window. It opened again with another bang.“Children!” he called out.“Yes, father!”“God bless you! Good-night!”Again the sash came down, more gently this time, and the light and the kind heart went on climbing up the stairway.“He wouldn’t have slept well to-night if he had not said ‘God bless you!’ to us,” said Miss Pembroke. “And I believe we shall sleep better for it, too, God bless him!”They walked up the steep hillside from the lower part of the town toward South Avenue. Half-way up the hill, on a cross-street that led out toward the country, was the cottage in which Lawrence Gerald lived with his mother, his aunt, and Honora Pembroke. As they approached this road, Annette Ferrier’s heart fluttered. Lawrence had been very amiable that evening. He had praised her, had twice smiled very kindly, and had put her shawl over her shoulders before they came out, as though he were really afraid she might take cold. Perhaps he would leave Honora at home first, and then go up with her.What great good this would do her she could not have explained; for seldom had she heard from him a word too tender to be spoken before witnesses. Still, she wished it. He might say something kind, or listen willingly to some word of affection from her. At any rate, she would be a little longer in his company.Miss Pembroke anticipated her wish, or had some other reason for making the proposal. “Just go as far as the gate with me, and then you can escort Annette,” she said. “You will not mind a few extra steps, Annette?”“Oh! come up with us,” the young man interposed hastily. “It is a beautiful night for walking, and I know you are not tired yet. You can bear twice the walking that Annette can.”She hesitated a moment, then went on with them. His request displeased her on more than one account: she did not like his indifference to the company of his promised wife, and she did not like his preference for being with herself. But his mother would be anxiously watching for him; and it would be something if he could be lured in at an early hour after a quiet evening.Down in the black heart of the town, among the offices, was a certain back room where the windows were not so closely curtained but those who watched outside could see a thread of light burning all night long. To this room men went sometimes in the hope of mending their fortunes, or, after the demon of gambling had caught them fast, to taste of that fiery excitement which had now become to them a necessity. Honora more than suspected that Lawrence Gerald’s steps had sometimes turned in there. A year or two before, in one of his good moods, he had confessed it to her, with an almost boyish contrition, and had promised never to go again. It was his last confession of the sort, but, she feared, not his last sin. Of what worth were the promises of a weak, tempted man who never sought earnestly the help of God to strengthen his resolution? Of no more value than an anchor without a cable. Lawrence needed to be watched and cared for; so she went on with them.“I am so sorry to trouble you both,” Miss Ferrier exclaimed, in a voice trembling with anger and disappointment. “I could have had John come for me, if I had thought.” She snatched her hand from the arm of her escort, and pulled her shawl about her with nervous twitches.“It would have been better to have had John,” Honora said; “for he could have gone home with me. I am the troublesome third, as it is. But then,” speaking lightly, “if I am the last, Lawrence will be obliged to go in early.”With another twitch of her shawl, Annette took her escort’s arm again as abruptly as she had left it, and, held it closely.Careless as the last words had sounded, she knew their meaning, for there had been something said on this subject before. She chose to take it defiantly now, and it comforted her to do so. Others might blame and doubt him, but she would not. He seemed nearer to her in the light of her superior devotedness than to any one else. She would never fail him; and by-and-by he would know her worth. The glow of this fervent hope warmed the girl’s chilled heart, and gave her a sort of happiness.And so they reached the house, and, after a quiet good-night, separated.The walk back was passed in silence; and Miss Pembroke did not choose to lean on her companion’s arm; she wished to hold her dress out of the dust.The street they went through was one of those delightful old ones which a city sometimes leaves untouched for a long time. Over-arching elms grew thickly on either side, and the houses were all detached.Midway up this street stood the cottage of the Geralds, with a garden in front and at the back, and a narrow green at right and left. Three long windows in front, lighting the parlor, reached almost to the ground. The steep roof slanted to a veranda at each side, leaving but one upper window over the three—a wide window with casements swinging back from the middle. The cottage was in the shape of a cross, and at one arm of it a lighted window shone out on the veranda.At sound of the gate-latch, the curtain was drawn aside a little, and a woman looked out an instant, then hastened to open the door.“Are we late, Mrs. Gerald?” Honora asked, and stepped forward into the sitting-room.“Oh! no, dear; I did not expect you any sooner.”Mrs. Gerald lingered in the doorway, looking back at her son as he stopped to leave his hat and overcoat in the entry, and only entered the sitting-room when she had caught a glimpse of his face as he came toward her. He was looking pleasant, she saw, and was contented with that.“Well, mother!” he said, and sank indolently into the arm-chair she pushed before the open fire for him. It was the only arm-chair in the room.She drew another chair forward, and seated herself beside him. Honora, sitting on a low stool in the corner, with the firelight shining over her, told what they had been doing that afternoon and evening. The son listened, his eyes fixed on the fire; the mother listened, her eyes fixed on her son.Mrs. Gerald was an Irish lady of good descent, well educated, and well mannered, and had seen better days. We do not call them better days because in her girlhood and early married life this lady had been wealthy, but because she had been the happy daughter of excellent parents, and the happy wife of a good man. All were gone now but this son; the husband dead for many a year, the daughters married and far away, the wealth melted from her like sunset gold from a cloud; but Lawrence was left, and he filled her heart.One could read this in her face as she watched him. It revealed the pride of the mother in that beautiful manhood which she had given to the world, and which was hers by an inalienable right that no one could usurp; and it revealed, too, the entire self-forgetfulness of the woman who lives only in the life so dear to her.The face showed more yet; for, hovering over this love and devotion as the mist of the coming storm surrounds the full moon, and rings its softened brightness with a tremulous halo, one could detect even in the mother’s smile the mist of a foreboding sadness.How ineffable and without hope is that sadness which is ever the companion of a too exclusive affection!Honora Pembroke looked at the two, and pain and indignation, and the necessity for restraining any expression of either, swelled in her heart, painted her cheeks a deep red, and lifted her lids with a fuller and more scornful gaze than those soft eyes were wont to give. Where was the courtesy which any man, not rudely insensible, should show to a lady? Where the grateful tenderness that any child, not cruelly ungrateful, pays to a mother? This man could be gallant when he wished to make a favorable impression; and she had heard him make very pretty, if very senseless, speeches about chivalry and ideal characters, as if he knew what they were. He had even, in the early days of their acquaintance, maintained for a long time an irreproachable demeanor in her presence. She was learning a doubt and distrust of men, judging them by this one, of whom she knew most. Were they often as selfish and insensible as he was? Were they incapable of being affected by any enchantment except that which is lent by a delusive distance? Here beside him was an ideal affection, and he accepted it as he accepted air and sunshine—it was a matter of course. The mother was in person one who might satisfy even such a fastidious taste as his; for though the face was thin and faded, and the hands marred by household labor, there were still the remains of what had once been a striking beauty. Mrs. Gerald carried her tall form with undiminished stateliness, her coal-black hair had not a single thread of white among its thick tresses, and her deep-blue eyes had gained in tenderness what they had lost in fire. To use one of Miss Pembroke’s favorite expressions, it was not fitting that the son, after having passed a day without fatigue, should lounge at ease among cushions, while the mother, to whom every evening brought weariness, should sit beside him in a chair of penitential hardness.But even while she criticised him, he looked up from the fire, his face brightening with a sudden pleasant recollection.“O mother! I had almost forgotten,” he said, and began searching in his pockets for something. “Neither you nor Honora mentioned it; but I keep count, and I know that to-day your ladyship is five times ten years old.”He smiled with a boyish pleasure more beautiful than his beauty, and the little touch of self-satisfaction he betrayed was as far as possible from being disagreeable. He could not help knowing that he was about to give delight, and cover himself with honor in the eyes of these two women.“Now, mother,” opening a tiny morocco case, “this is the first ring I ever gave any woman. The one I gave Annette was only a diamond of yours reset, and so no gift of mine. But this your good-for-nothing son actually earned, and had made on purpose for you.”He drew from the case a broad gold ring that sparkled in the firelight as if set with diamonds, and, taking the trembling hand his mother had extended caressingly at his first words, slipped the circlet onto her finger.“I had no stone put in it, because I want you to wear it all the time,” he said. “Doesn’t it fit nicely?”“My dear boy!” Mrs. Gerald exclaimed, and could say no more; for tears that she wished to restrain were choking her.A fiftieth birthday is not a joyful anniversary when there is no one but one’s self to remember that it has come. Just as the mother had given up hope, and was making to herself excuses for his not remembering it, her son showed that it had been long in his thought. The joy was as unexpected as it was sweet.When she said her prayers that night, Mrs. Gerald’s clasped hands pressed the dear gift close to her cheek; and no maiden saying her first prayer over her betrothal-ring ever felt a tenderer happiness or more impassioned gratitude.“Dear Lawrence! it was so nice of you!” whispered Honora, and gave him her hand as she wished him good-night.He threw himself back in the arm-chair again when he was left alone, and for a few minutes had a very pleasant sense of being happy and the cause of happiness. “Who would think that so much fun could be got out of a quiet evening spent in tying Mayflowers round a pole, and giving a gold birthday ring to one’s mother?” he mused. “After all, the good people have the best of it, and we scape-graces are the ones to be pitied. If I were rich, I should be all right. If I had even half a chance, I would ask no more. But the poverty!” He glanced about the room, then looked gloomily into the fire again.Yes; poverty was there—that depressing poverty which speaks of decayed fortunes. The carpet, from which the brilliant velvet pile was worn nearly off, the faded and mended covers of the carved chair-frames, the few old-fashioned ornaments which had been retained when all that would sell well had gone to the auction-room, each showed by the scrupulous care with which it had been preserved a poverty that clung to the rags of prosperity in the past because it saw no near hope of prosperity in the future. Miles of unbroken forest could be seen from the cupolas of Crichton; yet in this room the very stick of wood that burned slowly on the andirons was an extravagance which Mrs. Gerald would not have allowed herself.