"Your n's you should have said, Watson." "It's all one. Wait half an hour, and see what they'll say to that. They know I mean something when I blow them up." In due time the bell tinkled, and the answer came. Watson read it off word by word: "B. and W. came down on the Fox last night. Both died this morning. Dispatch corMrs. Walters came down on the Forest City this afternoon."" rect. When the Forest City reached Memphis "Yes. Burton and Walters-" We heard of "Would to God I were jesting! But it is too true. The Fox came in late last evening. ` Burton and Walters came at once to my storeboat, which lies off the wharf. My partner has been absent for a week, during which time I have not slept at home. 'Come boys,' said I, 'you do not want to go up to the town to-night; was extinguished, and they were left in darkness. He had forgotten the position of the plank which formed the only connection between the boat and the wharf, and it was vain to endeavor to find it by groping in the blank darkness among the boxes and bales with which the boat was encumbered. For two hours he remained in the dark with his suffering friend, listening to his groans, and the piercing cries with which he called for his absent wife. As soon as the earliest dawn enabled him to find his way he set out in search of aid. "The physician reached the boat almost as soon as we did. It was still early morning, and the daylight, mingled with that from the lamp, which we had lighted again, shone ghastly upon the hollow face of the sufferer. The first glance which the medical man caught of poor Walters was enough. "It's the cholera,' he whispered, hoarsely. 'He is in the last stages of collapse. He can not live half an hour.' "Still we did all that could be done, in the faint hope that the progress of the disease might be arrested. We chafed his cold limbs, and administered the most powerful stimulants. I once happened to look on Burton's face, and was shocked at its aspect. He said, however, in answer to my inquiry, that he was well; but he looked twenty years older than he had done the evening before. "You can do nothing more, Mr. Burton,' said the Doctor. 'He can not hold out a quarLie down for a few minutes. turn in here, and keep boat for me, and I'll go "There! I'm all right now,' said he, when he had drunk it. 'Go home to your wife. Burton and I will keep boat for you.' 'Just as day was breaking I was aroused by a violent ringing at my door. Going down, I found Burton in a state of high excitement, amounting almost to frenzy. "Walters is terribly sick,' said he. 'I was afraid he would die in the night. Where shall I find a physician? Come down to the boat.' "Leaving an urgent summons for a physician who lived close by, we hurried down. On the way Burton told me, as well as he could, what had happened. They had retired shortly after I had left. Walters had complained of a slight uneasiness, but said a night's rest would put him all right again. Just at two o'clock Burton was awakened by hearing his companion calling 'Mary! Mary!' in a tone of anguish. He was sure of the hour, for he heard the clocks strike at the moment. The sufferer grew momently worse. His agonies were intolerable, and at intervals he called despairingly upon his wife. Burton knew not what to do. He would have gone for a physician, but he knew not where to seek one; besides, Walters implored him not to leave him. At length he could bear it no longer, and was on the point of going in search of a physician, when, by some accident, the lamp "I dragged him to the door of the adjoining cabin, and heard him fling himself heavily into a berth. In a few minutes a terrible paroxysm convulsed the frame of poor Walters. "It's the last,' whispered the Doctor. "He opened his eyes wide, looked eagerly around, and cried out, 'Mary! Mary!' in a tone which still rings in my ears. It was the last effort of nature. His eyes closed, his jaw fell, his convulsed limbs straightened themselves. He was dead. At that moment I heard the clock strike six. 'He "Poor Burton,' said the Doctor. must be told,' and he stepped into the next cabin. In a moment I heard a great cry. "Good Heavens! Burton is dead, too!' "I rushed in, and there, lying upon his face in the berth where he had flung himself, was Burton, lifeless. He must have died at the very same instant with his friend." "How shall I break the tidings to Mrs. Walters?" said Marston to himself, as he returned to the Forest City. "Poor woman! It will kill her." His heart failed him as he stepped on board. "I can not do it.” Mary met him as he entered the cabin. "Mr. Marston," said she, calmly, "there is no use of attempting to disguise the truth. You need not attempt to soften the blow. I can read it all in your face. But that was not needed. I know that they are dead. Tell me how they died. I can bear it. of death was passed a week ago." And bear it she did, bravely and nobly, as this woman, evidently a widow, never made The bitterness | to travel, and in that time she learned to love her hostess deeply; one thing puzzled her, that a woman always bears a great woe I started with giving my general theory about omens, presentiments, and spiritual manifestations. Here are the facts, which I can not reconcile with my theory. For their perfect accuracy I vouch. I still hold to my theory. But I can not reconcile them. ALIX THURIOT THORNE. any allusion to her husband, or his death; there were two others only in the family, her mother, Madame Thuriot, a weak, listless, petulant old woman, and an old French physician, called Dr. Bellanger. If Marion Butler learned to love Mrs. Thorne, her brother, Mr. Rutledge, was unfortunate enough to learn the same lesson; and when, after a parting painful to all from excess of "Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one gratitude and feeling on one side, and regretful hour."