I sit long looking upon the blaze; and when I rouse myself, it is to say wicked things against destiny. Again, all the future seems very blank. I cannot love Carry, as I loved Bella; she cannot be a sister to me; she must be more or nothing! Again, I seem to float singly on the tide of life, and see all around me in cheerful groups. Everywhere the sun shines, except upon my own cold forehead. There seems no mercy in Heaven, and no goodness for me upon Earth.

I write after some days, an answer to the letter. But it is a bitter answer, in which I forget myself, in the whirl of my, misfortune-to the utterance of reproaches.

Her reply, which comes speedily, is sweet and gentle. She is hurt by my reproaches, deeply hurt. But with a touching kindness, of which I am not worthy, she credits all my petulance to my wounded feeling; she soothes me; but in soothing, only wounds the more. I try to believe her, when she speaks of her unworthiness;-but I cannot.

Business, and the pursuits of ambition or of interest, pass on like dull, grating machinery. Tasks are met, and performed with strength indeed; but with no cheer. Courage is high, as I meet the shocks and trials of the world; but it is a brute, careless courage, that glories in opposition. I laugh at any dangers, or any insidious pit-falls;-what are they to me? What do I possess, which it will be hard to lose? My dog keeps by me; my toils are present; my food is ready; my limbs are strong; -what need for

more?

The months slip by, and the cloud that floated over my evening sun passes.

Laurence, wandering abroad, and writing to Caroline, as to a sister,-writes more than his father could have wished. He has met new faces, very sweet faces; and one which shows through the ink of his later letters very gorgeously. The old gentleman does not like to lose thus his little Carry, and he writes back rebuke. But Laurence, with the letters of Caroline before him for data, throws himself upon his sister's kindness and charity. It astonishes not a little the old gentleman, to find his daughter pleading in such strange way for the son. And what will you do then, my Carry?"-the old

man says.

เ

"Wear weeds, if you wish, sir; and love you and Laurence more than ever.

And he takes her to his bosom, and says, Carry-Carry, you are too good for that wild fellow Laurence!"

Now, the letters are different! Now they are full of hope-dawning all over the future sky. Business and care and toil glide, as if a spirit animated them all; it is no longer cold machine work, but intelligent and hopeful activity. The sky hangs upon you lovingly, and the birds make music that startles you with its fineness. Men wear cheerful faces; the storms have a kind pity gleaming through all their wrath.

The days approach, when you can call her yours. For she has said it, and her mother has said it; and the kind old gentleman, who says he will still be her father, has said it too; and they have all welcomed you-won by her story-with a cordiality that has made your cup full to running over. Only one thought comes up to obscure your joy ;-is it real? or if real, are you worthy to enjoy? Will you cherish and love always, as you have promised, that angel who accepts your word, and rests her happiness on your faith? Are there not harsh qualities in your nature which you fear may some time make her regret that she gave herself to your love and charity? And those friends who watch over her, as the apple of their eye, can you always meet their tenderness and approval, for your guardianship of their treasure? Is it not a treasure that makes you fearful, as well as joyful?

But you forget this in her smile: her kindness, her goodness, her modesty, will not let you remember it. She forbids such thoughts; and you yield such obedience, as you never yielded even to the commands of a mother. And if your business and your labor slip by partially neglected-what matters it? What is interest, or what is reputation, compared with that fulness of your heart, which is now ripe with joy?

The day for your marriage comes; and you live as if you were in a dream. You think well, and hope well for all the world. A flood of charity seems to radiate from all around you. And as you sit beside her in the twilight, on the evening before the day, when you will call her yours, and talk of the coming hopes, and of the soft

That first taste of the new smoke, and of the fragrant leaf is very grateful; it has a bloom about it that you wish might last. It is like your first love,—fresh, genial, and rapturous. Like that, it fills up all the craving of your soul; and the light, blue wreaths of smoke, like the roseate clouds that hang around the morning of your heart life, cut you off from the chill atmosphere of mere worldly companionship, and make a gorgeous firmament for your fancy to riot in.