“Yes; the good ones have the best of it,” the young man repeated, rousing himself.He drew the andirons out, and let the unconsumed stick down into the ashes, lighted a candle, and turned the gas off. Then, candle in hand, he stood musing a moment longer, the clear light shining over his face, and showing an almost childlike smile coming sweetly to his lips. “After all,” he said softly, “I haven’t been a bad fellow to-night,” and with that pleased smile still lingering on his face, went slowly out of the room.And so the stillness of night descended, and deep sleep brooded over the town as the lights went out.Crichton was a well-governed city: no rude broils disturbed its hours of darkness. Decency was in power there, and made itself obeyed. You might see a doctor’s buggy whirl by, like a ghost of a carriage, its light wheels faintly crunching the gravel; for only the business streets were paved. Now and then, on still nights, might be heard the grating of ropes, as some vessel sailed up to the wharf after a long ocean voyage. Perhaps a woman in one of the houses on the hill above would hearthat sound through her dream, and start up to listen, fancying that, in the word of command the soft breeze bore to her casement, she could detect a familiar voice long unheard and anxiously waited for. Perhaps the sailor, whose swift keel had shot like an arrow past the heavy junk of Chinese waters, and scattered, as it approached the shore, clear reflections of tufted palms and dusky natives—perhaps he looked eagerly up the hill to that spot which his eyes could find without aid of chart or compass, and saw suddenly twinkle out the lamp in the window of his home.But except for such soft sounds and shadowy idyls, Crichton was at night as still as sleep itself.The Crichtonians had a pleasant saying that their city was built by a woman, and the best compliment we can pay them is that they made this saying proudly, and kept in honored remembrance the hand of the gentle architect. But not so much in brick and stone was it acknowledged, though they owed to her their first ideas of correct and symmetrical building: in their society, high and low, in many of their pretty customs, in their tastes, in their freedom from bigotry of opinions, even in their government, they felt her influence.While the city lies sleeping under the stars, strong, adult, and beautiful, full of ambitious dreams, full, too, of kind and generous feeling, let us go back to the time when, an infant town, it began to use its powers, and stammer brokenly the alphabet of civilization.Hush, fair city, all thy many thousands, while the angels watch above thee! and, sweeter marvel yet! while the dear Lord waits unsleeping in thy midst, where that solitary taper burns. Sleep in peace, “poor exiled children of Eve,” and be grateful at least in dreams.Not very long ago, this place was a wild forest, with a rude little settlement hewn out of it on the river’s banks. It was shut in from the world, though the world was not far distant. But the river was broad and deep, the ocean only ten miles away, and within a few miles were large and growing cities. Soon the sound of the axe and the saw were heard, and little craft, sloops and schooners, floated down the Saranac laden with lumber till the water rippled close to the rails. The story of her growth in this regard is the story of a thousand other towns. The vessels grew larger, their voyages longer, more houses were built, some men became comparatively wealthy and gave employment to others, while the majority kept the level of the employed. Social distinctions began to show themselves, detestable ones for the most part, since there was no social cultivation. Indeed, this poor settlement was in a fair way to become the most odious of towns. The two meeting-houses began to be called churches by the aspiring; the leading woman of the town ventured to call her help a servant (on which the indignant “help” immediately deserted her); and the first piano appeared. But let us mention this piano with respect, for it was the pioneer of harmony.When Crichton had about fifteen hundred inhabitants, a stranger came there one day, as a passenger on board a bark returning from a distant city. This bark was the chief vessel, and was owned by the three chief men of Crichton. It had gone away laden with laths, and it brought back tea, coffee, sugar, and other foreign groceries; and, more than all, it brought Mr. Seth Carpenter. He was not, apparently, a very remarkableman in any way, except as all strangers were remarkable in this young town. He was plain-looking, rather freckled, and had a pair of small and very bright eyes which he almost closed, in a near-sighted way, when he wished to see well. Behind those eyes was a good deal of will and wit, and the will to put the wit into immediate practice. Moreover, he knew how to hold his tongue very cleverly, and baffle the curious without offending them. Nothing but his name transpired. He might be a mountebank, a detective, a king’s son—how were these people to know?In fact, he was nothing more mysterious than a respectable young man twenty-five years of age, who, having his fortune to make, had thought best to leave his prim, sober, native town, where nothing was being done, and where the people were mummies, and seek what, in modern parlance, is called a “live” place. In his pockets he had nothing but his hands; in his valise was a single change of linen.The very morning of his arrival at Crichton, Mr. Seth Carpenter went to the highest hill-top, and from it viewed the town, the river, and the receding forests. He then strolled down to the river, and looked through the mills, and from there sauntered to the ship-yard, where he found a ship on the stocks, almost ready to be launched. He walked round the yard, whistling softly, with an air of critical indifference. He paused near two other men who were viewing the ship, and, since their conference was not private, listened to it.One of these men, a sailor, rather thought he might make up his mind to buy that ship. Did his companion know what was likely to be asked for it? The other reckoned, and calculated, and guessed, and expected, and finally owned that he did not know.Mr. Carpenter, his eyes winking fast with the sparks that came into them, and his fingers working nervously, walked out of the yard, and found the owner of the ship, and, still with nothing in his pockets but his hands, made his bargain with all the coolness of a millionaire. Before sunset, the ship was nominally his; and, before sunrise, it had changed owners again, and the young adventurer had made five hundred dollars by the bargain.“I will yet rule the town!” he said exultingly, when he found himself alone; and he kept his word. Everything prospered with him, and in a short time even rivalry ceased. Men who had been proud to add dollar to dollar shrank and bowed before this man who added thousand to unit. Half the men in town, after ten years, were in his employment, and business prospered as he prospered. In another ten years, Crichton was a city, with all barriers down between her and the great world; but a raw, unkempt city; jealous, superficially educated, quarrelsome, pretentious, and rapidly crystallizing into that mould. Only a person of supreme position and character could now change it. Mr. Carpenter had the position, but not the character. He thought only of money-making, and of the excitement of enterprise and power; the rest he viewed with a pleasant indifference not without contempt. At forty-five he was still a bachelor.We have mentioned the first piano with respect, because others followed in its train, rendering a music-teacher necessary; so that, after a succession of tyros, Miss Agnes Weston came, bringing the very spirit of harmony with her into the town she was to conquer.She did not come as a conqueror, however; nor probably did she anticipate the part she was to play any more than the Crichtonians did. She came to earn her bread, and, while doing so, was anything but popular. Nothing but her brilliant musical abilities, and the fact that she had been educated at Leipsic, saved her from utter failure. People did not fancy this self-possessed, unpretending young person, who could sometimes show such a haughty front to the presuming, and who was, moreover, so frightfully dark and sallow. They did not understand her, and preferred to leave her very much to herself.One person only found her not a puzzle. To Mr. Carpenter she was simply a refined woman among uncongenial associates; becoming discontented and unhappy there, too, before many months had passed. He did not choose that she should go away. He had become pleasantly accustomed to seeing her, had sometimes met her on her long walks out of town; and once, when he had politely offered to drive her home—an offer which any other lady in Crichton would have accepted beamingly, without the preliminary of an introduction—had been refreshed by receiving a cold refusal, and a surprised stare from a pair of large black eyes. The great man, surfeited with smiles and flatteries, was immensely pleased by this superciliousness.But though strangely disturbed at the prospect of Miss Weston’s leaving, he hesitated to speak the word which might detain her. A bachelor of forty-five does not readily determine on making a sensible marriage; it usually needs some great folly to spur him on to a change so long deferred. He had, moreover, two other reasons for delaying: he wanted a charming wife, and was in doubt whether even his power could transform this lady into his ideal: the other reason had blue eyes, and a dimple in its chin, and was a very silly reason.But no one who knew this gentleman would expect him to remain long in doubt on any subject. Within a month from the day he first entertained the thought of running such a risk, Crichton was electrified by the announcement that Mr. Carpenter was soon to be married to Miss Weston; and, before they had recovered from their first astonishment, the marriage had taken place, and the quiet, dark-faced music-teacher was established as mistress of an imposing mansion on North Avenue.It was now Mr. Carpenter’s turn to be astonished, and he was enchanted as well. Never had he pictured to himself a woman so charming as this grub, now become a butterfly, proved herself; and never had he imagined that even his wife could obtain so beautiful a supremacy as she gradually established and never lost. She was born to rule, and seldom had such power been placed in any woman’s hands. Mr. Carpenter was the first of her vassals. With a refined and noble arrogance, she esteemed him as the first man in the world, because he had been the first to appreciate and exalt her. For this she gave him a faithful, if condescending, affection, and quoted his wishes and opinions so constantly that one might have thought they were her only guides. So thorough was her tact and her courtesy toward her husband he scarcely guessed his own inferiority, and never dreamed that she was aware of it.She grew beautiful, too, as well as amiable. Now that the drudgery of toil was lifted from her, and hercramped talents had room for full and exhilarating play, the swarthy skin cleared, showing a peach-like bloom, the fine teeth lit a frequent smile, and the deep voice lost its dull cadence, and took a musical, ringing sound.Mrs. Carpenter used her power well. Crichton was as clay in her hands, and she moulded it after a noble model. What arrogance could never have done was accomplished by tact and sweetness. Her forming touch was strong and steady, but it was smooth, and nothing escaped it. Thoroughly womanly, speaking by her husband’s mouth when she deemed it not fitting that her proper voice should be heard, she could influence in matters where women do not usually care to interfere. She thought nothing out of her province which concerned the prosperity of the town she honored with her presence, and she inspired others with her own enthusiasm. That streets should be wide and well kept, that public buildings should be architecturally symmetrical, that neat cottages for the poor, replacing their miserable huts, should start up sudden as daisies along some quiet road—these objects all interested her, though she worked for them indirectly.But in social life she ruled openly; and there her good sense and good heart, her gentle gaiety and entire uprightness, became the mould of form. Ill-nature went out of fashion, and, in the absence of charity, self-control became a necessity. When people of opposite creeds met at her house, their feuds had to be laid aside for the time; and, once two foes have smiled in each other’s faces, the frown is not so easy to recall.Gradually the change which had been imposed outwardly became a real one; and, when Mrs. Carpenter died, full of years and of honors, her spirit continued to animate the place, in its opinions and actions, at least, if some fairer grace of heart and principle were wanting. She died as she had lived, out of the church; though the church had ever found her a friend, bountiful and tenderly protecting. Of its doctrines and authority she seemed never to have thought; but the copy of the Sistine Madonna in her drawing-room had always a vase of fresh flowers before it.She left no children. A niece whom she had adopted married in Crichton, and had one descendant, a grand-daughter, living there. This grand-daughter was Honora Pembroke.Wake again, Crichton, for morning is come. Long rays of golden light are shooting out of the east; and down the hillside, in the church of S. John, Father Chevreuse is saying,Sursum Corda!TO BE CONTINUED.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE.”

