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he had happened to hear of, and had taken pains to see, a note for more than a third of my inheritance, given by me, and payable on my twentyfirst birthday. What could have been done with such a sum he left to conjecture; but fast life at college, gaming, racing, or whatever worse it might be possible to imagine, could lightly dissipate as much and more. It might be thought unpardonable interference on his part, but duty to his cousin Annie forbade his silence.

I

soul and sense alike seemed fusing only into an intense hatred of Julian. The pale face of Annie rose before me; I cursed him for her suffering. The doubts of the good old Colonel pursued me; I cursed him for a lost name-to stay blackened and defamed before her. ground my teeth in rage-not impotent rage; I meant to kill him. Nothing short of his blood should wipe out his work. It was across this hill that he would have to pass on his way home that night; then a tussle, and death to the undermost. I knew the fellow; his will was as good as mine.

So I sat there. The still rich glow slowly faded, the far soft sky put on a darker violet, one by one a hazy star trembled forth as if slipping off a thread, then seemed to shake apart its slight veil of vapor, and hang yet nearer the earth; Mars sparkled ruddily on the dark field, and went dipping his lance into all the little pools and dykes of the meadows below; the sense of the sweet, damp evening exhalations, grateful and soft, entered at every pore. A gentle wind blew up a cool and hesitating breath of fragrant night-air. It crept along the hillside, and rustled the grasses; it curled nearer to me, and lifted my hair and fanned my burning forehead-by-and-by a free, wild gale was rushing over the hill-top. Ah, Heaven! if I could feel it now, with all its misery if I were

Possibly I was not immaculate, which made Julian's insinuations no easier to endure; but except that she was too high and fair for the grasp of any one I never felt myself quite unworthy of her. My surprise at first, however, my hesitation, hurt me in the eyes of my judges. My protestations, too, were useless. I could not deny the main fact. I was fain to admit its truth. I had given the note, and I had used the money. The old Colonel's disappointment in me excused his words. Still it seems to me even now that it would have been nobler had he trusted in my truth. But he had prided himself on his management of the property; he had expected to turn it over to me doubled; and not only failing there, but seeing me prove, as he feared, a villain, his heart was full of wrath for his gentle child's sake. Yet I could not retort upon her father. I kept my voice down while I assured him that I had applied the money to no ignoble purpose, and was un-away and abroad to feel it now! This wind reder bonds to my own honor for the secret's preservation. He demanded of me the ring I wore; I could but refuse to surrender it. Then he lifted his daughter's hand in a clasp to which resistance would have been as vain as to that of a steel vice, withdrew from it the little circlet I had placed there, and when I refused in turn to accept it, forgot the old dignities of his stately courtesy, tossed it through the window as a worthless bauble, and forbade me the house. I delayed a moment for one wild blast of words to wither Julian, then I went.

ness.

I had no other choice than to go. But whither? The whole outer world was a maze of darkMy feet of their own habit fell into a familiar way, and I paused at last on the brow of a hill where many a time she and I had come to see the sunset together. I sat down then on the flat rock in the shelter of the cedar thicket, and tried to gather my routed thoughts into order once more. It was idle effort though. I could neither reason nor remember. I only felt that I was cold to the core, icy cold and numb. The sun was going down-the last of him, like a great broken ruby, just disappearing over the edge of the long, low champaign that stretched beneath me; then a deep rosy glow welled up like foam and filled the whole heavens with its calm, warm lustre. It made the dark meadows purple below it. It seemed like the beneficent smile of a departing deity; and under it my heart warmed again. But as it warmed the crowding emotions there sprung up, all armed and bristling, and I became conscious once again of a blazing indignation within me, over which

freshed me; it brought my aids about me too; it blew off the cloud in my brain that was hiding from me all other things than my own revenge. Like the first breath of the wind itself, there crept over me a doubt if my purpose were best; and then the struggle came there in the darkness. A fiercer fight than ever I fought in the red field or fray; the powers of evil on one side, I alone on the other. Alone? Had that been, I were lost. The aspirations of all my twenty years came to befriend me; the prayers my mother had taught me; the old love of God that used to rise like a fountain in the sea whenever the beauty of earth or the joy of life gladdened me; the air above me and behind me; the lofty night, in truth, seemed all alive, thronged with the hosts of heaven, ready to fight on my side.