I do not speak now of those later and manlier passions into which judgment must be thrusting its cold tones, and when all the sweet tumult of your heart has mellowed into the sober ripeness of affection. But I mean that boyish burning which belongs to every poor mortal's lifetime, and which bewilders him with the thought that he has reached the highest point of human joy, before he has tasted any of that bitterness from which alone our highest human joys have sprung. I mean the time when you cut initials with your jack-knife on the smooth bark of beech trees; and went moping under the long shadows at sunset; and thought Louise the prettiest name in the wide world; and picked flowers to leave at her door; and stole out at night to watch the light in her window, and read such novels as those about Helen Mar, or Charlotte, to give some adequate expression to your agonized feelings.

At such a stage, you are quite certain that you are deeply and madly in love; you persist in the face of heaven and earth. You would like to meet the individual who dared to doubt it.

You think she has got the tidiest and jauntiest little figure that ever was seen. You think back upon some time when in

your games of forfeit you gained a kiss from those lips; and it seems as if the kiss was hanging on you yet, and warming you all over. And then again, it seems so strange that your lips did really touch hers! You half question if it could have been actually so, and how could you have dared;-and you wonder if you would have courage to do the same thing again?-and upon second thought, are quite sure you would, and snap your fingers at the thought of it.

What sweet little hats she does wear; and in the school-room, when the hat is hung up-what curls-golden curls, worth a hundred Golcondas! How bravely you study the top lines of the spelling-bookthat your eyes may run over the edge of the cover, without the schoolmaster's notice, and feast upon her!

You half wish that somebody would run away with her, as they did with Amanda, in the Children of the Abbey;

and then you might ride up on a splendid black horse, and draw a pistol or blunderbuss, and shake the villains, and carry her back, all in tears, fainting, and languishing upon your shoulder;—and have her father (who is Judge of the County Court) take your hand in both of his, and make some eloquent remarks. great many such recaptures you run over in your mind, and think how delightful it would be to peril your life, either by flood or fire-to cut off your arm, or your head, or any such trifle,—for your dear Louise.

A

You can hardly think of anything more joyous in life, than to live with her in some old castle, very far away from steamboats and post-offices, and pick wild geraniums for her hair, and read poetry with her, under the shade of very dark ivy vines. And you would have such a charming boudoir in some corner of the old ruin, with a harp in it, and books bound in gilt, with cupids on the cover, and such a fairy couch, with the curtains hung--as you have seen them hung in some illustrated Arabian stories-upon a pair of carved doves!

DONALD G. MITCHELL.

CANVASSING UNDER DISADVAN

TAGES.

He smiled blandly as he halted for a moment in front of the City Hall. He looked like a man who could palm off almost anything on the public at 100 per cent. profit, and yet leave each customer in a grateful mood. He had a tin trunk in his hand, and as he sailed down La Fayette avenue the boys wondered whether the trunk contained bug-juice or horse liniment. The stranger stopped in front of a handsome residence, his smile deepened, and he mounted the steps and pulled the bell.

"Is the lady at home?" he inquired of the girl who answered the bell.

The girl thought he was the census taker, and she seated him in the parlor and called the lady of the house. When the lady entered the stranger rose, bowed, and said:

"I said that I hadn't the remotest idea that any of the bedsteads in your house were infested by bedbugs," he replied.

"Take yourself out of this yard!" she shouted, snatching a tidy off the back of a chair and brandishing it at him.

Beg pardon, madame, but I should like to call your-" "Get out!

she screamed; "get out, or I'll call the gardener !"

"I will get out, madame, but I wish you understood

"J-a-w-n! J-a-w-n!" she shouted out of a side window, but the exterminator agent was out of the yard before John could get around the house.

He seemed discouraged as he walked down the street, but he had travelled less than a block when he saw a stout woman sitting on the front steps of a fine residence, fanning herself.

Stout women are always goodnatured," he soliloquized as he opened the gate.

Haven't got anything for the grasshopper sufferers!" she called out as he entered.

There was an angelic smile on his face as he approached the steps, set his trunk down, and said:

"My mission, madame, is even nobler than acting as agent for a distressed community. The grasshopper sufferers do not comprise a one-hundredth part of the world's population, while my mission is to relieve the whole world.'