-EMERSON. THER THERE was a sudden stir and commotion, unusual at any time in Fifth Avenue, specially unusual at the early hour of nine on a crisp October day; a crowd gathered on the pavement, a riderless horse flying down the street; another held by a man a few paces from the concourse; and presently a parting through the press, and on a shutter, wrenched from a long window at hand, was seen the shape of a woman, perhaps lifeless, certainly insensible; the arms thrown out as if she had lost consciousness under some strenuous agony, the long habit torn and trailing on either side; and the loose black hair lending a ghastly aspect to her pale and blood-smeared face, as she was carried by half a dozen strong men, slowly and tenderly through the valved door of a house open to receive her, on which door, as it swung to, outsiders read only the name "Thorne." affection on the other, he reached his Southern home safely with his sister, his first impulse was to write a most fervent letter to Mrs. Thorne, which she answered with a calm, hopeless refusal. Mr. Rutledge loved her as a man loves who has reached mature age before his first experience of the passion, and this disappointment made serious inroads on his health; so serious that his sister, moved by his evident misery and her own recollection of Mrs. Thorne's tender nature, wrote herself a long expostulation to Alix, and received in reply a most voluminous epistle, which we make no excuse for copying, inasmuch as it contains the whole matter and manner of the story, which here we have but prologued: "NEW YORK, April 30, 185– "DEAR MARION,-Your letter pained me very much, even more than your brother's, because I thought I could retain your affection, though I must not receive his, and I have not Mrs. Butler, whose fall from her restive horse created this scene and confusion, was a South-so many friends that I can afford to lose one. erner and a widow, visiting the North for her health with her brother as escort. Riding after their fashion at that hour, her horse had taken fright, throwing her headlong to the ground, and she had been immediately taken into that house so near by the wish and urgency of its owner, who established her in a cheerful and luxurious room, and while the surgeons were sent for, removed her soiled and bloody dress, bathed her unmoving face, and listened carefully to the faint pulsations of her heart. "Perhaps it would be better and easier for me to tell you only one fact of my personal history, which would convince you at once and finally that I can not marry Mr. Rutledge; but I think your kind heart and expressed affection for me deserve to know more. My life is a strange, sad story. I never speak of it, as you noticed, but it will set me back again in your affection and sympathy to know what that life has been; and I can not deny to myself that I Med-seek a certain relief in recalling the past where I can do it calmly, to you, who will understand and feel it. I request you to give Mr. Rutledge the manuscript when you have read it; he will feel then that there are sorrows greater than his present discontent, and in his pity for me will recall the love I can never return and be my true friend, I am sure; and now, after so much prelude, let me begin at once. ical skill did its utmost, but Mrs. Butler was fearfully injured; and the needful pain that the surgeons gave in setting her broken limbs threw her from one swoon into another, so that it was hours before she became thoroughly conscious; and when she opened her eyes to see what and where she was, they met a sweet if strange vision-the figure of a woman bending over her, no longer young but very lovely, clothed in a conventual dress of gray, and having for her sole ornament a heavy gold rosary and crucifix. Dark hair, threaded here and there with a gleam of silver; deep, dark eyes, at once tender and melancholy; marked and expressive features; a steady, pensive mouth; a broad brow; a fig-I had one brother, older than myself, named ure graceful from its unconsciousness; all these, informed with the vivid expressions of an ardent and pure soul, made Alix Thorne lovely. Mrs. Butler's injuries were so severe that the whole winter passed away before she was able "My father was a French merchant, the son of an emigré from 'the' Revolution; he was in good business, continually increasing in wealth, and had married my mother, a belle of the 'uptown' circles, for love only, for she had neither wealth nor expectations, and was an orphan. Francis, and Dr. Bellanger, whom you have seen, was our godfather. He too, was a Frenchman, had known my father from childhood, like him was the son of an emigrant, but was widowed, childless, and poor; poor from choice, for he would only practice among the destitute | the body, and then I went back to my mother, and foreigners, nor would he live with us who by this time in violent hysterics, which I alone would gladly have given him a home, but pre- could control, or in the least soothe. ferred to be the friend of the house, and to live an apostle's life beyond it, under this exterior of a poor, garrulous old Frenchman. God bless him! he has been the most patient and faithful friend to us. 66 My life passed like that of other girls till I was eighteen, nor did it differ much then, for I came out into society, ran the round of balls, parties, and