A year agone, I sat in this window, and watched a scene that is present with me now as it was then. The sunset hush is broken in upon by the fierce, quick beat of the waves against the bank, the sure token that swift oars are at work not far off. And while I lean forward to see who comes in such furious haste, the whole of our mimic fleet sweeps into view from behind the upper curve. The Gennesaret and Brownie are ably manned, and are doing their work well, riding high under light weight, and impelled by strong, true strokes, the keels cutting straight white furrows in the water. But two boat-lengths before them flies the Sunnybank, lithe and keen as a greyhound, leaping, not ploughing, and seemingly not swaying or trembling under the long, even sweep of the oars. As she passes the cottage the occupant swings his cap, his eyes brimful of merry light; the flush of healthful exercise making brighter the smile upon his happy face. He loves the much-belied boat as he might a genial comrade in this, his summer vacation, and handles her as no one except her owner has ever done before. "All's well!" is his ringing cheer—and ere the echoes cease to repeat the sound, the friendly race is out of sight and hearing-the waves are settling again into crimson repose. Between my vision and the picture a veil has fallen. They have fairer and eternal sunlight, and softer airs than ours, up there-lips that never whiten into dumbness, or moan the sorrows they cannot articulate; eyes that know not tears. His have looked upon the sea of glass mingled with fire, and he has learned the new song. All is well with the lad-more gloriously well than when he filled our home with gladness by his visit, and our souls with prideful affection-with joy in his noble nature, his great loving heart, and the talents that promised him renown and us enduring delight-how well we cannot know until we walk with him the sweet fields beyond the flood that took him away. And yet and yet-GoD knows the rest! THE NIGHT WATCHES. HER robes yet skirted with the sunset glimmer, Into the twilight brown Into the twilight ever growing dimmer, Calmly the world goes down. Without a fear she seeth shut behind her The iron gates of night. The morning sun hath never failed to find her, And lead her forth to light. And friendly is the darkness, grown thus wonted; With night, as well as day, Is the eternal covenant appointed— In both she knows her way. So in the solemn darkness of this hiding, That seems so like His frown, A planet which the sun unseen is guiding, When, on the dreamer, angels without number From the still skies look out, The revelers cannot know how sweet the slumber He draws the dark about. NEARLY five weeks were past since the time of the great meteor and Dr. Firm's adventure at the cemetery entrance. At that time Dr. Firm had made a promise to the woman he had sheltered; during the interim he had made two or three promises to Morton Cloud. From day to day Dr. Firm had quieted the impatience of the youth by asserting that time was to him, in the interest he had at heart, an advantage; but at length Dr. Firm was prepared to move, and on Christmas morning he shocked his good sister by requesting her to defer the dinner until nine o'clock in the evening, on the penalty of not having him for host at the table. "Benjamin Firm!" she said, too much stricken with surprise to say more. "Jane, my sister, it is a matter of importance," said he. "If you knew how long I had put it off you would hate me for not having gone earlier." "I do this minute, but if it has waited so long, all I have to say is that it must wait a little longer; for I cannot eat Christmas dinner without you; besides, what will our friends think?" Why will not to-morrow do as well?" "That I may not tell you; but you must trust me, Jane. Can't you, when you know I have never missed a Christmas dinner with you since we two were left alone; I don't think I shall enjoy my visit so very much that you need to think I prefer it to being at home to-day." There! there! I won't Bennie," she said. It was many years since Jane Firm had called her brother by the old childhood's name, and it touched him so tenderly that he thought of it many times on the railway that morning. Poor Morton Cloud! He did not look much like a gleeful college boy, going home to holiday festivities, as he sat by the side of Dr. Firm in the car that morning. Every mile the youth dreaded more and more. A vague, undefinable cloud of something terrible approaching seemed to fill the air he breathed, until he seemed like one in physical suffering, and two or three times, nay more, Dr. Firm watched him closely, and kindly words of encouragement were poured into his ear at intervals. "There is Dr.," exclaimed Mor"Tell them my absence is professional, ton, when they were leaving the train at Jane." They will want to know who is so ill. What shall I tell them, Benjamin?" "That it is none of their business, if you please," he said, and then instantly repenting, as he saw the signs of pain quivering along that face which had watched, waited and worked for him so many years, he went up to her, and putting his hand kindly on her shoulder, whispered, "It is your business, Jane, and I will tell you. I am going to Hartford to learn something about the body I found one night, you know where." Hartford. "I am certain that I saw him this very morning in New Haven." "You did without doubt, for he came on the same train-" Time for further information was not granted, for so soon as he could reach Dr. Firm, Dr. - joined him and Morton, and with them proceeded to the asylum for the insane. Poor Morton was left in a receptionroom for full half an hour while the physicians from New Haven were in consultation with the