way in the morning light. That these young hearts did not sorrow, and deeply feel their loneliness and bereavement, I would not insinuate; I saw their tears, I heard the deep tones of anguish that came up from the fountain of their true and loving hearts. But they were soon solaced; and time, and other scenes, and especially their own reciprocated and mutual love, wore away the sharpness of their grief.

The mother had not been dead a year, when I learned that my little friend Eugene was sick. I lost no time in calling at the house of Mons. now made mournfully interesting by the occurrences of a few fleeting months. I soon ascertained that the boy was almost frantic with a raging fever; the family physician was in attendance, and I inquired of him privately as to the case of the lad, and the only response was a deep sigh and a shake of the head. Oh, I can never forget the overwhelming shudder that came over me, as though the fountains of vitality had been broken up. "This dear boy must not die! it can not be!" almost involuntarily choked my utterance. His sister sat by his bedside, with a fan in one hand and a vial in the other, an inimitable model of sincere grief and holy love. She had feared the worst; her bursting heart was too full for tears or words, and all that she could do was now and then to place a smothered kiss on the burning forehead of her idol. The boy had been ill but two days, and his sister had scarcely left him from the moment he was taken sick. I entreated the father to strive if pos

sible to prevail on this devoted "ministering angel" to leave her brother for a few moments; that his son was well attended, and that, if he did not wish to be childless, his daughter ought to be roused from a situation little less dangerous than that of her dying brother.

come.

It was near the close of the month of May; the sun was just leaving the western hills; the birds were singing their vesper song, and the flowers had folded themselves up as if to meet the next morning sun with a more joyous welAmong a cluster of flowers, in a little vase on a table in the sick-room, I noticed a rosebud. That bud. thought I, will not bloom, mournful emblem of the dying boy! The father of the lovely girl, in a low tone, desired her to go with him a few minutes into the garden. Here all was quietness and beauty, and the stars were coming one by one into the deep, clear cerulean above. But neither the music of nature, nor the glory of the earth and the heavens, nor the voice of friendship, could charm the heart of my young friend. She was soon again at the bedside of her sick brother.

Not to be tedious in our narrative, suffice it to say, before the sun rose that morning, the boy died. A lovely flower had withered and perished on earth, but another had been added to the fadeless bloom of an eternal paradise. Josephine was with her brother when the convulsive, agonizing whisper fell on every heart in the room, “he has breathed his last." As yet, she wept not; but when she could no longer doubt as to the issue, and the last ray of

hope had passed away, she clasped her hands as if in frantic ineffable grief, pressed them to her forehead, and throwing herself with her face on the couch of her dead brother, sobbed aloud in all the indescribable agony of despair.

The funeral passed away with its scene of solemnity, and that once-cheerful and happy family seemed now to be rendered desolate. Weeks rolled on, during which I made my visits more frequent than usual to the house of my friend. I had faintly hoped that one so young, so accomplished, might survive this sad wreck of her cherished hopes, and live on above the tempest and the storm.

But it was manifest that her heart was broken; and in the midst of affluence, a circle of gay friends, and all the outward elements of happy life, there was a visible struggle to keep down the tide of anguish that was ready to burst from the soul's deep fountain. Amid the throng of admirers, the courtesies of friends, the festivities of social life, the beauties of nature, and all that would seem to charm and break the spell of sorrow, she was alone with her own spirit's sad musings. She seemed to me like one of earth's choicest flowers, that the winds had swept over, and left, in the dying tones of the sweeping blast, "passing away!" The despoiler had commenced his consuming work; the fair, the beautiful, and the lovely, began to feel the withering, chilling hand that wrote the presages of an untimely death. As her health began to decline, her father concluded that a voyage across the Atlantic, and the return to his former

relatives and friends, might restore his daughter, the only. tendril that was now left entwined around the parent-stem.

They set out for Paris about two years ago, with the warm wishes of many good friends, and the prayers of all who knew them; and I have since learned that this lovely, devoted girl is dead! In a few months after her arrival in Paris, she gave up a life as quietly and peacefully as the golden shadows that fall on the bosom of the still waters in the sunset of a calm summer-day, mild as the zephyr that plays around a bed of roses, and is lulled to silence by its sweetness. I revere the memory of that bereaved, stricken child. Her beauty, her guileless spirit, her deep and sacred affection, her ardent feelings, her decay and death, come over me in their softness and sublimity, like the rainbow on a silver cloud which has shed its genial waters and passed away for ever. Let it be granted that many a one as amiable, as lovely, and as loving as this, passes away in obscurity and poverty, and no pen records the glowing story; because,

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Many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air,"

shall we cease to cultivate and cherish those that give a sacred odor from the vase in which they have withered and died?

"Rejoice

For her, that when the garland of her life

Was blighted, and the springs of hope were dried,

Received her summons hence; and had no time,

Bearing the canker at the impatient heart,
To wither, sorrowing for that gift of heaven,
Which lent one moment of existence light

That dimmed the rest for ever."

When I think of Josephine and this family shattered into fragments, how glorious and blessed does the rich boon appear which "brings to light life and immortality." Can it be that we are the creatures of a day, and destined to the "oblivious sleep" of a second chaos or rayless oblivion? Are these ties of love that bind us together in faith and fellowship so strongly, to be cut asunder for ever by the sharp death-stroke? It can not be ! These wishes that leap out from the fountain of the heart to live again, and "live alway," beyond the everlasting hills—these deep, hallowed desires to meet our beloved ones on the other side of death's cold stream were never given to mock us with a delusive dream, or to be the fatal rocks on which aspiring hope dashes its scattered wreck. It is not true that the poor earth fixes the bounds of our destiny. It is not so, that life, like a bubble floating in the breezes of heaven, is thrown out on the dangerous waters of Time to be dashed into silence and nothingness. No! We "rise and flourish, fade and fall," for a higher, better destiny than the earth. There is a realm of immortal, fadeless felicity. The lost are there; the purified and the saved are there. The stars never grow dim there; Time has no gray locks, no tottering age there. Neither the light of the sun nor of the moon is needed there, "for the LORD shall be an