CRICHTON, AND THE CRICHTONIANS.

Thedelicate exuberance of a New England spring was making amends for the rigor of a New England winter, and for its own tardy coming. Up through the faded sward pushed multitudinously all the little budding progeny of nature; out through rough bark burst the tender foliage; and all the green was golden-green. Light winds blew hither and thither; light clouds chased each other over the sky, now and then massing their forces to send a shower down, the drops so entangled with sunshine as to look like a rain of diamonds. Birds soared joyously, singing as they flew; and the channels of the brooks could scarcely contain their frolicsome streams. Sometimes a scattered sisterhood of snowflakes came down to see their ancestresses, and, finding them changed into snowdrops, immediately melted into an ecstasy, and so exhaled.

This vernal freshness made the beautiful city of Crichton fairer yet, with curtains waving from open windows, vines budding over the walls, and all the many trees growing alive. It set a fringe of grasses nodding over the edges of three yellow paths ravelled out from a new road that, when it had travelled about a mile westward from the city, gave up being a road for the present. One of these paths started off southward, and sank into a swamp. In summer, this swamp was as purple as a ripe plum with flower-de-luce, and those who loved nature well enough to search for her treasures could find there also an occasional cardinalflower, a pink arethusa, or a pitcherblossom full to the brim with the last shower, or the last dew-fall. The second path ran northward to the bank of the Cocheco River, and broke off on the top of a cliff. If you should have nerve enough to scramble down the face of this cliff, you would find there the most romantic little cave imaginable, moss-lined, and furnished with moss cushions to its rock divans. A wild cherry-tree had in some way managed to find footing just below the cave, and at this season it would push up a spray of bloom, in emulation of the watery spray beneath. Fine green vines threaded all the moss; and, if one of them were lifted, it would show a line of honey-sweet bell-flowers strung under its round leaves.

The third path kept on westward to a dusky tract of pine-woods about two miles from the town. No newly-sprouting verdure was visible amid this sombre foliage; but there was aglistening through it all like the smile on a dark face, and the neighboring air was embalmed with its fine resinous perfume.

Out from this wood came sounds of laughter and many voices, some shrill and childish, others deeper voices of men, or softer voices of women. Occasionally might be heard a fitful song that broke off and began again, only to break and begin once more, as though the singer’s hands were busy. Yet so dense was the border of the wood with thick, low-growing branches that, had you gone even so near as to step on their shadows, and slip on the smooth hollows full of cones and needles they had let fall, not a person would you have seen.

A girlish voice burst out singing:

“‘The year’s at the spring,And day’s at the morn;Morning’s at seven;The hillside’s dew-pearled.The lark’s on the wing,The snail’s on the thorn;God’s in his heaven—All’s right with the world!’

Only day is not at the morn,” the voice added correctingly; “for it is near sunset. But,” singing again,

“‘The year’s at the spring;The lark’s on the wing;God’s in his heaven—And all’s right with the world!’

—which may be called making a posy out of a poem.”

A young man’s voice spoke: “All will soon be wrong in a part of the world, Pippa, if I do not call the sheep to fold.” And immediately a loud bugle-call sounded through the forest, and died away in receding echoes.

Presently a Maying-party came trooping forth into sight.

First, stooping low under the boughs, a score of boys and girls appeared, their cheeks bright with exercise and pure air, their silken hair dishevelled. After them followed, more sedately, a group of youths and maidens, “Pippa,” otherwise Lily Carthusen, and the bugler, among them. All these young people were decked with wreaths of ground pine around their hats, waists, and arms, and they carried hands full of Mayflowers.

Lastly, two gentlemen, one at either hand, held back the branches, and Miss Honora Pembroke stepped from under the dark-green arch.

If you are a literal sort of person, and make a point of calling things by their everyday names, you would have described her as a noble-looking young woman, dressed in a graceful brown gown, belted at the waist, after a Grecian fashion, and some sort of cloudy blue drapery that was slipping from her head to her shoulders. You would have said that her hair was a yellowish brown that looked bright in the sun, her eyes about the same color, her features very good, but not so classical in shape as her robe. You might have added that there was an expression that, really—well, you did not know just how to name it, but you should judge that the young woman was romantic, though not without sense. If you should have guessed her age to be twenty-eight, you would have been right.

If, on the other hand, you are poetically Christian, ever crowning with the golden thorns of sacrifice whatever is most beautiful on earth, you would have liked to take the Mayflower wreath from this womanly maiden’s hand, place the palm-branch in its stead, and so send her to heaven by the way of the lions. Her face need hardly have changed to go that road, so lofty and delicate was the joy that shone under her quiet exterior, so full of light the eyes that, looking straight before her intospace, seemed to behold all the glory of the skies.

The girl who came next was very different, not at all likely to suggest poetical fancies, though when you looked closely you could see much fineness of outline in the features and form. But she was spoilt in the coloring—a sallow skin, “sandy” hair, and light eyes giving a dingy look to her face. She was spoilt still more by the expression, which was superficial, and by being overdressed for her size and the occasion, and a little ragged from the bushes. This is Miss, or, as she likes to be called, Mademoiselle, Annette Ferrier. If at some moment, unawares, you should take the liberty to call her Niñon, with an emphatic nasal, she would forgive you beamingly, and consider you a very charming person. Mademoiselle, who, like three generations of her ancestors, was born in America, and who had spent but three months of her life in France, had no greater ambition than to be taken for a French lady. But do not set her down as a simpleton. Her follies are not malicious, and may wear off. Have you never seen the young birds, when they are learning to fly, how clumsily they tumble about? yet afterward they cleave the air like arrows with their strong pointed wings. And have you not seen some bud, pushing out at first in a dull, rude sheath that mars the beauty of the plant, open at last to disclose petals of such rare beauty that the sole glory of the plant was in upbearing it? Some souls have to work off a good deal of clinging foolishness before they come to themselves. Therefore, let us not classify Miss Ferrier just yet.

She had scarcely appeared, when one branch was released with a discourteous haste that sent it against her dress, and a gentleman quickly followed her, and, with a somewhat impatient air, took his place at her side. Mr. Lawrence Gerald had that style of beauty which suggests the pedestal—an opaque whiteness of tint as pure as the petal of a camellia, clustering locks of dark hair, and an exquisite perfection of form and feature. He and Miss Ferrier were engaged to be married, which was some excuse for the profuse smiles and blushes she expended on him, and which he received with the utmost composure.