beaux; lovers I had, but I learned early to know why they loved me-how little Alix Thuriot concerned them, how much her father's wealth. I think the proud and free spirit of my Breton grandmother, whose name I bore, must have inspired me-I grew so soon able to detect and despise this worthless devotion, this flattery so idle and false. "Francis sat where I left him. Poor boy! I have thought of it often since; what an hour was that, alone in the darkened room, with his selfmurdered father, watching that spying streak of light traverse inch by inch the dishonored head, the relaxed limbs, the red stains and pools of blood, and the instrument of death grasped in his stiff and bloody hand; fearful points for that slow index to rest upon! fearful vigil for a reckless boy of twenty-two to keep! "It seemed a whole day's length before Dr. Bellanger came and released my brother, sending him away to his room, where a potent sleeping draught wrapped him for the time in rest and peace. Then my mother was cared for and quieted with all his skill, and when he left her tranquil, with me beside her, then came the horrible sequence of such a deed; heavy steps of men upon the stairs, low voices of dread and awe in his room, the judicial process, the verdict that I saw long after in an old paper, carefully banished then, setting forth, with those used and wonted phrases that coldly vail mortal anguish and eternal despair as the locked ice of a pool holds and vails a dead body, that Emile Thuriot, merchant, had comitted felo-dese on the morning of October 6, 184-, cause supposed to be the newly discovered defalcation of his head clerk, who had quitted the country with the greater part of the property of the firm in his hands, a week before date. That, indeed, was true; my father's confidential agent, on the eve of some great speculation that risked much, but promised more, had collected all the resources of the firm, and sailed for Europe, guarding his escape with the pretense of illness, and the shock falling suddenly upon my father's excited and over-wrought brain, destroyed his courage and his self-respect, and hurried him to this hopeless suicidal end. "So affairs went on till I was twenty. One October night I had been to a large dinnerparty, and from thence to a ball. I had danced late, and reaching home went at once to my room, and slept, oh! how heavily, for suddenly the sleep was broken as if by a sharp shudder, and before I was awake I found myself standing upright on the floor, shivering with an undefined sense of horror and dread. A door swung to, somewhere in the hall beneath, and startled me into life. I thrust my feet into shoes, and ran with uncertain speed down the stair-case to my mother's room; the door was ajar and I opened it-my veins curdle nowoh, God! what a sight was there! just before the closed window lay my father on the floor, one keen ray of sunshine pierced a crack in the shutter, touched his gray head, leaped thence to his shoulder, but in the shadow between lurked a fearful witness, the strong cords of his bare throat, the gashed linen that bound it, all steeped, dabbled, scarlet with blood. My mother lay before me, nearer the door, a formless heap of drapery; she had risen at her usual hour, come upon my father, shrieked and swooned; it was her shriek woke me. Against the bed's foot leaned my brother, with hands clench-friendly part of mourner at my father's lonely ed together, and eyes set in a hopeless stare. "I lifted my mother like a baby, took her into the dressing-room, rang for the housekeeper, and giving her charge to use every restorative as she best knew how, I returned to the bedroom, where already the servants had gathered about the door with dismayed looks and furtive glances at the terrible shape of death. I could not feel sure that it was death. I went to my father, and kneeling by him lifted up his hand it was cold and heavy as marble; it fell back of itself. I think Francis was roused by seeing me there; for now he came, and stooping, raised the head. Ah, miserable discovery!-in the red right hand there lay the old story of despair, of suicide-an open razor, clotted with the blood that stained us both, and with indelible stains. I rose up, for I was rigid with anguish. I sent directly for Dr. Bellanger, telling the servants by no means to disturb : "Dr. Bellanger was at that hour every thing to us that man could be; he alone acted the funeral, he arranged his business affairs, and gathered from the wreck whatever was justly the due of his fatherless and widowed charge. Now came the test of our dear professing friends; the trial of the metal that was minted for gold, and all! all, rang false. Not one of the hundred visitors we numbered on our list came near the house so plague-stricken, and a bitterness that adds wormwood to gall smote upon our wounds and made them cringe while yet they bled. I do not now blame those people, Marion, for the garments of grief are sackcloth and ashes, the very livery of leprosy, and the children of this world are wise to avoid even seeming contagion; but I was young then, full of hope, buoyancy, generous impulses, and I despised, when I should have pitied, the weakness of undisciplined natures and narrow minds. "Here, again, the goodness of Dr. Bellanger rescued me from a sort of moral infidelity. I will think it an incomprehensible poverty for a lady to endure, but I was a woman as well as a lady, and my feminine instincts gave me keen pleasure in keeping my small domains clean and bright as a Dutch kitchen, arranging my tiny parlor with such taste as poor materials