physicians of the asylum. He looked out from the windows, but there was nothing pleasing in the view to him that day; he listened with all his powers of hearing, but no sound of insane cry or laughing maniac smote on his hearing; the place was as quiet as a village burying-ground. He walked up and down the room, sighing as he went, and quite determined in his own mind the important fact that he did not care to live long, if his life was to be made up of the days and cares that had lately formed the sum of it. The substance of the story was like unto the following statement: Mrs. Norman Cloud was the possessor of a comfortable fortune inherited from her father, together with some of his own personal peculiarities. This fortune was represented by certain plots and parcels of real estate, improved and unimproved. To this land, with a kind of allegiance that some natures owe and seem determined to pay to mother earth, her father had bound himself in life, and, at death, had most solemnly warned his daughter not to alienate. Inherited tendency and dying request falling into the same parallel, their combined strength assumed the appearance of obstinacy. At length they came in, a stately array, to the youth-four physicians as opposite in type and spirit as the four cardinal points of the compass, and they seemed to stand about the boy for a minute in silence, making him feel as if he were in the very midst of a compass-saw. Then Dr. Firm introduced Morton to the asylum physicians, and they began to question the youth, asking him of places and points in his life so apparently without connection with the subject he had at heart, that at last Morton burst out with the words, "Let me see my mother first and question me afterward." "We would, were she here," was the sor of many roods of soil, believing that reply. "You do not mean that she is dead!" The look of the youth touched the hearts of all, for with one voice they made haste to tell him that his mother had been removed from the asylum because no reason for her confinement there had been found; that she had gone to New York two days earlier, and been consigned to the care of her husband by one of the physicians of the asylum. Furthermore, that the advice to his father had been to take her to new places and new scenes. Morton then underwent a catalogue of questioning longer than any catechism, and quite as comprehensible to him as catechism to infancy. He was so relieved to find that his mother was no longer an inmate of that dreaded place, that he replied to every question with exceeding patience and care. Morton Cloud was a truth-teller, and his statements made the physicians doubt their own wisdom in so speedily dismissing the woman. Norman Cloud was a speculating adventurer from his cradle, he having even in the days of his infancy whittled himself out from it, evidently with a view to finding out its construction. Life was with him one grand, gayly-colored bubble, that, toss it howsoever he might, would, if it broke, shower down on him all manner of brilliances. He had married the young lady, who was known to be the posses he had only to bring such treasures as he would out from the earth. He dreamed of finding therein mines of gold, and house lots without number. He thought he loved the possessor of this fine property, and he did, as a part of it. The lady, witnessing the love he had for, and the interest he took in her lands, mistook the love and interest, and applied it to the wrong account of self. The gold mines did not appear above the surface, for want of capital, possibly; certain it is, that the husband spent hours and days in the vain effort to convince his young wife that the needed capital, for great plans of improvement that he made in his brain to become realities, lay in her inherited acres. "Then it must lie there," she said. "But it does not remove the lands to mortgage them," he said, "and the returns will readily remove the encumbrances." The wife was firm, obstinate, ugly, a monomaniac, by turns, as the firmness grew, and the time lengthened, until, at the period when Norman Cloud and Nathan Wave launched their great steamship enterprise on the highways of finance, her temper had positively reached, in her husband's view, the limit of reason, and he delighted to announce to himself that she was insane, yes-really insane. "The thing had been growing upon her for years; indeed, ever since his married life began," he stated to the doctors, and in fact, by reference to those persons who had been acquainted with his wife's father and familiar with his grasp over property, he had reason to believe that the madness was inherited. Norman Cloud did not narrate to the medical gentlemen the number of weeks he had devoted to the enterprise of trying to induce his wife to sell some portion of her property and invest the amount thus obtained in steamships. Then, when entreaty had failed, he likewise omitted to mention that he had tried a course of absence from home with no better effect-that he had added thereto the discipline of silence and inattention, in fact he had revolved himself around the circle of her nature, trying to find some weakness, some door of attack, by which he could conquer and wave his flag of manly victory over his wife. Over all these minor details the man drew the curtain of silence; they appertained alone to the privacy of home. His last method to win the sweet "I-willwrite-my-name-there," was the incarceration in the gloomy vault. If she would say that sentence, he would take her back to New York with him, he promised. She did not say it. Norman Cloud did not desire to kill his wife, as was evidenced in his concealment in the cemetery on the night Dr. Firm passed by and found her. He had no especial