The second branch swung softly back from the hand that carefully released it, and Mr. Max Schöninger came into sight, brushing the brown pine-scales from his gloves. He was the last in order, but not least in consequence, of the party, as more than one backward glance that watched for his appearance testified. This was a tall, fair-haired German, with powerful shoulders, and strong arms that sloped to the finest of sensitive hands. He had a grave countenance, which sometimes lit up beautifully with animated expression, and sometimes also veiled itself in a singular manner. Let anything be said that excited his instinct of reserve or self-defence, and he could at once banish all expression from his face. The broad lids would droop over those changeful eyes of his, and one saw only a blank where the moment before had shone a cordial and vivid soul.

When we say that Mr. Schöninger was a Jew who had all his life been associated more with Christians than with his own people, this guarded manner will not seem unnatural. He glanced over the company, and was hesitatingly about to join Miss Pembroke, when one of the children left her playmates, and ran to take his hand. Mr. Schöninger was never on his guard with children, and thosehe petted were devotedly fond of him. He smiled in the upturned face of this little girl, held the small hand closely, and led her on.

The order of march changed as the party advanced. Those who had been last to leave the wood were made to take precedence; the youths and maidens dropped behind them, and, as both walked slowly forward, the younger ones played about them, now here, now there. It was like an air with variations.

The elders of the company were very quiet, Miss Carthusen a little annoyed. She need not have wasted her eloquence in persuading Mr. Schöninger to come with them, if he was going to devote himself to that baby. Miss Carthusen was clever, and rather pretty, and she liked to talk. What was the use of having ideas and fancies, if one was not to express them? Why should one go into company, if one was to remain silent? She considered Mr. Schöninger too superb by half.

The sun was setting, and it flooded all the scene with a light so rich as to seem tangible. Whatever it fell upon was not merely illuminated, it was gilded. The sky was hazy with that radiance, the many windows on the twin hills of Crichton blazed like beacons, and the short green turf glistened with a yellow lustre. Those level rays threw the long shadows of the flower-bearers before them as they walked, dazzled the faces turned sidewise to speak, turned the green wreaths on their heads into golden wreaths, and sparkled in their hair. When Miss Pembroke put her hand up to shade her eyes in looking backward, the ungloved fingers shone as if transparent. She had been drinking in the beauty of the evening till it was all ready to burst from her lips, and there seemed to be no one who perceived that beauty but herself. She would have liked to be alone, with no human witness, and to give vent to the delight that was tingling in her veins. A strong impulse was working in her to lift a fold of her dress at either side, slide out that pretty foot of hers now hidden under the hem, and go floating round in a dance, advancing as she turned, like a planet in its path. It would have been a relief could she have sung at the very top of her voice. She had looked backward involuntarily at Mr. Schöninger, expecting some sympathy from him; but, seeing him engrossed in his little charge, had dropped her hand, and walked on, feeling rather disappointed. “I supposed he believed in the creation, at least,” she thought.

Miss Pembroke was usually a very dignified and quiet young woman, who said what she meant, who never effervesced on small occasions, and sometimes found herself unmoved on occasions which many considered great ones. But when, now and then, the real afflatus came, it was hard to have her lips sealed and her limbs shackled.

As she dropped her hand, faintly and fairylike in the distance she heard all the bells of Crichton ringing for sunset.

Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, she sang softly, clasping her hands, still walking forward; and so went on with the rest of the hymn, not minding where the others of the party were, or if there were any others, till she felt a little pull at her dress, and became aware that Mr. Schöninger’s young friend had urged him forward to hear the singing, and was holding up her hand to the singer. But the Jew’s visor was down.

Miss Pembroke took the child’s hand, which thus formed a link between the two, and continued her singing:Benedictus qui venit innomini Domini. She felt almost as if the man, thus linked to her by that transparent, innocent nature of the little girl between them, were spiritually joining her in the Hosanna. How deep or bitter his prejudices might be she knew not. Their acquaintance had been short, and they had never spoken of their theological differences. That his unbelief could be profound, yet gentle and tolerant toward her belief, had never occurred to her mind. She would have been scarcely more shocked than astonished could she have known the thought that almost escaped his lips. “She is too noble to be a worshipper of strange gods,” he thought. “When will this miserable delusion be swept away!”

A slim, light hand stole into Miss Pembroke’s arm on the other side, and Miss Carthusen’s cheek pressed close to her shoulder. Miss Carthusen was a foundling, and had been adopted by a wealthy and childless couple. Nothing whatever was known of her parentage.

“Lady Honora,” she whispered, “this scene reminds me of something. I am like Mignon, with my recollections gathering fast into a picture; only my past is further away than hers was. I almost know who I am, and where I came from. It flashes back now. We were dancing on the green, a ring of us. It was not in this land. The air was warm, the sward like rose-leaves; there were palms and temples not far away. I had this hand stretched forward to one who held it, and the other backward to one who held it, and so we danced, and there were wreaths on our heads, vine-leaves tangled in our hair. Suddenly something swept over and through us, like a cold wind, or a sharp cry, or both, and we all became fixed in a breath, the smile, the wreath, the tiptoe foot, and we hardened and grew less, and the air inside the ring died with our breaths in it, and the joy froze out of us, and the recollection of all we were faded. We were like flames that have gone out. There was nothing left but an antique vase with Bacchantes dancing round it in a petrified circle. Have you ever seen such a vase, with one figure missing?”

“Silly child!” said Honora, smiling, but shrinking a little. This girl was too clinging, her imagination too pagan. “It is said that, at the birth of Christ, that wail was heard through all the hosts of pagan demons. ‘Pan is dead!’ they cried, and fled like dry leaves before a November wind. Pan is dead, Lily Carthusen; and if you would kindle his altars again, you must go down into the depths of perdition for the spark.”

She spoke with seriousness, even with energy, and a light blush fluttered into her cheeks, and faded out again.

Miss Carthusen, still clinging to the arm she had clasped, leaned forward to cast a laughing glance into the face beyond. “To Mr. Schöninger,” she said, “we are both talking mythology.”

Miss Pembroke freed her arm decidedly, and stepped backward, so as to bring herself between Miss Ferrier and Lawrence Gerald. She took an arm of each, and held them a moment as if she were afraid. “Annette, Lily Carthusen must not help us to trim the altar,” she said. “It is not fitting. We will do it ourselves, with Mother Chevreuse.”

“But Lily has such taste,” was the reluctant answer. “And she may be displeased if we do not ask her.”

“Our Lady thinks more of devotion than of taste, Annette,” Miss Pembroke said earnestly. “It seems to me that every flower ought to be placed there by the hand of faith and love.”

The other yielded. People always did yield when Miss Pembroke urged. And Miss Carthusen, fortunately, saved them the embarrassment of declining her assistance by walking on, engrossed in a gay conversation with the German. When she recollected, they were already far apart. She and her companion were close to the town, and the others had stopped where the three paths met.

The children gathered about Miss Ferrier, and began piling their Mayflowers and green wreaths into her arms; for the flowers were all to decorate the altar of Mary in the beautiful church of S. John the Evangelist. These children were not half of them Catholic; but that made no difference in Crichton, where the people prided themselves on being liberal. Moreover, Miss Ferrier was a person of influence, and could reward those who obliged her.

Then they scattered, dropping into different roads, one by one, and two by two, till only three, heavily laden with their fragrant spoil, were left walking slowly up South Avenue, into which the unfinished road expanded when it reached the city. They were to take tea at Mrs. Ferrier’s, and afterward go to the church; for this was the last day of a warm and forward April, and on the next morning the exercises of the Month of Mary were to begin. At the most commanding spot on the crown of the hill stood Mrs. Ferrier’s house; and one has but to glance at it to understand at once why mademoiselle is a person of influence.

Seventeen years before, those who knew them would have imagined almost any change of fortune sooner than that the Ferriers should become people of wealth. There was Mr. Ferrier, a stout, dull, uneducated, hard-working man, who had not talent nor ambition enough to learn any trade, but passed his life in drudging for any one who would give him a day’s work. A man of obtuse intelligence, and utterly uncultivated tastes, but for the spark of faith left in that poor soul of his, he would have been a clod. But there the spark was, like a lamp in a tomb, showing, with its faint but steady light, the wreck of the beautiful, and the noble, and the sublime that was man as God made him; showing the dust of lost powers and possibilities, and the dust of much accumulated dishonor; showing the crumbling skeleton of a purpose that had started perfect; and showing also, carven deep, but dimly seen, the word of hope,Resurgam!

Those human problems meet us often, staggering under the primal curse, ground down to pitiless labor from the cradle to the grave, losing in their sordid lives, little by little, first, the strength and courage to look abroad, then the wish, and, at last, the power, the soul in them shining with only an occasional flicker through thedébrisof their degraded natures. But if faith be there buried with the soul in that earthy darkness, the word of hope is still for themResurgam!

There was Mrs. Ferrier, a very different sort of person, healthy, thrifty, cheerful, with a narrow vein of stubborn good sense that was excellent as far as it went, and with a kind heart and a warm temper. The chief fault in her was a common fault: she wished to shape and measure the world by her own compasses; and, since those were noticeably small, the impertinence was very apparent. She was religiously obedient to her husband when he raised his fist; but, in most matters, she ruled the household, Mr. Ferrier being authoritative only on the subject of his three meals, his pipe and beer, andhis occasional drop of something stronger.