"I don't want any peppermint essence," she continued as he started to unlock the trunk.

"Great heavens, madame, do I resemble a peddler of cheap essences?" he exclaimed. "I am not one. I am here in Detroit to enhance the comforts of the night-to produce pleasant dreams. Let me call your attention to my Sunset Bedbug Exterminator, a liquid warranted to—”

"Bed what?" she screamed, ceasing to fan her fat cheeks.

"My Sunset Bedbug Exterminator. It is to-day in use in the humble negro cabins on the banks of the Arkansaw, as well as in the royal palace of her Majesty Q-"

"You r-r-rascal! you villyun!" she wheezed; "how dare you insult me,

m

"No insult, madame, it is a pure matter of "

แ

'Leave! Git o-w-t!" she screamed, clutching at his hair, and he had to go out in such a hurry that he couldn't lock the trunk until he reached the walk.

He travelled several blocks and turned several corners before he halted again, and his smile faded away to a melancholy grin. He saw two or three ragged children at a gate, noticed that the house was old, and he braced up and entered.

"I vhants no zoap," said the woman of the house as she stood in the door.

Soap, madame, soap? I have no soap I noticed that you lived in an old house, and as old houses are pretty apt to be infested-"

"I vhants no bins or needles to-day!" she shouted.

"Madame, I am not a peddler of Yankee notions," he replied. "I am selling a liquid, prepared only by myself, which is warranted to-"

"I vhants no baper gollers!" she exclaimed, motioning for him to leave.

"Paper collars! I have often been mistaken for Shakspeare, madame, but never before for a paper collar peddler. Let me unlock my trunk and show-"

"I vhants no matches-no dobaccono zigars!" she interrupted; and her husband came round the corner and, after eying the agent for a moment, remarked:

"If you don't be quick out of here I shall not have any shoking about it!"

At dusk last night the agent was sitting on a salt barrel in front of a commission house, and the shadows of evening were slowly deepening the melancholy look on his face.

M. QUAD, Detroit Free Press.

The boarders of a tavern in Georgia were annoyed by flies in their butter. Judge Dooley took the tavern-keeper aside, and remarked to him, in a private way, that some of his friends thought it would be best for him to put the butter on one plate and the flies on another, and let the people mix them to suit themselves. He merely suggested it for consideration.

G. D. PRENTICE.

A TRUE GHOST STORY. [REV. NORMAN MACLEOD, D. D., born at Campbelltown, 1812; died at Glasgow, June 16, 1872. Educated at the Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, and studied some time in Germany. Became minister of Loudoun, Ayrshire, 1838; of Dalkeith, 1843; and of the Barony parish, Glasgow, 1851. As a preacher and a man of letters he earned widespread and enduring popularity. He was one of the Deans of the ChapelRoyal, and one of Her Majesty's Chaplains for Scotland. His principal works are: The Earnest Student; Wee Davie; Parish Papers; Eastward, a book of travel; The Old Lieutenant and his Son; The Starling; Reminis cences of a Highland Parish; The Gold Thread, a story for the young; Peeps at the Far East; Character Sketches,

from which the following is taken; War and Judgment, and other sermons, etc. Isbister & Co., publishers.]

Granting for the present the truth of the alleged facts of spirit-rapping and of table-turning, yet, after hearing them, and comparing them with some of the mysteries I have myself collected, chiefly in the Highlands, connected with second sight and ghostly apparitions, and with other similar phenomena noticed by me in some of the remoter valleys of the Harz and Black Forest, I cannot possibly admit the one without admitting the other. Both seem to me to rest on such evidence as must compel them to stand or fall together. Perhaps some day I may enlighten the world by recording some of these.

I have no wish whatever to bring any reader who has "made up his mind" on those mysterious topics to my own way of thinking. I shall acknowledge it as a sign of progress in free thought if I am permitted to hold my own views without being condemned as a person devoid of all judgment or common sense.