Then the turmoil thickened: it was not enough for me to spare Julian's life-I must forgive him the wrong he had done me. This was the turning-point of all my being. I felt it blindly; it was my soul that was the contested prize. I rose at last from the flat rock, and stood up with my clenched hands in the shade of the cedar thicket. How could I forgive this man?

Only

And just then a light, ringing step came swiftly up the hill-side. The moon had begun to rise; the subtle essence of her light was abroad in the sky, but a wood yet hid her disk. as he paused a moment to look at the broad, shadowy landscape below, lifting his hat to taste the wild, full wind, perhaps, and quench a thirst for coolness there, she sent one long shaft and laid it revealingly on his face-the dark, handsome, daring face.

in the presence of God. I know now that it was ill of me; but I seemed shut out from heaven then-shut out from heaven and her. I did not ascend with her; only, half-hushed and awed, my heart ached with suppressed longing and bitterness once more. Perhaps it touched her even then. She lifted her eyes a moment and they met mine. And over all the holy pallor there shot a beautiful and sudden flush-ah, pardon me, Heaven!

I thought it was all over then for one breath. | window were falling over her, rose and ameI remembered, as if a flash had illumined all thystine lights flickering to and fro about her about me, a curious pointed flint that I had seen shadow, while a sunbeam, filtered through a at my feet before dark. I stooped and found it. martyr's palm high up above, laid a crown of I rose then to spring out at him with my weapon, yellower gold upon her hair. She was wrapped for he always went armed-but I was the more in the moment-in her prayers, her vows, her face powerful of the two-when up the wind, swell-appeared to me as if her sanctified spirit stood ing and falling, fainting and dying and coming again, arose the clear ringing of the nine o'clock bell. How many a time that bell had called us to prayer! How many a soul it had tolled away! Seventy times seven, seventy times seven, it seemed repeating in its airy rhythm-seventy times seven! The flint fell to my feet. Julian dropped his hat upon his head again, and went whistling down the hill lightly as he had come up. But as for me, I had conquered indeed; but how came I to be fighting such a foe? Nor had he all withdrawn. I felt the blackness of his presence still, and was possessed by an untold and awful fear-fear such as I never knew when facing the flame that leaps bodily out of the cannon's mouth. Crime could not come so near and leave me unscathed; weak from the strife, and every nerve unstrung, the terrors of hell were getting hold upon me.

That night I could not sleep, I tossed with my unrest. The inn was silent as a tomb; it was after midnight-I rose and sought the open air; there was always a fascination in walking at that hour when all mankind have left the world to the stars and me-in stirring abroad when every other form lies stretched in white sleep. Unconsciously it was again that my feet sought out old paths, and the wild night-wind and I went up the hill together-the boisterous wind, strong, fresh, and fitful, that seemed ca

As I sat there, then, my head bowed in my hands, there came a rushing and gamboling, a couple of quick yelps, and old Titan was bound-reering and gamboling about me in the darking beside me, over me, and round me, with a thousand antics of joy; and in a moment more a little slender form glided up behind him, wrapped in the old capote, the hood fallen back, and the fair, pure face silvered in the moonlight like a saint's; and Annie laid her timid touch on my head.

It was kind of you, dear, fearless child! Without you, then, what had become of me? You came like light into the darkness of that hour, as if you were the messenger of God, and in your stainlessness I felt myself forgiven. But it was a desecrated place to take you in—that heart so lately rife and foul with murder!

I went back with her to her gate. She had imagined where to seek me, and had trusted herself to Titan. She had not found it possible to let me go till she could assure me of her confidence once more going with me every where. Then we parted, and were to meet no more until her father opened his doors to me.