And there were five or six young ones, new little souls in very soiled bodies, the doors of life still open for them, their eyes open also to see, and their wills free to choose. These little ones, happy in their rags, baked mud pies, squabbled and made up twenty times a day, ate and slept like the healthy animals they were, their greatest trial being when their faces were washed and their hair combed, on which occasion there was an uproar in the family. These occasions were not frequent.

The Ferrier mansion had but one room, and the Ferrier plenishing was simple. The wardrobe also was simple. For state days, monsieur had a state costume, the salient points of which were an ample white waistcoat and an ancient and well-preserved silk hat which he wore very far back on his head, both these articles being part of his wedding gear. Madame had also her gala attire, with which she always assumed an expression of complacent solemnity. This toilet was composed of a dark-red merino gown, a dingybrochéshawl, and a large straw bonnet, most unconsciously Pompadour, with its pink flowers and blue ribbons. For great occasions, the children had shoes, bought much too large that they might not be outgrown; and they had hats nearly as old as themselves. The girls had flannel gowns that hung decently to their heels; the boys, less careful of their finery, had to go very much patched.

On Sundays and holidays, they all walked two miles to hear Mass, and each one put a penny into the box. On Christmas Days, they each gave a silver quarter, the father distributing the coin just before the collector reached them, all blushing with pride and pleasure as they made their offering, and smiling for some time after, the children nudging and whispering to each other till they had to be set to rights by their elders. Contented souls, how simple and harmless they were!

Into the midst of this almost unconscious poverty, wealth dropped like a bombshell. If the sea of oil under their cabin and pasture had suddenly exploded and blown them sky-high, they could not have been more astounded; for oil there was, and floods of it. At almost any part of the little tract of land they had bought for next to nothing, it was but to dig a hole, and liquid gold bubbled up by the barrelful.

Mr. Ferrier, poor man! was like a great clumsy beetle that blunders out of the familiar darkness of night into a brilliantly lighted room. Perhaps something aspiring and only half dead in him cried out through his dulness with a voice he could not comprehend; perhaps the sudden brightness put out what little sight he had: who knows? He drank. He was in a dream; and he drank again. The dream became a nightmare; and still he drank—drank desperately—till at last nature gave way under the strain, and there came to him an hour of such utter silence as he had not known since he lay, an infant, in his mother’s lap. During that silence, light broke in at last, and the imprisoned light shone out with a strange and bewildered surprise. The priest, that visible angel of God, was by his side, instructing his ignorance, calming his fears, calling up in his awakening soul the saving contrition, leaving him only when the last breath had gone.

After the husband went child after child, till but two were left, Annette and Louis. These, the eldest, the mother saved alive.

We laugh at the preposterous extravagance and display of the newly enriched. But is there not something pitiful in it, after all? How it tells of wants long denied, of common pleasures that were so distant from those hopeless eyes as to look like shining stars! They flutter and run foolishly about, those suddenly prosperous ones, like birds released from the cage, like insects when the stone is lifted from them; but those who have always been free to practise their smooth flight through a sunny space, or to crawl at ease over the fruits of the world, would do well not to scorn them.

The house Mrs. Ferrier had built for herself in the newest and finest avenue of Crichton was, it must be confessed, too highly ornamented. Ultra-Corinthian columns; cornerstones piled to the very roof at each angle, and so laboriously vermiculated that they gave one an impression of wriggling; cornices laden with carving, festoons, fancy finials wherever they could perch; oriels, baywindows, arched windows with carven faces over them—all these fretted the sight. But the view from the place was superb.

When our three flower-bearers reached the gate, they turned to contemplate the scene.

All round, a circle of purple hills stood bathed in the sunset. From these hills the Crichtonians had borrowed the graceful Athenian title, and called their fair city the “city of the violet crown.” Forming their eastern boundary flowed the stately Saranac, that had but lately carried its last float of ice out to sea, almost carrying a bridge with it. Swollen with dissolving snows, it glided past, a moving mirror, nearly to the tops of the wharves. Northward was the Cocheco, an untamed little river born and brought up amid crags and rocks. It cleft the city in twain, to cast itself headlong into the Saranac, a line of bubbles showing its course for half a mile down the smoother tide.

The Cocheco was in high feather this spring, having succeeded at last in dislodging an unsightly mill that had been built at one of its most picturesque turns. Let trade go up the Saranac, and bind its gentler waters to grind wheat and corn, and saw logs, and act as sewer; the Cocheco reserved itself for the beautiful and the contemplative. It liked that lovers should walk the winding roads along its banks; that children should come at intervals, wondering, half afraid, as if in fairy-land; that troubled souls, longing for solitude, should find it in some almost inaccessible nook among its crags; but, best of all, it liked that some child of grace, divinely gifted to see everything in God, should walk rejoicingly by its side. “O my God! how sweet are those little thoughts of thine, the violets! How thy songs flow down the waters, and roll out from the clouds! How tender is the shadow of thy hand when at night it presses our heavy eyelids down, and folds us to sleep in thy bosom, or when it wakens us silently to commune with thee!” For such a soul, the river had an articulate voice, and answered song for song.

Yes; that was what it had to do in the world. Away with mills and traffic! Let trade go up the Saranac.

So for three years watery tongues had licked persistently at posts and timbers, legions of bubbles had snapped at splinters till they wore away, and the whole river had gathered and flung itself against the foundations, till at last, when the spring thaw came, over went the mill, and was spun down stream, and flung into the deeper tide, and so sweptout to sea. Let trade go up the Saranac!

But the patient Saranac sawed the logs, and carried away their dust and refuse, and took all the little fretted brooks and rivers into its bosom, and soothed their murmurs there. And both did God’s will, and both were good.

Half hidden by the steep slope of the hill, as one stood in Mrs. Ferrier’s porch, was the church of S. John the Evangelist. Only the unfinished tower of it was visible, and a long line of slated roof seen in glimpses between spires and chimneys.

“I really believe, Lawrence, that Crichton is the pleasantest place in the world,” remarked Miss Pembroke, after a short silence.

A servant had taken away their flowers to keep fresh for the evening, and Miss Ferrier had gone in to change her dress. The mother being away, there was no need the other two should enter, when the lovely evening invited them to remain outside.

Receiving no reply, the lady glanced inquiringly at her companion, and saw that his silence was a dissenting one. He had thrown himself into a chair, tossed his hat aside, and was looking off into the distance with fixed and gloomy eyes. The tumbled locks of hair fell over half his forehead, his attitude expressed discontent and depression, and there was a look about the mouth that showed his silence might proceed only from the suppression of a reply too bitter or too rude to utter.

Seeing that her glance might force him to speak, she anticipated him, and continued, in a gentle, soothing tone: “If one loves religion, here is a beautiful church, and the best of priests; if one is intellectual, here is every advantage—books, lectures, and a cultivated society; if one is a lover of nature, where can be found a more beautiful country? Oh! it is not Switzerland nor Italy, I know; but it is delightful, for all that.”

She had spoken carefully, like one feeling her way, and here she hesitated just for a breath, as though not sure whether she had better go on, but went on nevertheless. “Here every one is known, and his position secure. He need not suffer in public esteem from adverse circumstances, if they do not affect his character. There never was a place, I think, where a truly courageous and manly act would be more heartily applauded.”

“Ah! yes,” the young man said, with hasty scorn; “they applaud while the thing is new, and then forget all about it. They like novelty. I don’t doubt that all the people would clap their hands if I should take to sweeping the streets, and that for a week the young ladies would tie bouquets to the end of the broomstick. But after the week was over, what then? They would find me a dusty fellow whose acquaintance they would gradually drop. Besides, their applause is not all. I might not enjoy street-sweeping, even though I and my broomstick were crowned with flowers as long as we lasted.”

Miss Pembroke had blushed slightly at this sudden and violent interpretation of her hidden meaning; but she answered quietly: “No: their applause is not all—the applause of the world is never all, but it helps sometimes; and, if they give it to us for one moment when we start on the right path, it is all that we ought to expect. Life is not a theatre with a few actors and a great circle of spectators: we all have our part to play, and cannot stop long to admire others.”

“Especially when that other isonly the scene-shifter,” laughed the young man, throwing the hair back from his face.

“I know well that ordinary, inelegant work would come very hard to you, Lawrence,” she said kindly; “and, if it were to be continued to the end of your life, I might think it too hard. But there must be ways, for other men have found them, of beginning at the lower end of the ladder, even very low down, even in the dust, and climbing steadily to a height that would satisfy the climber’s ambition. It needs only a strong will and perseverance; and I firmly believe, Lawrence, that, to a strong will, almost anything is possible.”

“A strong will is a special gift,” he replied stubbornly.

“Yes; and one for which we may ask,” she said; then, seeing that he frowned, added: “And for you I like Crichton, as I said. One is known here, and motives and circumstances are understood. A thousand little helps might be given which in a strange city you would not have. All would be seen and understood here.”

“All would be seen, yes!” he exclaimed, with a shrug and a frown. “That is the trouble. One would rather hide something.”

She would not be repelled. “There is, of course, sometimes a disadvantage in living where everything is known,” she admitted. “But there must be disadvantages everywhere in the world. Look at the bright side of it. If you were in a great city, where all sorts of crimes hide, where men the most abandoned in reality can for a long time maintain a fair reputation before the world, how your difficulties would be increased! You would not then know whom to trust. Here, on the contrary, no wrong can remain long hidden.”

