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beatings of its constant heart sent freshness in great veins of health throughout the air.

"I'm good for so long as you've the mind to stay, Dr. Aubichon," cried Ambrose. "It's impossible to die here. It's just a day dropped out of heaven, taking such shape as it fell. thousand years as one day."

A

cause, of course, you couldn't be there unless you deserved to be. And so you feel yourself possessed of all the virtue incident to those people who went to and fro in white robes and with harps of gold."

"And what adds to the feeling," she said, "is, that we lose the count of the days; the ""Twouldn't be too long for me if it were," seasons are so confused that we seem to have replied the other.

done with time."

space."
"Listen.

gale?"

Mr. Ambrose, is that a nightin

"A noonday nightingale. An unrecognized species."

"It comes so from that covert of shade, it seems as if the golden anther of that great white bell were singing."

As for Melicent, she looked about her in a "And to have begun eternity? Yes; but maze. It seemed to be a garden floated off that is one of our errors, because we merely pass from the lost Manoa, becalmed and moored in the hours, merely spend them. We measure this enchanted spot. Sweeter than the valley time; formerly people weighed it. Clocks are of Avilion, more mysterious than the yet un- convenient liars; they have taught us to regard found Isla de Arin, so hidden from others that eternity not as a state of being, but as an affair it would seem to have repelled their compass of duration. I don't think men will ever get it needles, and have become unattainable as a through their gross perception, till death refines cloud in heaven, sphered in impenetrable sum-them, that there are no such things as time and mer. In later years, as her memory went to hover over it, she could hardly believe that it were any thing but the wildest vision, till one spot embowered in its shadows rose and stamped it ineffaceably on fact. But apart from its mystic seclusion, from its air of everlastingness, as if it were a thing forgotten by the great powers of the universe, passed over by destruction and decay, all its tides and breathings were balm. In this languishing warmth, this fertilizing atmosphere, they might well forget the future; the luxuriant riot of stem and root, the great flowers that seemed, as they hung in the shadow, to be radiant with the inexhaustible "Oh the place is haunted," said Ambrose, life in their hearts, the depth of sky, the won- then. "Doubtless elfinly-but haunted. We drous loveliness on every side, the very ap-are waited on and welcomed by the souls of the proach of so much vitality-from them all Am-fairies who died with Shakspeare. I shall come brose drew a stronger, longer life. And Grand-out here under the midnight, some time, darkly pa Aubichon, who appeared to think that in bringing Ambrose here he had deployed a wonderful strategic force over nature, and diplomatized with death, rubbed his hands in an imaginary lavatory every hour, and regarded the sleeping and waking breath of his patient as entirely an affair of his own workmanship.

Melicent's presence threw round this airy habitation all the grace of home. Books, and prints, and tiny treasures of alabaster scattered themselves about; and shells of curious beauty, picked up along the shore to which they now and then climbed, vased the torrent of blossoms that daily overflowed the house, the house itself buried in splendid trailers, and a deep tangle of loose and interlaced greenery.

"The place seems to seize every thing," said Ambrose. "If you stand still long enough under that dropping yaguey spray it will knot you and net you in inextricable coils. If I lie here five minutes, letting this dazzle of light soak through me, I find a foot or a hand fast banded in the hurrying vines. It must be as healthful for the soul as for the body here, Nature seems so desirous of taking us to herself."

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"And the fragrance were the tune."

They listened till the song went wandering away into deeper depths of shadow, where it should refresh itself in the richest draughts of the honey-wine.

bathed in odorous dew, and surprise them at
their revels while they think us asleep, and have
stepped from their aura of invisibility-and I
shall learn wonderful secrets, secrets that they
whisper among themselves, or that drop, a little
later, from the lips of listening orchids."
"For instance-"

"For instance, I shall learn that we preserve the immortality we have found here only on condition of never seeing the full moon. That this Governess of Floods who hides her sceptre and pretends to be a satellite, in her witch-dance round the earth, rules the tide of the trees as the tide of the seas, and therefore the spells that I may work with a spike of aloe when the sap mounts or when it falls. I shall learn that the poisons that are death-pangs in her gibbous ray are innocuous sweets as she wanes. I shall learn at what moment of what receding nighttide to climb the shore's rim yonder, and, descending the beach, find my mermaid with perfumed locks singing dulcet strains on the reef outside the dark lagoon. And I shall feel a dim warning that has been read from the mystic writing on the sphinx Atropos, a dim warning

"It seems to me like those Happy Islands in of the hour in what dark morning prime these Mirza's dream," said Melicent.