They were slow days that followed-almost as slow and agonized as these. In all my leisure afterward I haunted the place like a ghost that revisits the scenes of its ancient bliss. But I never saw her. One Sabbath rumor reached me of solemnities in the little church, and I went there again. I might see her at least from afar. She had been so delicate a child that the grand christening customary in her family had been delayed till it grew to be too late for it at all, and now she was herself to utter the vows that dedicated her to Heaven. I was in the gallery, at its remotest corner and just above the pulpit; so that as she knelt there at the altar and the font her sweet face was turned full on mine. All the glories from the great chancel

ness like some spiritual phantasm of the wild huntsman's hound, then mounted in an eldritch chase of the thin clouds across the stars. How it seems to cool and fan me here-the stemming of those glad gusts on the crest of the hill so long ago! It was a late autumn night, and all the melancholy spell of the season in its stiller hours seemed transferred from the keen, turbulent air, and loaded upon my heart as I stood there and breasted its rush over the hill-top; and but for the defiance it aroused, the forces of life would have been at a low ebb within me then.

Still standing there and gazing over the sleeping valley, and half-wondering which of all those tall tree-tops, in their billowy rise and fall, waved over her roof, I became gradually sensible of a strange brightness in the air-a brightness that must have been imperceptibly growing for some time, and that now began to fill the heavens with a rosy glare strong and vivid as the glow of that cloudless sunset that had impressed itself upon my passive senses when last upon that hill. Voices, too, I seemed to hear, and dimly divined a stir somewhere below me. I had a vague fantasy at first that malicious nightsprites were mocking me and my loneliness; then I turned, expecting to see the northern sky full of a dazzling aurora, when instantly it seemed as if the valley on that side behind me and below me were ablaze, and almost as immediately I comprehended that the home of Julian, barns and sheds and house, was a mass of flame, an apparition of fire, soaring and sinking, with all the roar and crash of its blaze and smell of its smoke carried by the wind the other way. The rest is all confusion-dashing down

heart throbs over the picture, beating like a bird against its bars, and life seems worth living yet, even in a dungeon, if only these hours that rust into one's soul corrode the prison-grates as well, and ever leave me free again. Free? It is a little word, but it holds the universe. To go once more with steps uncounted, with breath unbated, with will unquestioned-to go, to go at all! the sky would seem to be loosening itself away from the earth. And if it means so much to me, ah what to those the flesh upon whose bones is not their own, who feel themselves each inch of them another man's estate!

I have used the word lightly indeed; if ever these doors open, let me prove how clearly I see that freedom is the first sacrament between God and man.

the hill-side with loud halloos, parting the gath- | sunbeam that has gone in behind you; still my ering throng, hearing the cries that he still lay stupefied within, darting through rooms of blistering smoke with tongues of fire shooting out at me like demons, up a staircase, between burning walls, groping with scarifying breath, dragging the senseless log from its place, laboring with it back again, down the breaking stairs, leaping the gulf of fire that already swallowed half of them out into the air and under the spurting torrents of the engines-it is all like the dreams of a delirium. But here are the scars on my hands at this day, and the deep wound in my head made by the pitch of the rafter throbs and burns again on many an autumn night. But oh for those bold bounds anew; for that unshackled liberty of limb and power once more; for that ice-cold dash and drench even of the water-spouts about me! Perchance not entirely barren, then, my duWell, Julian was safe. It was the old Col-rance here. Much may be learned that was not onel who received him out of my arms, who took mine before; much may be found to teach my us home together-loud in his asseverations, boy. To hear his ardent speech, to make his gentle in his touch-and whose gallant heart fresh young face kindle, shall I ever have that felt all suspicions wiped away in applause of joy again? Fitter for work since I have suffered, that night's action. And he remitted me my fire and ice must temper the steel, and I have secret-and it is my secret still. his mind to mould yet. Ah, happy fathers, with your boys about you! And my little stareyed darling- But not for worlds should you know how this tired hand aches to draw your head back in the rope of curls twisted about it, how a teasing trifle vexes me as I yearn for the pinch of dimpled fingers and the sailor's kiss once more. Some one else will give you sailorkisses, one day, my beauty, but not while I am by if he is wise. Could she always be our baby, the laughing sprite! But no, I must see into what kind of a rose our rose-bud opens. Will it be a wild one, with the bees nipping its petals; or a calm and rich tea-rose, all creamy soft without, but so deeply blushing at its heart? What kind of a woman will she make, I wonder? Not much like her mother, after all; some gay and sweet ancestress, that died in her bloom, is going to see the sun over again in her, the sparkle; brighter hair than Annie's, darker eyes, and then such daring color, such daring smiles, such daring sallies into the very strongholds of one's heart. Well, well, Madge, we shall see; if the birds build another year, perhaps I shall lift the leaf and show you the speckled eggs all written over with music. We shall see, if indeed eyes be not darkened and eyelids closed by then.