He had not looked at her before, but at these words his eyes flashed into her face a startled glance. Her eyes were looking thoughtfully over the town.

Feeling his gaze, she turned towards him with a quick change of expression and manner. A friendly and coaxing, almost caressing, raillery took the place of her seriousness: “Come! drive away your blues, Lawrence, and take courage. Study out some course for yourself where you can see far ahead, and then start and follow it, though you should find obstacles grow up in the way. Bore through them, or climb over them. There must be a way. There is something in you for honor, something better than complaining. Cheer up!”

She extended her hand to him impulsively.

“What motive have I?” he asked. But his face had softened, and a faint smile showed that the cloud had a silver lining.

“For your mother’s sake,” she said. “How happy she would be!”

“I can make my mother happy by kissing her, and telling her she is an angel,” he answered.

It was but too true.

“For poor Annette, then. There is a good deal in her, and she is devoted to you.”

He shrugged his shoulders, and lifted his eyebrows: “She loves me as I am, and would love me if I were ten times as worthless, poor silly girl!”

Miss Pembroke withdrew her hand, and retired a step from him. Again he had spoken the truth, this spoiled favorite of women!

“For God’s sake, then.”

He did not dare give another shrug, for his mentor’s face was losing its kindness. “You know I am not at all pious, Honora,” he said, dropping his eyes.

She still retained her patience: “Can you find no motive in yourself, Lawrence? Do you feel no necessity for action, for courageous trial of what life may hold for you?”

His pale face grew bright with an eager light. “If life but held for me one boon! O Honora....”

She made a quick, silencing gesture, and a glance, inconceivably haughty and scornful, shot from her eyes.

“Are you two people quarrelling?” Miss Ferrier inquired, behind them. “If you are, I am in good time. Tea is ready, and I suppose the sooner we are off, the better.”

“I sent the flowers to the church,” she continued, as they went in through the gorgeous hall, “and directed John to tell Mother Chevreuse that we should come down in about an hour. But he brings me word that she is out with some sick woman, and may not come home till quite late. So we are but three.”

Mother Chevreuse was the priest’s mother. It had grown to be a custom to give her that title, partly out of love for both mother and son, partly because Father Chevreuse himself sometimes called her so.

“It will require one person to carry your train, Annette,” Mr. Gerald said, looking at the length of rustling brown silk over which he had twice stumbled. “And that takes two out; for, of course, you can do nothing in that dress. Honora will have the pleasure of decorating the altar, while we look on.”

Only the faintest shade of mortification passed momentarily over the girl’s face, and vanished. She knew well the power her wealth had with this man, and that she could not make it too evident. Miss Ferrier was frivolous and extravagant, but she was not without discernment.

“Did you ever know me to fail when I attempted anything?” she asked, with a little mingling of defiance and triumph in her air. “Honora goes calmly and steadily to work; but when I begin....”

She stopped, embarrassed, for a rude speech had been at her lips.

“You do twice as much as I,” Miss Pembroke finished, with sweet cordiality. “It is true, Annette, though you did not like to say it. You have great energy.”

She put her hand out, and touched caressingly the shoulder of her young hostess in passing. “You are just what Lawrence needs.”

Tears of pleasure filled Annette’s eyes. For all her wealth and the flatteries it had brought her, she had seldom heard a word of earnest commendation.

To be praised by Honora was sweet; but to be praised before Lawrence was sweetest of all.

They hurried through their tea, and went to the church. Mother Chevreuse had not returned home, and the priest also was away. The pleasant task of adorning the altar of Our Lady was left to them.

The stars were beginning to show faintly in the sky when they commenced their work, and all the church was full of that clear yellow twilight. The pillars and walls, snowy white, with only delicate bands of gilding, reflected the softened beams, and seemed to grow transparent in them. But around the side-altar burned a ring of brilliant gas-jets; and through the open door of the sacristy was visible, ruddily lighted, a long passage and stairway leading to the basement.

The light of heaven and the light of earth were thus brought face to face—the one pure, tender, and pervading, the other flaring, thick, and partial. But as daylight faded away, that inner light brought out strangeeffects. There was no longer anything white in the church: it was all turned to rose-color and deep shadow. Carven faces looked down with seeing eyes from arch, capital, and cornice; the pillars, standing up and down in long rows, appeared to lean together, to move, and change places with each other; there was a tremor in the dimly-seen organ-pipes, as though the strong breath of music were passing through them, and would presently break out in loud accord. A picture of S. John beside the grand altar showed nothing but the face, and the face was as glowing as if it had just been lifted from the bosom of the Lord to look into the Lord’s eyes.

One might fancy that this fair temple in which God had taken up his dwelling only waited for those three to go away, that it might break into joy and adoration over its divine Guest.

On a pedestal at the gospel side of the altar stood the statue of Our Lady, lovely eyelids downcast, as she gazed on those below, loving hands and arms outstretched, inviting all the world to her motherly embrace. An arch of white lilies had already been put up against a larger arch of green that was to be set with candles and a crown of light. They were now engaged in putting under the lilies a third and smaller arch of Mayflowers, that the whole might be like the Lady it was meant to honor—radiant with glory, mantled in purity, and full of tender sweetness.

Annette had redeemed her promise of usefulness. Her long train was pinned about her, leaving a white skirt with the hem close to her ankles, and the flowing drapery of her sleeves was bound above the elbow, her arms being quite free. Mounted on the topmost step of an unsteady ladder, she fastened the higher flowers; lower down, at either side, Lawrence Gerald and Honora tied the lower ones. Not much was said, the few necessary words were lowly spoken; but they smiled now and then in each other’s lighted faces.

It was ten o’clock when they went out through the basement, leaving a man to extinguish the gas and lock the door. On their way to the street, they passed the priest’s house. Only one light was visible in it, and that shone in a wide-open stairway window. The light, with a shadow beside it, was approaching the window, and presently a man’s head and shoulders appeared above the high sill. Father Chevreuse had returned home, and was going up to his chamber. He stopped, holding a candle, and put out his right hand to close the window, but paused, hearing a step outside. “Who’s there?” he asked authoritatively, peering out, but seeing nothing in the darkness.

“Three friends who are just going home,” answered a voice.

“And who are the other two, Honora Pembroke?” demanded the priest.

“Annette and Lawrence. We have been arranging flowers for Our Lady.”

“That’s well. Good-night!”

He pulled the sash down with a bang; but Honora, smiling in the dark, still held her companions beneath the window. It opened again with another bang.

“Children!” he called out.

“Yes, father!”

“God bless you! Good-night!”

Again the sash came down, more gently this time, and the light and the kind heart went on climbing up the stairway.

“He wouldn’t have slept well to-night if he had not said ‘God bless you!’ to us,” said Miss Pembroke. “And I believe we shall sleep better for it, too, God bless him!”

They walked up the steep hillside from the lower part of the town toward South Avenue. Half-way up the hill, on a cross-street that led out toward the country, was the cottage in which Lawrence Gerald lived with his mother, his aunt, and Honora Pembroke. As they approached this road, Annette Ferrier’s heart fluttered. Lawrence had been very amiable that evening. He had praised her, had twice smiled very kindly, and had put her shawl over her shoulders before they came out, as though he were really afraid she might take cold. Perhaps he would leave Honora at home first, and then go up with her.

What great good this would do her she could not have explained; for seldom had she heard from him a word too tender to be spoken before witnesses. Still, she wished it. He might say something kind, or listen willingly to some word of affection from her. At any rate, she would be a little longer in his company.

Miss Pembroke anticipated her wish, or had some other reason for making the proposal. “Just go as far as the gate with me, and then you can escort Annette,” she said. “You will not mind a few extra steps, Annette?”

“Oh! come up with us,” the young man interposed hastily. “It is a beautiful night for walking, and I know you are not tired yet. You can bear twice the walking that Annette can.”

She hesitated a moment, then went on with them. His request displeased her on more than one account: she did not like his indifference to the company of his promised wife, and she did not like his preference for being with herself. But his mother would be anxiously watching for him; and it would be something if he could be lured in at an early hour after a quiet evening.

Down in the black heart of the town, among the offices, was a certain back room where the windows were not so closely curtained but those who watched outside could see a thread of light burning all night long. To this room men went sometimes in the hope of mending their fortunes, or, after the demon of gambling had caught them fast, to taste of that fiery excitement which had now become to them a necessity. Honora more than suspected that Lawrence Gerald’s steps had sometimes turned in there. A year or two before, in one of his good moods, he had confessed it to her, with an almost boyish contrition, and had promised never to go again. It was his last confession of the sort, but, she feared, not his last sin. Of what worth were the promises of a weak, tempted man who never sought earnestly the help of God to strengthen his resolution? Of no more value than an anchor without a cable. Lawrence needed to be watched and cared for; so she went on with them.

“I am so sorry to trouble you both,” Miss Ferrier exclaimed, in a voice trembling with anger and disappointment. “I could have had John come for me, if I had thought.” She snatched her hand from the arm of her escort, and pulled her shawl about her with nervous twitches.

