long winter evenings, platting willow baskets, while his notable partner spread the spotless napkin and arranged his frugal supper, you might scarcely chance upon a happier man. And, after supper, when Susan always sung her merriest ditties, Darby would listen for hours, and forget to tell the strokes of the village clock. He was surely not sentimental, and he had heard all her songs for the hundredth time. Yet would his neighbors roguishly tell, that as they stopped before Darby's window to catch the last words of some favorite old ballad, they had seen him lay down his half-finished basket, and slip behind Susan's chair, to steal a kiss, with almost as much fondness, though certainly with less awkward bashfulness, than when he stole the first from her rosy lips.

Around, as within the cottage,-on Darby's little farm and in Susan's garden, every thing spoke the careful eye and the busy hand of its possessors. Their thoughts, indeed, centered in their pleasant home; and for the world beyond, it was to them as though it existed not, except when Darby filled Dobbin's panniers, and proceeded to dispose of the produce of their industry, and to gaze for the thousandth time with undiminished wonder on the marvels and the rary-shows of a market town. Yet, even there, Darby seldom saw a merrier eye or a rosier cheek than his pretty Susan's, and seldom found a neater garden or a tidier home than his own: and so Darby was not given to inconstancy.

Thus passed their quiet lives, without fear for the future or regret for the past; with scarcely a wish beyond their little possessions, and scarcely a care beyond the passing hour. They lived in the present, and enjoyed it, undisturbed by dreams of rich inheritance, either in this world, or the next.

It chanced, one dark November evening, that a stranger rode into the village. He wore a long black Spanish-looking cloak; and the boys, attracted by the unusual sight, followed him to the door of the village inn, where he alighted. As he entered the busy kitchen, he threw aside his upper garment, discovering beneath a dress of the same color, very plainly cut, and somewhat threadbare. There was a merry party gathered round a fire that blazed and sparkled as a November fire ought; and there the officious landlady placed a chair for the stranger, who saluted the circle with a solemn "God be with you!" and then seated himself in silence.

The laugh and the jest were hushed in a moment; each jogged

his neighbor with a side glance at their visiter; and, after a few commonplaces about the weather and the crops, first one, and then another, rose and departed.

"Who can he be ?" said the landlady to her help-mate, as the last guest prepared to retire.

"Ask him," was the laconic reply.

But this was not so easy, even for the assurance of Mrs. Margery. Her first remark about the weather was answered in a monosyllable; and there the conversation ended; for the landlady thought, as she expressed it afterwards, "that he was an uncomfortable looking man ;" and so she smothered her curiosity, and left him to his own meditations.

Margery's remark was not inapplicable to the stranger. His figure was tall and spare, and he stooped from his shoulders. Care was imprinted on the wrinkled brow, over which his straight black hair was formally combed; and care and restlessness were in his dark gray eyes. There was a strange, absent, uneasy swimming expression, too, about those eyes. You might at times have imagined they were turned on the inward man, rather than occupied in scanning outward objects; so dead and unsettled they seemed. And then again you might have supposed that they looked through the vulgar realities of sense to something of a vaguer nature, distant and longed for and unseen; for in the frequent fixedness of his gaze, there was rather the excitement of eager and dissatisfied expectation, than the calmer expression of actual perception.

Let it not be imagined that all these reflections passed through Margery's brain, and elicited the remark, "that he was an uncomfortable looking man." No; she was not one of those who looked beyond the outward show; but the outward show of that pale, thin visage, and gaunt figure, was unpromising enough.

And, in truth, the appearance of the stranger did not belie his avocation. His labors and his thoughts were not of this world. His body, indeed, sojourned on our earth, but his spirit had wandered out of it. He walked through life with the careless indifference of a hasty pilgrim, who scarcely bestows a glance or a thought on the scenes that open around him; so deeply and solely occupied is his imagination with other lands and future prospects. He walked through life, not only without tasting its joys, but even unconscious that it contained any. As he conceived it the duty, so he made it the business of his life,

1*