"Yes, and that is very cheering," he replied, throwing his clasped hands above his head and falling back, to luxuriate more entirely, "be

phantoms shall cease to stand between me and the actual, and the beetle and the glow-worm begin to stake out my grave."

"You will be a great enchanter," said Meli

cent, laughing in order to hide the shudder that | The milkman, the walk-sweeper, and the ragwould creep coldly over her. "And you will command the springs of life and know the potent berry in whose juice the Immortals dip their spears, that you told me of yesterday, so to shoot Death with his own shafts."

"You will become a very Poke o' Moonshine, and will naturally dissolve in these torrefying sunbeams if you don't seek a roof straightway," said Grandpa Aubichon, rising from his own nest and shaking off the deposit of a tropical hour that had tried to assimilate him with the granite foundations of the place.

picker, were the only creatures moving in Osgood's neighborhood. The time was propitious for meditation and resolve, but Osgood's head was not ready. The still Champagne that he had drank the night before buzzed in his brain. With a glass of it in his hand, under a side gaslight, in the drawing-room of his Aunt Formica, he had proposed marriage to a handsome dashing girl, and the handsome dashing girl had accepted him. They swallowed the bubbles on the "beaker's brim," thinking it was the Cup of Life they were drinking from. Neither supposed "Saint Aubichon, in an aureole of flower- that the moment was one of exhilaration or endust and powder off moths' wings!" exclaimed thusiasm. Osgood never felt so serious, or so Ambrose. "Of course we are his thralls. Not determined to face the music, as he called it, obeying the saints here, they bring a hurricane which was the short for a philosophical design or an earthquake, or some other day of judg-to march boldly through life, and shoulder its ment, and explode it round about us. At his necessities with a brave spirit and a martial air.

service," he added, rising. "Come, darling,
there's a dream in a drowse waiting to chariot
you through siesta!" And catching Melicent
like a lily-stem, he throned her, perfect and pe-
tite, upon his arm. "Don't you see how strong
I am?" he said.
"I absorb vitality from the
leaves."

“Make the most of them," responded Grand-selves,
pa Aubichon. "Your stock for threescore and
ten must be stored in as many days. Time's
half up."
"Not a moment more to linger? It's idle
talking; I can't go. I never shall be satiate
with this sea, this splendor, this drunkenness of
odor. This sweet sunny space has been such
bliss, Dr. Aubichon! It has been such rest,
such quiet."

Osgood was intelligent, agreeable, and handsome. He had advanced no further into life than to give this impression. He knew nothing more of himself than that he was intelligent, handsome, and "plucky." He had no father or mother, but he had an aunt who had married Mr. Formica; this pair, effete in thembelonged to that mysterious class who are always able to get their relatives places under Government. When Osgood was eighteen they obtained a place in the Sub-Treasury, which yielded him the income of fifteen hundred dollars. Aunt Formica expected a great deal from him in the way of deportment and dress. The exigencies of his position, she observed, compelled him to do as those around him did. Of course he never laid up any of his salary, but he kept out of debt, and in doing this he fulfilled the highest duty that came within his province. His associates were young men who had more money than he, and who expected him to spend "It has made me so good, too," he said, as much as they spent. The houses he visited laughingly; and tossing her to his shoulder with were inhabited by people who took it for grantone of his old arts of the athlete. "I can't ed that all who came in contact with them were imagine the possibility of sin. I am sure I am as rich as themselves. The Formica interest an angel!" was large. When he went to Washington with his aunt, he went the rounds of the senators' houses and hotels in the way of calls, dinners, and parties. When he went to Boston with her he began his visits at the right hand of Beacon Street, and branched into the streets behind it, where as good blood abides, though it has not the same advantage of the air of the Common.