“It would have been better to have had John,” Honora said; “for he could have gone home with me. I am the troublesome third, as it is. But then,” speaking lightly, “if I am the last, Lawrence will be obliged to go in early.”

With another twitch of her shawl, Annette took her escort’s arm again as abruptly as she had left it, and, held it closely.

Careless as the last words had sounded, she knew their meaning, for there had been something said on this subject before. She chose to take it defiantly now, and it comforted her to do so. Others might blame and doubt him, but she would not. He seemed nearer to her in the light of her superior devotedness than to any one else. She would never fail him; and by-and-by he would know her worth. The glow of this fervent hope warmed the girl’s chilled heart, and gave her a sort of happiness.

And so they reached the house, and, after a quiet good-night, separated.

The walk back was passed in silence; and Miss Pembroke did not choose to lean on her companion’s arm; she wished to hold her dress out of the dust.

The street they went through was one of those delightful old ones which a city sometimes leaves untouched for a long time. Over-arching elms grew thickly on either side, and the houses were all detached.

Midway up this street stood the cottage of the Geralds, with a garden in front and at the back, and a narrow green at right and left. Three long windows in front, lighting the parlor, reached almost to the ground. The steep roof slanted to a veranda at each side, leaving but one upper window over the three—a wide window with casements swinging back from the middle. The cottage was in the shape of a cross, and at one arm of it a lighted window shone out on the veranda.

At sound of the gate-latch, the curtain was drawn aside a little, and a woman looked out an instant, then hastened to open the door.

“Are we late, Mrs. Gerald?” Honora asked, and stepped forward into the sitting-room.

“Oh! no, dear; I did not expect you any sooner.”

Mrs. Gerald lingered in the doorway, looking back at her son as he stopped to leave his hat and overcoat in the entry, and only entered the sitting-room when she had caught a glimpse of his face as he came toward her. He was looking pleasant, she saw, and was contented with that.

“Well, mother!” he said, and sank indolently into the arm-chair she pushed before the open fire for him. It was the only arm-chair in the room.

She drew another chair forward, and seated herself beside him. Honora, sitting on a low stool in the corner, with the firelight shining over her, told what they had been doing that afternoon and evening. The son listened, his eyes fixed on the fire; the mother listened, her eyes fixed on her son.

Mrs. Gerald was an Irish lady of good descent, well educated, and well mannered, and had seen better days. We do not call them better days because in her girlhood and early married life this lady had been wealthy, but because she had been the happy daughter of excellent parents, and the happy wife of a good man. All were gone now but this son; the husband dead for many a year, the daughters married and far away, the wealth melted from her like sunset gold from a cloud; but Lawrence was left, and he filled her heart.

One could read this in her face as she watched him. It revealed the pride of the mother in that beautiful manhood which she had given to the world, and which was hers by an inalienable right that no one could usurp; and it revealed, too, the entire self-forgetfulness of the woman who lives only in the life so dear to her.The face showed more yet; for, hovering over this love and devotion as the mist of the coming storm surrounds the full moon, and rings its softened brightness with a tremulous halo, one could detect even in the mother’s smile the mist of a foreboding sadness.

How ineffable and without hope is that sadness which is ever the companion of a too exclusive affection!

Honora Pembroke looked at the two, and pain and indignation, and the necessity for restraining any expression of either, swelled in her heart, painted her cheeks a deep red, and lifted her lids with a fuller and more scornful gaze than those soft eyes were wont to give. Where was the courtesy which any man, not rudely insensible, should show to a lady? Where the grateful tenderness that any child, not cruelly ungrateful, pays to a mother? This man could be gallant when he wished to make a favorable impression; and she had heard him make very pretty, if very senseless, speeches about chivalry and ideal characters, as if he knew what they were. He had even, in the early days of their acquaintance, maintained for a long time an irreproachable demeanor in her presence. She was learning a doubt and distrust of men, judging them by this one, of whom she knew most. Were they often as selfish and insensible as he was? Were they incapable of being affected by any enchantment except that which is lent by a delusive distance? Here beside him was an ideal affection, and he accepted it as he accepted air and sunshine—it was a matter of course. The mother was in person one who might satisfy even such a fastidious taste as his; for though the face was thin and faded, and the hands marred by household labor, there were still the remains of what had once been a striking beauty. Mrs. Gerald carried her tall form with undiminished stateliness, her coal-black hair had not a single thread of white among its thick tresses, and her deep-blue eyes had gained in tenderness what they had lost in fire. To use one of Miss Pembroke’s favorite expressions, it was not fitting that the son, after having passed a day without fatigue, should lounge at ease among cushions, while the mother, to whom every evening brought weariness, should sit beside him in a chair of penitential hardness.

But even while she criticised him, he looked up from the fire, his face brightening with a sudden pleasant recollection.

“O mother! I had almost forgotten,” he said, and began searching in his pockets for something. “Neither you nor Honora mentioned it; but I keep count, and I know that to-day your ladyship is five times ten years old.”

He smiled with a boyish pleasure more beautiful than his beauty, and the little touch of self-satisfaction he betrayed was as far as possible from being disagreeable. He could not help knowing that he was about to give delight, and cover himself with honor in the eyes of these two women.

“Now, mother,” opening a tiny morocco case, “this is the first ring I ever gave any woman. The one I gave Annette was only a diamond of yours reset, and so no gift of mine. But this your good-for-nothing son actually earned, and had made on purpose for you.”

He drew from the case a broad gold ring that sparkled in the firelight as if set with diamonds, and, taking the trembling hand his mother had extended caressingly at his first words, slipped the circlet onto her finger.

“I had no stone put in it, because I want you to wear it all the time,” he said. “Doesn’t it fit nicely?”

“My dear boy!” Mrs. Gerald exclaimed, and could say no more; for tears that she wished to restrain were choking her.

A fiftieth birthday is not a joyful anniversary when there is no one but one’s self to remember that it has come. Just as the mother had given up hope, and was making to herself excuses for his not remembering it, her son showed that it had been long in his thought. The joy was as unexpected as it was sweet.

When she said her prayers that night, Mrs. Gerald’s clasped hands pressed the dear gift close to her cheek; and no maiden saying her first prayer over her betrothal-ring ever felt a tenderer happiness or more impassioned gratitude.

“Dear Lawrence! it was so nice of you!” whispered Honora, and gave him her hand as she wished him good-night.

He threw himself back in the arm-chair again when he was left alone, and for a few minutes had a very pleasant sense of being happy and the cause of happiness. “Who would think that so much fun could be got out of a quiet evening spent in tying Mayflowers round a pole, and giving a gold birthday ring to one’s mother?” he mused. “After all, the good people have the best of it, and we scape-graces are the ones to be pitied. If I were rich, I should be all right. If I had even half a chance, I would ask no more. But the poverty!” He glanced about the room, then looked gloomily into the fire again.

Yes; poverty was there—that depressing poverty which speaks of decayed fortunes. The carpet, from which the brilliant velvet pile was worn nearly off, the faded and mended covers of the carved chair-frames, the few old-fashioned ornaments which had been retained when all that would sell well had gone to the auction-room, each showed by the scrupulous care with which it had been preserved a poverty that clung to the rags of prosperity in the past because it saw no near hope of prosperity in the future. Miles of unbroken forest could be seen from the cupolas of Crichton; yet in this room the very stick of wood that burned slowly on the andirons was an extravagance which Mrs. Gerald would not have allowed herself.

“Yes; the good ones have the best of it,” the young man repeated, rousing himself.

He drew the andirons out, and let the unconsumed stick down into the ashes, lighted a candle, and turned the gas off. Then, candle in hand, he stood musing a moment longer, the clear light shining over his face, and showing an almost childlike smile coming sweetly to his lips. “After all,” he said softly, “I haven’t been a bad fellow to-night,” and with that pleased smile still lingering on his face, went slowly out of the room.

And so the stillness of night descended, and deep sleep brooded over the town as the lights went out.

Crichton was a well-governed city: no rude broils disturbed its hours of darkness. Decency was in power there, and made itself obeyed. You might see a doctor’s buggy whirl by, like a ghost of a carriage, its light wheels faintly crunching the gravel; for only the business streets were paved. Now and then, on still nights, might be heard the grating of ropes, as some vessel sailed up to the wharf after a long ocean voyage. Perhaps a woman in one of the houses on the hill above would hearthat sound through her dream, and start up to listen, fancying that, in the word of command the soft breeze bore to her casement, she could detect a familiar voice long unheard and anxiously waited for. Perhaps the sailor, whose swift keel had shot like an arrow past the heavy junk of Chinese waters, and scattered, as it approached the shore, clear reflections of tufted palms and dusky natives—perhaps he looked eagerly up the hill to that spot which his eyes could find without aid of chart or compass, and saw suddenly twinkle out the lamp in the window of his home.

But except for such soft sounds and shadowy idyls, Crichton was at night as still as sleep itself.

The Crichtonians had a pleasant saying that their city was built by a woman, and the best compliment we can pay them is that they made this saying proudly, and kept in honored remembrance the hand of the gentle architect. But not so much in brick and stone was it acknowledged, though they owed to her their first ideas of correct and symmetrical building: in their society, high and low, in many of their pretty customs, in their tastes, in their freedom from bigotry of opinions, even in their government, they felt her influence.