So they gave me Annie. And by-and-by I took her away to the home we had built on the hill that was dear to me now. And there it is I have left her. For when the clang of arms dinned the air, and the land rang with the clamor of war, my blood began to bubble in its old heat, and longings for the strife kept stirring within me with quick thrills and fires. I felt the rending of my country as if my heart were torn; a glorious cause stood shining before me and forbade me to linger, and pointed at the heights to climb, the wrongs to overthrow, the name of nationality to win, oppression to annihilate, freedom--that right of each, like air and sunshine, from the hour of birth-to be given to man and child.

"And many a darkness into the light shall leap,

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And shine in the sudden making of splendid names," I kept saying to myself as well. I did my nature wrong to linger so, dry and parched as now for freedom then for the wild license of war. But oh! my country, first and chief for you, to ransom, to redeem you, and if you need these languishing hours of mine still to give them and forget to murmur! The winds by day seemed hurrying to the field; I could not look upon the sky at night but all the dark-blue heavens seemed tented with the starry folds of our banner. She, too, throughout her pale and placid life, was kindled to the time. Into the lullabies she sang to little Madge at twilight-faintness, has the sound of its rough surf torthat hour that always seemed her own-there entered swifter and fickler turns of tune than used to hush off together the boy and old Titan at her feet. The martial music of the streets made her face white with its ardor. Where she could urge others she must not spare her own. And I went.

Nor have I seen you since, dear child. But still my fancy paints you in the door with a

The tide is coming in at last; it has a measured beat like the tread of a sentinel. How often, as I lie burning up in alternate fever and

mented me with thirst and longing! But time has been fleet to-day; noon has waxed weary at her post; I have been out of prison! None of your chains and bolts could keep me in ; I have been out of prison.

Woe is me that I am back again, back with all the loathly sameness, the irksome sights that the brain gets to feel at last through shut eyes, such the perpetual iteration of their pain. There

is the old buzz of the fly again, the old cobweb | Sad voices, have I read your rede aright, and swinging from the corner, the old gaunt white is there boding in your burden meant for me? faces like leprous blotches on a charnel-house. Or, is it my fate to hear a dirge you sing on a Each stain of the wall is printed in my mind. windy hill-side far away in a distant country? I have counted each year's slow growth on the Yet that I will not think; for as often as I lichen of the log beside me; that spider dragging mark the strain I see pale faces flittering beabout her tiny blue bag of eggs, I can tell all fore my eyes, aimless and wan, as if, only halfthe eggs by name. The day declines, the sun- dead, half-dead and starved, already I made shine falls in my face. I am scarcely so strong consort with phantoms. that I can turn away from it; yet have I had more vigor to-day than for many a weary while before, for there are times when I am not even able to wish. Yet fear not-I remember to have read-fear not those which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul.

"If ever thou gavest meate or drinke,
Every night and alle,

The fire shall never make thee shrinke,
And Christe receive thye saule.

"If meat or drinke thon never gavest nane,
Every night and alle,

The fire will burn thee to the bare bane,
And Christ receive thye saule."