dislike for her, either as an individual, or as the wife that he had chosen because of her acres, but every other will, and motive, and power of his nature had given way before the mighty pressure of his desire to speculate. He did not want any few-dollar affair on his hands; it must be something which should command the attention of the world, his world at least. This great aim could not be carried on to success without money, more money than the stockholders cared to pay in until further evidence of its future greatness revealed itself. To that end it had been voted that each person should contribute according to his ownership; a measure, be it known, that was carried at a meeting held during the absence of Christopher Kroy and Mr. Cloud from the city. To compel acquiescence in his wish to obtain the desired amount, Mr. Cloud had exhausted all measures before he resorted to that of the confinement in vault and asylum. It is true that his wife had dwelt upon the idea so long, that it had outgrown, overshadowed, and absorbed her ideas to such extent, that the theme of this property was almost the only subject that had chance to present itself before the imperial court of mind in her person. It was always before her by day and it led the succession of her dreams by night, until the poor lady was in a condition "requiring change," as the physicians at the asylum had suggested, and which her good, kind husband seemed only too anxious to carry out, for before the advice came, he had engaged passage for her with himself in the Liverpool steamer for a certain Saturday in December of that year. That Saturday preceded the Monday wherein Dr. Firm and Morton Cloud had gone to Hartford. The very train which carried them from New Haven had borne on its way from New York to that place a letter from Norman Cloud to his son. The son found it awaiting his arrival in New Haven. The dinner bell rang at precisely two o'clock in the Firm house. The invited individuals were all prompt and were seated at table, Miss Jane combining the duties of her brother with her own. She was in the midst of the said duties when suddenly down went her knife and fork, and the noise of the falling of the same caused a silence, in which silence Miss Jane spoke. "I hope there hasn't anything happened to Benjamin," she said, "for as certainly as I live I heard him sneeze just now, and he is in Hartford." They all laughed at her fancy, but somehow Miss Firm's firmness was departed from her. She was confused in her duties, and in less than two minutes she cried out again, "There! did you hear that?" but no ear save her own had been acute enough to catch the note. Miss Firm was a lover of order. She thought it a semi-divine institution, and very rarely permitted herself to pass its boundaries, but on this occasion she arose from the table and left the room. She went through the hall and looked out from the front door. The street was still and deserted, for it was the Christmas dinner hour throughout the little city. Involuntarily she looked at the hat-rack in the hall, but it was already so laden with hats and coats that one more or less did not signify. A little rustle of sound from the region above caused her to go up and investigate the cause. There, with his door standing open, stood Dr. Firm, brushing his hair. He was so intent on the occupation that he had not heard a sound, nor did he until it was accompanied by a rush of arms and a flow of words quite bewildering. "Benjamin, did you sneeze twice, and how in the world did you get here, and what on earth did you want to frighten me so for?" "Don't kill me with words and I'll answer every question. I can't tell how many times I did sneeze, railway or insane dust, I reckon, and I came by rail and my own feet, and I did not want to frighten you, nor was I conscious that I had done so until you pounced upon me. Now, Jane, run back to your guests, and I'll be down at my post in less than no time." "No! you don't escape me that way; besides they will believe that I have seen a ghost unless I present you in person." In vain the brother insisted; Miss Jane resisted, even although her guests were sitting around the table, until he was forced to tell her that he was waiting for a very particular guest to arrive; that he had invited Morton Cloud to dine with him. CHAPTER XVIII. On a day, your nature being specially polished to receive certain moral influences passing by, you take up a chance bit of printed matter and find therein a gem of emotion, rounded into form, and thereto initial letters appended. How, in after days, you pick up the thread of that soul by the token of the initial letters and unwind it, hoping to find anew the pleasure you well remember, and, like a pleasant entrance into some enchanted ground, the initial letters seem to you. Though many times doomed to disappointment in following up the clew, you yet trace it, trusting still to find yourself led into a garden of beauty. To Mrs. Norman Cloud the days wherein she first met Mr. Cloud were initial days, leading into a golden vestibule. She had entered through it and found the temple cold and the worship colder. For years she had tried to get back into the golden vestibule. To that end she waited and watched, and when she thought she saw the initial letters she tried to follow their leading, but never again had they guided her to the enchanted ground of early days. She was always watching and listening, hungry for a word of affection from the lips of Norman Cloud; so that when, on the steamship, he gave to her the simplest attention, showed for her the smallest consideration, her heart arose and floated in a mist of emotion, requiring but one glance from the sun of love to transform her into a happy wo |