"One of the seasons when the soul grows," said Melicent, laying her cheek against his hair -hair whose fine soft darkness alone would have attested the owner's organization.

Honey, come
going up for

"I am sure somebody else is. down, or I shall think you are good." "I can't go up for bad, Grandpa Aubichon." "Yes you could, if you left us behind." "Ah, wherever I go, I shall yet have her. My rose can never close its petals!"

And so the three disappeared under the dense Wherever he went expense was involved, in the forest screen of shadow and coolness.

OSGOOD'S PREDICAMENT.

OSGOO

way of gloves, bouquets, cards, fees to errand boys, exchange of civilities in lunches, cigars, ale, brandy, sherry, stage, hack, and car fare, which he bore like a hero.

SGOOD took a cane-bottomed chair whose Lily Tree, the girl whom he proposed to maredges had given way from the application | ry, belonged to a family of the Formica species. of boot-soles, cane and umbrella ferules, and It sailed through society all a-taut with convenstudied his predicament. He commenced this tion, and was comme il faut from stem to stern. necessary study early in the morning in his Lily and Osgood had always known each other. room, which was in a boarding-house situated They passed through the season of hoop and in this metropolis. The early carts were tak-ball, dancing-school, tableaux, and charades toing their way down town through a blue haze, which in the country prefigured a golden day.

gether; sympathized in each other's embryonic flirtations; and were such fast friends that no

one ever dreamed of any danger to them from of the watch in his pocket; it associated itself love. But as the wagon that goes from the pow-in his mind with the sound and motion of railder-mill in safety innutaerable times at last car- road-cars. He felt himself traveling hundreds ries the keg which explodes it, so Osgood and Lily at last touched the divine spark which threw them out of their old world into one they had not anticipated.

This was part of Osgood's predicament.
What made him do as he had done?
Why had Lily accepted him?

of miles away, listening all the while to a rhythmic sound, which said, "Many a mile, many a mile." Why should he not go "many a mile, many a mile," in reality? He went out immediately and bought a valise. After that his demeanor was settled and tranquil. He then wrote three notes-to his chief, his Aunt Formica, and Lily. The first was a note of resignation; the second conveyed the information to his aunt that he was sick of his place, had thrown it up, and was going out of town for a change of air. He regretted, when he began his note to Lily, that he had not sent her some flowers. A momentary impulse to go and see her stayed his hand; but he remembered that she must be at Mrs. Perche's "sit-down supper" that evening, and resumed writing. He begged her to enjoy herself, and not miss him while he was away. He did not know what to write besides, but put in a few chaotic expressions which might or might not mean a great deal.

She would never, he argued, consent to go out of the area which bounded her ideas, and which comprised a small portion of New York, Boston, Washington, and the tour of Europe, which meant a week in London, six months in Paris, and ten days in Rome. Unless he descended from the Sub-Treasury, and sought some business, such as making varnish, glue, buttons, soap, sarsaparilla, or sewing machines, could he marry? What shrewdness had he in the place of capital to bring to bear on the requirements of these Yankee callings? How he worried over the prospect which looked so pleasant the night before! Champagne, flowers, light, and perfume were gone from it. He pitied himself in his helplessness. The thought of Lily deprived of her delicate evening dresses, her diurnal bouquets, caramels, and her pecunious caprices, was not pleasant. He could not see her in any lighting the brilliant dressing-gown, he packed in a that made her so agreeable as in the light that trunk and locked it. he must certainly cause her to lose.

While he put a few necessary articles in the valise he wondered where he should go, never dropping the thought that he must go somewhere. The remainder of his wardrobe, includ

He rang the bell, and when the waiter came up asked for the landlady, Mrs. Semmes. The waiter thought that it was not too late to see her in her own parlor, and lingered, with his hand on his chin and his eyes on the valise.