Ah, solemn shrift! it was not so awful to me
once, repeating your quaint words, and pictur-
ing in the dark frame-work of the night the
sparkling fire-light, the fair tapers, and the salt
on the dead man's breast.

But these are unwholesome humors of mine

This is a day of June, when this same sunshine that disturbs me now lies thick and rich in the meadows, when the bluebird's wing has less brilliant azure than the deep, deep sky; when the wild-rose lines the way-side with its blushing tangle, and the sweet smell of the fern makes heavy the afternoon air with its balsams. Ah! to see the field all goldenly embroidered in its butter-cups; just to toss up the long well-humors that the memory of an old-time rhyme sweep, and draw one glittering bucket shaking back crystals into the cold dark shaft of the well; to roll in the grass with Madge and my boy; to feel the puff of the light wind on my face. This den I can not endure much longer; its foul air reeks; all its accumulation of suffering becomes my own. The inexorable rise and fall of the sea seems a forbidding fiat, and that long roller forever breaking on the beach a sterner barrier than the cruel dead-line here.

may bring me, and a shrill noise in my head like a humming of bells miles away over water, or the wind blowing in any hollow sea-shore shell: while the sun shines, at least, I need not submit myself to their caprice. The blessed sun, father of heaven and earth, under his beams no one quite forsaken or forlorn—it is only in the dark that judgment fails, the brain benumbs, pain grows intolerable. Now let me set myself to watch that sunbeam creep up my side and All weary as I-nearly as weary as I. I hear vanish into shadow. Some day I shall be satistheir faint mumble; I see their crawling forms; fied with just that task-that one blue line of I feel the aching and the longing. It lies be- sky, so far and fathomless, will be serene confore me, and the terror and the anguish grow tent-that yellow sunshine limned along the till I seem to myself like that man whose prison wall will be joy itself; then perhaps, though walls narrowed every day about him until they prison doors never open, a free spirit will soar crushed him like a fly; for these creatures are be-away eternally into the infinite blue and suncoming idiots. Great Heaven! I have kept cour-light of heaven. If that hour were only here age so far, not to lose it now, I pray! Yet men at last! Dozing and dozing the days away, have gone mad with less. It is as if one were alas, I am so tired! conscious of mouldering in the grave. But rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Ah, this must be that place! Oftentimes, of late, as I lie here in the dead of the night, I hear faint voices of the air threning above me. It is a strange rune they sing, like that of the old Lyke-Wake Dirge :

"This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every night and alle,
Fire and saut and candle-lighte,

And Christe receive thye saule."

With what significance do they chant it over
and over, and do they prophesy, the weird sis-
ters, as they sing? Fire and salt and candle-
light-I shall not get it here-so much I know:
"If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Every night and alle,

Sit thee down and put them on,

And Christe receive thye saule.

"If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gavest nane,
Every night and alle,

The whinnes shall pricke thee to the bare bane,
And Christe receive thy saule."

What! not done yet? I say to myself every time I lift my lids, and the old eyesore of the place vexes them afresh. At any rate, there is so much more time passed. Presently the nightchills will begin to creep in, and the heavy dews will gather on the wall; the green mould take heart, and spread near where the hot sunshine burned all day. Made of a handful of clay, why not reverse the stroke, and let us crumble back again? At least we should be free as all these other atoms are-these drops of moisture, these grains of growth. In following law most free. Now for the racking of one's bones in the dark. As for me, I have no odds to ask of Heaven!

And so to sleep again, if sleep will come.

How this tune rings in my ears! It may be Sunday at home; I have lost the reckoning of the days. Perhaps they are singing it up in the choir, and it echoes through the still aisles of the church, and down upon the green, and seems to the truant children sitting there like songs from another world. Or perhaps it is only that

Annie has called in little Madge from the after- | again. They dig his grave out on the sand tonoon play, and rocks her to sleep while she night. sings:

"So let my lamp be trimmed and fed,
That whether I be quick or dead,
That light shall shine,

And down sad ways a glory shed,
And ray divine."