afforded scope for, and serving our meals as scrupulously as they had ever been at home, though many a day we dined on nothing more savory than potatoes and tea, having breakfasted on bread and coffee. could not despair of the race that produced, | poor; every thing else he did-invested our even in my little sphere, one man so good, so money safely and profitably, so that there was constant, so unselfish; for then I did not recog- always a pittance to depend on, and then huntnize that undefiled religious principle which ed out and hired for us a tenement in a quiet was his rule and guide, and which alone is safe and obscure neighborhood, three little rooms to trust in any man. that occupied the second floor of a house whose "After all our affairs were arranged, there kindly German owner kept a tiny shop for emremained to support us three only two thousand broideries below, and housed her three growndollars; and the evident necessity that some-up girls and her old husband in the story above thing should be done to increase this small us. I could not afford a servant, Marion; you stipend roused Francis to most unusual exertion, and dispelled greatly his apathetic grief. | He searched faithfully every where for employment, but he had been a spoiled child always, and with almost unlimited command of time and money had led too gay and reckless a life to achieve, even in his present need, the confidence of any business man, or to satisfy their requirements as a clerk, so little did he know of the simplest business routines or practices. At length, harassed with useless attempts, and mortified with repeated disappointments, too helpless physically for hard labor, and too proud to do little things, he fell in with a man whom he had once met in the capacity of mate to a vessel in which my brother crossed the Atlantic, but who was now on his way to California, where the gold mines were just discovered. His stories of that fabulous and splendid wealth that lay waiting to be gathered enchanted Francis at once, while a subtler spell insensibly strengthened his wish to go, the fascination ever hanging over a new land, with new names, and new associations; the seeming approach to the beginning of another life; a fair if treacherous hope that change so entire externally will change the purposes and traits of the soul, and recreate from habits of indolence, luxury, and vice, the active, frugal, selfrelying virtues of a successful man. I could not believe in this course, I knew my brother's nature too well; but it seemed his only prospect of occupation, and to do something, if it be only the preparation for labor, is better than any idlesse; so I packed his trunk, bade him good-by, and saw his fair waving hair glitter in the sun, as he waved his hat from the deck of the Argo, thinking in my secret heart that I might never see those locks again; but we had done what seemed right, and the results were not for our care. "I heard afterward from some fellow-voyager, that the brig had a long passage, and on the way out my brother, with the proverbial irritability engendered by a long voyage, had mortally insulted a man named Essinger; but as he wrote us from San Francisco that he had taken a man of that name into partnership, and was about leaving for the diggings in his company, I supposed they must have become friendly again, and thought no more for many long months of the story that had reached me. "After Francis left us, there was of course an urgent necessity that I too should work. Dr. Bellanger would gladly have given both my mother and myself a home, but he was too "Once established and accustomed to the routine, I applied myself to copying, which Dr. Bellanger procured for me, and as I wrote a clear firm hand, singularly unfeminine, I had soon all I could do, all I needed to support my mother who helped me from time to time with the exquisite embroideries that her conventual education had made easy and pleasant to her, even as a labor. So we lived for two years, indeed nearly three, receiving rarely any remittance from Francis-in the course of that time only two hundred and fifty dollars. He wrote word that he had made a good deal of money, but the expenses of living swallowed it up so rapidly that he could not save for us as he would like. We rarely heard from him but wrote often, and when I grew weary of drudgery, as I sometimes did, and felt almost despairing of my powers to meet the life before me, I thought of Francis, and remembered that I had a brother; it helped me very much, how much I did not know till afterward. "One May day, in the third spring, I was sitting alone at my work, mother had lain down, and through the gay, flowering plants that vailed one of my two south windows stole in the fluttering sea-breeze that tempers even the summer heats of New York. I was both languid and sad, with no definable reason but fatigue, and had ceased for a moment to write when I heard steps unfamiliar, slow, and irresolute ascending the stair-case; that inexplicable presentiment of ill that prepares us for its presence overtook me almost as a certainty, nor did it vanish when the steps ceased at our door, and a knock, hesitating and timid, announced-as I saw when I turned the handle-Dr. Bellanger. Instantly, with a peculiar intuition that is a painful trait in me, I knew his errand. I felt my face grow rigid, and my tongue begin to fail with dryness, but I said, quite calmly, Francis is dead,' for I knew it. Poor Dr. Bellanger! I had saved him from his dreaded announcement, but before I dared to tell my mother I asked for more information, and he