66

The alacrity with which Jem changed his attitude and expression struck Osgood with a sense of pain. "How horribly selfish servants are!" he thought, taking his way down stairs. Mrs. Semmes hoped there was no trouble, and asked him to be seated. He looked at her earnestly; she was the only one to say farewell Never had he looked Mrs. Semmes in the face before; he had only seen the hand into which he had placed the price of his board.

to.

Something practical must be done. Naturally he looked into his pocket-book. There was eighteen dollars in it-all the money he had. It was the last day in the month, however, and he was entitled to draw one hun- Jem," said Osgood, "I have left some boots dred and twenty-five dollars. He shut his pock-in the closet, and some shirts in the drawers, et-book and looked into his closet. He found which are at your service." there several pairs of patent-leather boots and a brilliant dressing-gown. "Pooh!" he said, peevishly, and shut the door. He then examined his bureau: in its drawers were many socks, shirts, cravats, four sets of studs and sleeve-buttons, and five scarf-pins. He rattled the studs and buttons thoughtfully; but nothing came of it, and he closed the drawers. His eye then fell on a dress-coat which he had worn for the first time the evening before. He resolved to take the coat back to Wiedenfeldt, his tailor. solve was the nucleus probably of his future undertakings. He finished dressing and left the house. Before reaching Wiedenfeldt he purchased and drank a bottle of Congress Water. He also stopped at a favorite restaurant and made an excellent breakfast, and came away with a "Relampagos"-a small cigar of superior flavor-and three daily papers. His interview with Wiedenfeldt was satisfactory; the coat was taken back, and when he had settled the matter he felt as if a beginning had been made in a new and right direction.

This re

That afternoon he drew his pay, and walked up town. The moment he entered his room his predicament fell upon him again, and his spirits sunk. He sat on the edge of his bed, so quiet in his misery that he began to hear the ticking

"I came to tell you, Mrs. Semmes, that I am about to leave town for the present. Will you allow my trunk to remain here? If I do not return in a year and a day, break it open."

Mrs. Semmes promised to keep the trunk; took some money due her; wondered at his going away at that time of year, and asked him his destination.

"I think I shall go to Canada," he answered, vaguely.

"There must be snow there, by the accounts."

"Where shall I go?" he was about to say, but checked himself.

"If you were going East," she continued, "you would find the ground bare enough, especially in the neighborhood of the sea: the seawinds melt the snow almost as soon as it falls."

"I think I will go East," he said, musingly. He sat so long without saying any thing, staring straight before him, that Mrs. Semmes began to feel fidgety. She recalled him to the present by walking to the window. He started, bade her good-by, and retired.

He tossed about all night in a feverish sleep, tormented with dreams which transformed Lily into a small child which he was compelled to carry in his arms, or furnished his Aunt Formica with a long spear, with which she pursued him, and was forever on the point of overtaking

him.

At 8 o'clock A.M. he might have been seen by a detective at the Twenty-seventh Street dépôt. A few minutes after he was going through the tunnel; and, emerging from that, he considered himself fairly divided from New York. At the first station beyond the State-line of Massachusetts he consulted a map, and concluded to stop at the junction of the Old Colony Railroad. There he changed the route, and in the evening reached a town which seemed waiting to go somewhere else, where he passed the night.

"Thee has come to us from strange parts, I reckon, from thy looks."

"Yes," he answered, absently; "I needed change."

"There has been no change here since the Indians went away. If thee will look across the road thee can see the ground is strewed with the bits of shells from their feasts."

He went to the window, and again remarked to himself, "This is the place for me.

"Could you," he asked, going toward her, "let me stay with you a while?"

"Did thee come to the Marsh End station this morning?"

"Yes; my valise is there."
"Thy parents are rich ?"
"I have none."

"Thee has been well cared for, though."
"I have not left home because of any-"
Misfortune, he was about to say, but that did
not seem to be the right word; so he tried to
think of something else to say. She saw his
embarrassment, and said, quickly,
"I never have harbored a stranger; but if
Peter likes, he may take thee."