Ah, patience, tired heart! and teach these pa-
tience that here in this dark strait about thee
arraign their doom. I was stronger once than
many of them, than a few of them wiser. Did
I give them of my hosen and shoon, of my meat
and drink?

Another. Who replies to that?

He-he?

Shall he go walking up the long street, the dear familiar path? shall he take his wife to his heart again, and dandle his children, and feel his old mother's faltering hand stroke his hair -and I stay festering here?

Down, evil spirit, down! Who deserves better than he? Who is truer comrade in fightwho stouter friend in prison? Hail to his joy as if it were mine! Make it mine-feel it mine!

And that name. No one claims it. Dead, possibly. Yet it had a sound of pleasant things; I seem to have heard it somewhere before

Did any one call me? Dare I dream-can it be-is it mine?

What is it diverts them now, I wonder? Torpid and sluggish as snails, they are crawling down to the door. Some little break in the long monotone of the day-perhaps they have a fresh ration served, or is there news of battle? Let- Oh, to breathe again! Oh, home, friends, ters-can there be letters? No, no; it is only country, my own once more! Oh, life restored a voice-the old humdrum tone. Vainly count- while the grave gaped! To see you, dear child, ing the roll for the thousandth time. But that in a week-to feel your soft touch, your embrachurrah-I did not think there was so much ing care! A week! A little while ago eternity breath in them-that wild, keen cry. It is the seemed short till we should meet; now, can I order of exchange! Let me get down there, live so long without you as seven days? Ah! let me hasten, let me try and reach them! I crouched and crushed, I rise; I see a future; I among them? Oh, wait, wait! feel my manhood. To my knees, to my knees That name? He will never answer to it-dear God, I am free!

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

T is natural that friends should tenderly and in the Capitol used by the Presidents of the

Congress, he said, "That room, you know, that they call"-dropping his voice and hesitating"the President's room." To an intimate friend who addressed him always by his own proper title he said, "Now call me Lincoln, and I'll promise not to tell of the breach of etiquette-if you won't-and I shall have a resting-spell from 'Mister President.'"

With all his simplicity and unacquaintance with courtly manners, his native dignity never forsook him in the presence of critical or polish

ing upon their virtues, narrating the little inci*dents of a life ended, and dwelling with minute particularity upon traits of character which, under other circumstances, might have remained unnoted and be forgotten, but are invested now with a mournful interest which fixes them in the memory. This, and the general desire to know more of the man ABRAHAM LINCOLN, is the only excuse offered for the following simple sketch of some parts of the character of our beloved Chief Magistrate, now passed from earth. All persons agree that the most marked char-ed strangers; but mixed with his angularities acteristic of Mr. Lincoln's manners was his simplicity and artlessness; this immediately impressed itself upon the observation of those who met him for the first time, and each successive interview deepened the impression. People seemed delighted to find in the ruler of the nation freedom from pomposity and affectation, mingled with a certain simple dignity which never forsook him. Though oppressed with the weight of responsibility resting upon him as President of the United States, he shrank from assuming any of the honors, or even the titles, of the position. After years of intimate acquaintance with Mr. Lincoln the writer can not now recall a single instance in which he spoke of himself as President, or used that title for himself, except when acting in an official capacity. He always spoke of his position and office vaguely, as "this place,"

and bonhomie was something which spoke the fine fibre of the man; and, while his sovereign disregard of courtly conventionalities was somewhat ludicrous, his native sweetness and straightforwardness of manner served to disarm criticism and impress the visitor that he was before a man pure, self-poised, collected, and strong in unconscious strength. Of him an accomplished foreigner, whose knowledge of the courts was more perfect than that of the English language, said, "He seems to me one grand gentilhomme in disguise."

In his eagerness to acquire knowledge of common things he sometimes surprised his distinguished visitors by inquiries about matters that they were supposed to be acquainted with, and those who came to scrutinize went away with a vague sense of having been unconsciously pump," "here," or oth-ed by the man whom they expected to pump. One Sunday evening last winter, while sitting

er modest phrase. Once, speaking of the room

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