Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

lifted her up and laid her head back upon the pillow. A smile was upon her dead face.

Three days later we buried her in the family burying-ground, behind the stately poplars, and it was not many weeks before Wilton Eldredge lay down beside her, to sleep in the same grave his long, dreamless slumber. The Eldredge family were left without an heir. No one cared to live in the old brown house. It is going to decay.

But the dead rest well. At "moonless midnight or matin prime" they lift not up their covering of verdure. Suns rise and moons set for them in vain; but I know there is another country where the long-enduring love will receive its reward-where the roses are eternal, and the tenants of the everlasting mansions shall never die.

Uncle Roger's Story and Mine.

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while;

My heart seemed full as it could hold—

There was place and to spare for the frank young smile, And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold.

So hush! I will give you this leaf to keep;

See, I shut it inside the sweet, cold hand. There, that is our secret! go to sleep;

You will wake, and remember, and understand.

ROBERT BROWNING.

UNCLE ROGER'S STORY AND MINE.

WE

E were sitting on the upper piazza-my Uncle Roger Apthorpe and I. It was at his house in Hingham—a country house, yet looking out upon the distant ocean, with its countless white wings of sails, "its million lips of shells," the cliffs upon its margin, the islands on its bosom. I had been talking to Uncle Roger. He was my mother's brother; the house in which he lived was his inheritance from my grandfather, and here I spent with him the summer months, to me the happiest portion of the year.

My mother had died when I was very young. My father was immersed in the cares of business, and between my stepmother and myself was always a thin ice of reserve-perhaps a courteous and unexpressed hostility. Therefore Uncle Roger was my only confidant.

I had been telling him of a visit I had received that morning. Young Harry Holt had ridden out from town, and, in a few manly words, had offered me his heart and his name. Uncle Roger had listened to my story with even more than his usual interest. Harry was one of his prime favorites.

“And you accepted him, Ethel?" he said, inquiringly, as I paused.

"No, Uncle Roger; why should I? It was my first offer. I might see fifty men I like better, yet—”

« AnteriorContinuar »