The next morning he started on his travels again toward Cape Cod. Five miles beyond a Osgood thanked her so pleasantly that she large village, in a flat, sterile, gloomy region, he determined he should stay. She asked him his alighted with his baggage, and said, "This is name, his age, his place of residence, his busithe place for me." The train went on, and the ness, and his intentions. Except in regard to dépôt-master went into his little den without the latter, his answer proved satisfactory; and noticing Osgood. Several tall school-girls, who when Peter returned at noon from the distant had come to watch for the train, strolled down shore with a load of sea-weed, she introduced a cross-road, and he was alone. He went to the Osgood as if he were an old acquaintance of end of the platform and surveyed the country. whom Peter was in a state of lamentable ignoHe stood on the edge of a wide plateau along rance. He pushed his hat on the back of his which ran the railroad track. Beyond that a head, shook hands with Osgood, and said, road deviated through dismal fields, by unpaint-Maria, will thee give me my dinner?" taking ed houses, large barns, and straggling orchards. no further notice of Osgood till she had placed Below the plateau a wide marsh extended, in-it on the table. It consisted of stewed beans, tersected by crooked creeks, which gnawed into boiled beef, apple-pie, and cheese. Osgood ate the black earth like worms. A rim of sea bor-half a pie, and established himself in Peter's dered the tongue of the marsh, but it was too good graces. far off to add life to the scene. The sedge, giving up all hope of being moistened by the salt waves, had died in great circles, which looked like mats of gray hair on some pre-Adamite monster's buried head.

Osgood determined to pursue the windings of the road. He plowed the sand for two miles, and at a sudden turn of the road came upon a house, with a number of barns and sheds attached to it. A dog with a stiff tail ran out from a shed and barked at him, and a pale-faced woman in a muslin cap appeared at a window of the house. He knocked at the door: she opened it.

66 Will thee come in?" she asked.

He entered, following her as he would have followed a ghost. She moved a chair from the wall without the least noise, and he dropped upon it. As he looked at her his identity seemed slipping away-seemed to be slipping into an atmosphere connected with her and her surroundings. She brought him some water which she dipped from a pail near by, and held the cocoa-nut dipper which contained it to his lips.

"Thee will learn that Maria's pie-crust beats all," he said.

"Thee is ready to consent," said his wife, "to keep young Osgood a while ?"

"I don't know yet," answered Peter.

But after dinner he harnessed his horse and went to the dépôt for Osgood's valise, which he carried up stairs and deposited in the spare room. He then invited Osgood to take a look at the premises. He wished to make his own investigations in regard to Osgood without Maria's intervention. They lingered by the pig-sty, and while Peter scratched the pigs with a cord-wood stick, exchanged views of men and things. Peter saw the capabilities of Osgood's character, and easily divined the manner of life he had led. He knew him to be selfish from ignorance, and because he had early formed the habits which impose self-indulgence. Something in the young man's bearing won his heart-a certain impetuous simplicity and frankness which made him long to be of service to a nature unlike his own. Osgood found Peter genial, shrewd, and sad. Such a man he had never met. It seemed to

him that Peter could set him straight in his own estimation; there was no nonsense about the old man, and yet he could see deep feeling in his dark, cavernous eyes. The feeling which had oppressed him passed away, and another took its place which contained restoration, and faith in the future. He got into Peter's way by attempting to help fodder the cattle and "slick up" the barn. When the work was done, and while Peter fastened the barn-doors with an ox-bow, Osgood looked about him. It was a March afternoon; no wind blew, and no sun shone; but the gray round of the sky, which neither woods por hills hid from his sight, rolled over him in soft commotion. The reddish, barren fields stretched in their flatness beyond his vision, and the narrow roads of yellow sand ran to nowhere. The world of God, he thought, he saw for the first time; and, away from the world of men, felt himself a man.