While the city lies sleeping under the stars, strong, adult, and beautiful, full of ambitious dreams, full, too, of kind and generous feeling, let us go back to the time when, an infant town, it began to use its powers, and stammer brokenly the alphabet of civilization.

Hush, fair city, all thy many thousands, while the angels watch above thee! and, sweeter marvel yet! while the dear Lord waits unsleeping in thy midst, where that solitary taper burns. Sleep in peace, “poor exiled children of Eve,” and be grateful at least in dreams.

Not very long ago, this place was a wild forest, with a rude little settlement hewn out of it on the river’s banks. It was shut in from the world, though the world was not far distant. But the river was broad and deep, the ocean only ten miles away, and within a few miles were large and growing cities. Soon the sound of the axe and the saw were heard, and little craft, sloops and schooners, floated down the Saranac laden with lumber till the water rippled close to the rails. The story of her growth in this regard is the story of a thousand other towns. The vessels grew larger, their voyages longer, more houses were built, some men became comparatively wealthy and gave employment to others, while the majority kept the level of the employed. Social distinctions began to show themselves, detestable ones for the most part, since there was no social cultivation. Indeed, this poor settlement was in a fair way to become the most odious of towns. The two meeting-houses began to be called churches by the aspiring; the leading woman of the town ventured to call her help a servant (on which the indignant “help” immediately deserted her); and the first piano appeared. But let us mention this piano with respect, for it was the pioneer of harmony.

When Crichton had about fifteen hundred inhabitants, a stranger came there one day, as a passenger on board a bark returning from a distant city. This bark was the chief vessel, and was owned by the three chief men of Crichton. It had gone away laden with laths, and it brought back tea, coffee, sugar, and other foreign groceries; and, more than all, it brought Mr. Seth Carpenter. He was not, apparently, a very remarkableman in any way, except as all strangers were remarkable in this young town. He was plain-looking, rather freckled, and had a pair of small and very bright eyes which he almost closed, in a near-sighted way, when he wished to see well. Behind those eyes was a good deal of will and wit, and the will to put the wit into immediate practice. Moreover, he knew how to hold his tongue very cleverly, and baffle the curious without offending them. Nothing but his name transpired. He might be a mountebank, a detective, a king’s son—how were these people to know?

In fact, he was nothing more mysterious than a respectable young man twenty-five years of age, who, having his fortune to make, had thought best to leave his prim, sober, native town, where nothing was being done, and where the people were mummies, and seek what, in modern parlance, is called a “live” place. In his pockets he had nothing but his hands; in his valise was a single change of linen.

The very morning of his arrival at Crichton, Mr. Seth Carpenter went to the highest hill-top, and from it viewed the town, the river, and the receding forests. He then strolled down to the river, and looked through the mills, and from there sauntered to the ship-yard, where he found a ship on the stocks, almost ready to be launched. He walked round the yard, whistling softly, with an air of critical indifference. He paused near two other men who were viewing the ship, and, since their conference was not private, listened to it.

One of these men, a sailor, rather thought he might make up his mind to buy that ship. Did his companion know what was likely to be asked for it? The other reckoned, and calculated, and guessed, and expected, and finally owned that he did not know.

Mr. Carpenter, his eyes winking fast with the sparks that came into them, and his fingers working nervously, walked out of the yard, and found the owner of the ship, and, still with nothing in his pockets but his hands, made his bargain with all the coolness of a millionaire. Before sunset, the ship was nominally his; and, before sunrise, it had changed owners again, and the young adventurer had made five hundred dollars by the bargain.

“I will yet rule the town!” he said exultingly, when he found himself alone; and he kept his word. Everything prospered with him, and in a short time even rivalry ceased. Men who had been proud to add dollar to dollar shrank and bowed before this man who added thousand to unit. Half the men in town, after ten years, were in his employment, and business prospered as he prospered. In another ten years, Crichton was a city, with all barriers down between her and the great world; but a raw, unkempt city; jealous, superficially educated, quarrelsome, pretentious, and rapidly crystallizing into that mould. Only a person of supreme position and character could now change it. Mr. Carpenter had the position, but not the character. He thought only of money-making, and of the excitement of enterprise and power; the rest he viewed with a pleasant indifference not without contempt. At forty-five he was still a bachelor.

We have mentioned the first piano with respect, because others followed in its train, rendering a music-teacher necessary; so that, after a succession of tyros, Miss Agnes Weston came, bringing the very spirit of harmony with her into the town she was to conquer.

She did not come as a conqueror, however; nor probably did she anticipate the part she was to play any more than the Crichtonians did. She came to earn her bread, and, while doing so, was anything but popular. Nothing but her brilliant musical abilities, and the fact that she had been educated at Leipsic, saved her from utter failure. People did not fancy this self-possessed, unpretending young person, who could sometimes show such a haughty front to the presuming, and who was, moreover, so frightfully dark and sallow. They did not understand her, and preferred to leave her very much to herself.

One person only found her not a puzzle. To Mr. Carpenter she was simply a refined woman among uncongenial associates; becoming discontented and unhappy there, too, before many months had passed. He did not choose that she should go away. He had become pleasantly accustomed to seeing her, had sometimes met her on her long walks out of town; and once, when he had politely offered to drive her home—an offer which any other lady in Crichton would have accepted beamingly, without the preliminary of an introduction—had been refreshed by receiving a cold refusal, and a surprised stare from a pair of large black eyes. The great man, surfeited with smiles and flatteries, was immensely pleased by this superciliousness.

But though strangely disturbed at the prospect of Miss Weston’s leaving, he hesitated to speak the word which might detain her. A bachelor of forty-five does not readily determine on making a sensible marriage; it usually needs some great folly to spur him on to a change so long deferred. He had, moreover, two other reasons for delaying: he wanted a charming wife, and was in doubt whether even his power could transform this lady into his ideal: the other reason had blue eyes, and a dimple in its chin, and was a very silly reason.

But no one who knew this gentleman would expect him to remain long in doubt on any subject. Within a month from the day he first entertained the thought of running such a risk, Crichton was electrified by the announcement that Mr. Carpenter was soon to be married to Miss Weston; and, before they had recovered from their first astonishment, the marriage had taken place, and the quiet, dark-faced music-teacher was established as mistress of an imposing mansion on North Avenue.

It was now Mr. Carpenter’s turn to be astonished, and he was enchanted as well. Never had he pictured to himself a woman so charming as this grub, now become a butterfly, proved herself; and never had he imagined that even his wife could obtain so beautiful a supremacy as she gradually established and never lost. She was born to rule, and seldom had such power been placed in any woman’s hands. Mr. Carpenter was the first of her vassals. With a refined and noble arrogance, she esteemed him as the first man in the world, because he had been the first to appreciate and exalt her. For this she gave him a faithful, if condescending, affection, and quoted his wishes and opinions so constantly that one might have thought they were her only guides. So thorough was her tact and her courtesy toward her husband he scarcely guessed his own inferiority, and never dreamed that she was aware of it.

She grew beautiful, too, as well as amiable. Now that the drudgery of toil was lifted from her, and hercramped talents had room for full and exhilarating play, the swarthy skin cleared, showing a peach-like bloom, the fine teeth lit a frequent smile, and the deep voice lost its dull cadence, and took a musical, ringing sound.

Mrs. Carpenter used her power well. Crichton was as clay in her hands, and she moulded it after a noble model. What arrogance could never have done was accomplished by tact and sweetness. Her forming touch was strong and steady, but it was smooth, and nothing escaped it. Thoroughly womanly, speaking by her husband’s mouth when she deemed it not fitting that her proper voice should be heard, she could influence in matters where women do not usually care to interfere. She thought nothing out of her province which concerned the prosperity of the town she honored with her presence, and she inspired others with her own enthusiasm. That streets should be wide and well kept, that public buildings should be architecturally symmetrical, that neat cottages for the poor, replacing their miserable huts, should start up sudden as daisies along some quiet road—these objects all interested her, though she worked for them indirectly.

But in social life she ruled openly; and there her good sense and good heart, her gentle gaiety and entire uprightness, became the mould of form. Ill-nature went out of fashion, and, in the absence of charity, self-control became a necessity. When people of opposite creeds met at her house, their feuds had to be laid aside for the time; and, once two foes have smiled in each other’s faces, the frown is not so easy to recall.

Gradually the change which had been imposed outwardly became a real one; and, when Mrs. Carpenter died, full of years and of honors, her spirit continued to animate the place, in its opinions and actions, at least, if some fairer grace of heart and principle were wanting. She died as she had lived, out of the church; though the church had ever found her a friend, bountiful and tenderly protecting. Of its doctrines and authority she seemed never to have thought; but the copy of the Sistine Madonna in her drawing-room had always a vase of fresh flowers before it.

She left no children. A niece whom she had adopted married in Crichton, and had one descendant, a grand-daughter, living there. This grand-daughter was Honora Pembroke.

Wake again, Crichton, for morning is come. Long rays of golden light are shooting out of the east; and down the hillside, in the church of S. John, Father Chevreuse is saying,Sursum Corda!

TO BE CONTINUED.

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