But one fact is better than a thousand mere arguments in discussing such a question, and I shall therefore devote the rest of this paper to a narrative, which the reader may rest assured is strictly true, and then I shall leave him to judge for himself as to how far such mysterious phenomena as it records can be accounted for. To myself they are profoundly mysterious!

A friend of mine, a medical man, went on a fishing expedition with an old college acquaintance, an army surgeon, whom he had not met for many years, from his having been in India with his regiment. M'Donald, the army surgeon, was a thorough Highlander, and slightly tinged

with what is called the superstition of his countrymen, and at the time I speak of was liable to rather depressed spirits from an unsound liver. His native air was, however, rapidly renewing his youth; and when he and his old friend paced along the banks of the fishing stream in a lonely part of Argyleshire, and sent their lines like airy gossamers over the pools, and touched the water over a salmon's nose so temptingly that the best principled and wisest fish could not resist the bite, M'Donald had apparently regained all his buoyancy of spirit. They had been fishing together for about a week with great success, when M'Donald proposed to pay a visit to a family with which he was acquainted, that would separate him from his friend for some days. But whenever he spoke of their intended separation, he sank down into his old gloomy state, at one time declaring that he felt as if they were never to meet again. My friend tried to rally him, but in vain. They parted at the trouting stream, M'Donald's route being across a mountain pass, with which, however, he had been well acquainted in his youth, though the road was lonely and wild in the extreme. The doctor returned early in the evening to his restingplace, which was a shepherd's house lying on the very outskirts of the "settlements, and beside a foaming mountain stream. The shepherd's only attendants at the time were two herd lads and three dogs. Attached to the hut, and communicating with it by a short passage, was rather a comfortable room which the Laird" had fitted up to serve as a sort of lodge for himself in the midst of his shooting-ground, and which he had put for a fortnight at the disposal of my friend.

Shortly after sunset on the day I mention the wind began to rise suddenly to a gale, the rain descended in torrents, and the night became extremely dark. The shepherd seemed uneasy, and several times went to the door to inspect the weather. At last he roused the fears of the doctor for M'Donald's safety, by expressing the hope that by this time he was owre that awfu' black moss, and across the red burn." Every traveller in the Highlands knows how rapidly these mountain streams rise, and how confusing the moor becomes in a dark night. The confusion of memory once a doubt is suggested, the utter mystery of places, becomes,

as I know from experience, quite indescribable. "The black moss and red burn" were words that were never after forgot by the doctor, from the strange feelings they produced when first heard that night; for there came into his mind terrible thoughts and forebodings about poor M'Donald, and reproaches for never having considered his possible danger in attempting such a journey alone. In vain the shepherd assured him that he must have reached a place of safety before the darkness and the storm came on. A presentiment which he could not cast off made him so miserable that he could hardly refrain from tears. But nothing could be done to relieve the anxiety now become so painful.

The doctor at last retired to bed about midnight. For a long time he could not sleep. The raging of the stream below the small window, and the thuds of the storm, made him feverish and restless. But at last he fell into a sound and dreamless sleep. Out of this, however, he was suddenly roused by a peculiar noise in his room, not very loud, but utterly indescribable. He heard tap, tap, tap at the window; and he knew, from the relation which the wall of the room bore to the rock, that the glass could not be touched by human hand. After listening for a moment, and forcing himself to smile at his nervousness, he turned round, and began again to seek repose. But now a noise began, too near and loud to make sleep possible. Starting and sitting up in bed, he heard repeated in rapid succession, as if some one was spitting in anger, and close to his bed-"Fit! fit! fit! and then a prolonged "whir-r-r-r" from another part of the room, while every chair began to move, and the table to jerk! The doctor remained in breathless silence, with every faculty intensely acute. He frankly confessed that he heard his heart beating, for the sound was so unearthly, so horrible, and something seemed to come so near him, that he began seriously to consider whether or not he had some attack of fever which affected his brain-for, remember, he had not tasted a drop of the shepherd's small store of whisky! He felt his pulse, composed his spirits, and compelled himself to exercise calm judgment. Straining his eyes to discover anything he plainly saw at last a white object moving, but without sound,