in a snuff-colored suit, and Maria in a series of brown articles-dress, shawl, and bonnet. They started in good spirits in an open wagon, with an improvised seat for Peter in front. Beyond a belt of pine woods stood the meeting-house, and a mile beyond the meeting-house lay the town, before a vast bay. Osgood drove alone into the town, and spent several hours there. He visited the shops to find some trifle for Maria, and then went through the town down to the shore. How happy he grew in the pure wind and the gay morning light! The gulls rode over the foaming wave-crests and dipped into their green walls, and hawks swooped between the steadfast sky and heaving deep. The sea traveled round and round before his eyes with a mad joy, and tempted him to plunge into it. He wrote his name in the heavy sand with a broken shell, and the water filtered out the letters; then he paved it in pebbles with the word Strength.

Peter and Maria were waiting for him when he returned to the meeting-house with the wag

He looked so kindly upon Maria when he entered the house that she delayed the stream of the tea-kettle which she held over the tea-pot to admire him. The supper was the dinner-on. cold, with an addition of warm biscuits; and again Osgood ate himself into Peter's good graces.

Peter

"Thee has been sky-larking," she said. "After something for you," he answered, putting in her hand a handsome work-basket.

The evening was passed in silence. smoked, Maria mended, and Osgood reflected. A violent storm arose in the night, which lasted three days. They were improved by Maria and Peter in overhauling garden-seeds in the garret, and in setting up a leach-tub in the wood-house. Osgood assisted. When he was alone with Maria she talked to him of the boy who was lost at sea, and of the girl who died in childhood; with the hungry eyes of a bereaved mother she looked upon him, and his heart was touched with a new tenderness. When he was alone with Peter the old man sounded the depths of the young man's soul with wise, pathetic, quaint speech; he went over the ground of his own life, which had been passed on the spot where he now was, with the exception of several mackerel voyages, and one in a merchant vessel to some of the southern ports of Europe. But when together Peter and Maria never talked with Osgood on personal matters. Between them a marital silence was kept, which was more expressive than the conjugal volubility which ordinarily exists; it proved that they had passed through profound-him a small share of the profits. er experiences.

"Has thee so much money that thee must waste it on me, Osgood?"

But she was pleased with the gift. They rode home amicably. Peter, as a favor, allowed Osgood to drive, while he imparted to Maria sundry bits of information gained at the meeting.

When the storm ceased Peter went to the station for his Boston newspaper, which he read to Maria, who took it afterward and read it over to herself. Brother Quakers, Peter's neighbors, who lived out of sight, dropped in from time to time to exchange a word with Maria, or hold talks outside with Peter, with one foot in the rut and the other on the wagon-step. The present subject of interest, Osgood discovered, was the approaching Quarterly Meeting, and the mackerel fishery. Peter asked him to accompany himself and Maria to the town where the meeting was to be. They breakfasted at sunrise, when the day arrived, in full dress-Peter

Mackerel" went in and out at Osgood's ears without gaining his attention, till he caught at something Peter said about the Bonita. He listened. Three vessels were about to sail from the town on a mackerel voyage, and the Bonita was one of them. He comprehended that Peter owned half the Bonita, and a plan struck him. He inquired into the subject, and obtained its history. That evening he proposed going on a mackerel voyage, which proposal so fired Peter that he declared he had a mind to go too; but Maria quenched his enthusiasm by going over the programme of work that must be done at home. She made no opposition to Osgood's going, but set before him in plain terms the hardships of such a voyage. He was not to be deterred, and Peter gave his consent, promising

Osgood wrote to his Aunt Formica that night, assuring her that he already felt much better, and that he was about to enter into a new business, of which she should hear more. He also wrote Lily Tree a minute, lengthy epistle. He described his situation with Peter and Maria; told her how much board he paid-two dollars and fifty cents a week—and how well he had learned to do chores. He fed the pigs every day; he wished that she could see how well they thrived on the diet lately introduced by Peter and himself-a dry mash of boiled potatoes and meal, with an occasional horse-shoe thrown in as a relish. Would she, he wondered, have enjoyed the day that he, Maria, and Peter made

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