handed me a letter which I copy in word and letter, and which contained and the next year, till in the second autumn all we knew or could discover of my brother's fate, for no answer ever was given to all the inquiries we directed to his partner, or to the writer of this first and only news we received, both having left the diggings, as we afterward knew. The letter was ill-spelled, worse written, and contained in a dirty paper an ounce of gold dust, and a card on which was written October came cool, fresh, and brilliant, bringing even to me a quicker breath of life, a little tonic both to body and soul. One day on his daily visit, Dr. Bellanger told my mother that he had met at the counting-house of a French merchant, a friend of his, a Mr. Henry, who had been in California, made an immense fortune there, and had known my brother; though, "If I am wounded, write to Dr. F. Bellanger, New having left Carter's Gulch in March, he could not tell us more than we knew of the duel and its results. Dr. Bellanger added that Mr. Henry would like to see my mother, if it would afford her any pleasure to hear what he had to tell, and it would certainly be agreeable to him to visit us, as he was a perfect stranger in New York, having brought letters only to his business acquaintances, and being there merely for the purpose of investing his wealth. My mother caught eagerly at the idea of any thing like society, from which she had been so long excluded, and our friend promised to bring Mr. Henry the next evening, and at the hour he knew was most convenient they came. "I can not tell you now, Marion, what our new acquaintance was like. I knew him afterward so well that his individual self has in my memory absorbed his human likeness; it is one of my strange idiosyncrasies that I never can recall the face of any one I have intimately known, while I could paint the picturesque child that passed me in the street yesterday, or the old man that sat opposite me in the ferry-boat six weeks ago, from memory alone. I suppose it is that the soul outshines and transfuses its garment so that the fashions of it are invisible, or it is as when we draw close to a face we love, too close to do more than feel its loveliness. "Marion, he was my brother! If I had not loved and respected him as some women do their brothers, he was still mine, bound to me by the only sure tie, the link of blood. I might have friends; I might love-but of my own will; God had made him my brother, and the immortal bond vindicated itself in the bitterness of an irremediable loss. No other could fill his place, no other had the same right or will to protect me. Heaven help the woman who has no brothers! Neither love nor law supply that want, and I was all alone except my mother, and I had yet to tell her. Oh! if it is bitter to see death, to watch the cold gray shadow blot out passion, intelligence, almost identity from the eye and sweep away sympathy, feeling, and consciousness from the relaxing lip, at length leaving to the mad clasp of anguish a fearful mould of clay alone; it is far bitterer, far more awful to go out from the dead and tell the living they are gone: to meet the incredulous eye that accuses you of mockery, because it "I know that I thought Xavier Henry a gendare not believe your words; to see the flying tleman, from his quiet manner and perfect ease, horror of conviction distort each feature of the and that I discovered him to be handsome sudface that would, yet can not, deny the horrible denly, when I first saw the very settled gravity certainty, cringing in every nerve, and curdling of his face give way to a smile that was genuine in every vein; till you stand helpless and hope-heat-lightning, vivid, brilliant, and still. Of less before it, as if you yourself had wrecked the soul you would die to comfort, and in all the reeling world there is but one stay-the blind, instinctive consciousness of God, somewhere-surely somewhere! though it be not here. This was my task, but perhaps it was well for me that my mother, never very strong or self-controlled, fell into the same hysteric fits that attacked her on my father's death, and for many hours Dr. Bellanger and I had full occupation for both our thoughts and hands in restoring her so far as we could to quiet. I will not carry you with me through the following days and months, monotonous with sorrow and labor, for now I felt a certain hurry to work, as if I had just come to know that neither health nor strength would always serve me, and that I must endeavor by heavier tasks to lay up a little sum against the coming of evil days. Nothing from without occurred to break the steady routine through all that long summer course on that first evening nothing was said of Francis. I sat quiet, in my corner, glad to be saved the effort of speech, and even against my listlessness amused and pleased by Mr. Henry's graphic descriptions and furtive but keen humor. "Mother asked him to come again, and a certain pleasure seemed to tinge his cheek as he accepted her invitation. I thought he was lonely probably. He did come again, and spoke of Francis with gentleness and sympathy in every tone; he had not much to tell us, but it was no slight consolation to hear from him that Francis had fought this Harry Thorne in a paroxysm of partial derangement to which he was subject always, since a violent sun-stroke had nearly cost him his life, in the preceding summer. was glad to know that my brother had not deliberately faced and sped his death in cold blood. After this, Mr. Henry came still again; my mother liked him, nor could I, though I guard I |