his love, and that parents and friends should believe that the kind Shepherd is folding the lamb in his own arms. But now, amid these musings, the boat has borne us out into the lake-like Zee, on whose eastern shore nestles the unpretending but shrine-destined home of Irving, whose fame is wide as the world, and enduring as time and eternity too.

Here, the gentle, undulating banks of the river nearer its mouth, loom up into loftier hills and even precipitous cliffs, until you enter the narrow channel which terminates the Zee, at Verplanck's Point, and rounding into the Peekskill Bay, you find yourself, at once, in the presence of the towering Highlands,

stray spurs of the mountain-ranges of the Alleghanies.

What a river is the Hudson, in the story of its discovery, its first settlements, its revolutionary memories, its sloop navigation, and then its steamboat exploits, its deep, wide waters, its gigantic Palisades, its once wild, uncultured banks, where the Indian roamed, its now beauteous culture, with its palatial homes!

Without castles, indeed, gray with age, and toppling to the dust, to tell of the past of feudalism and fight, it has its better monuments, to speak for 'freedom to worship God,' and to write, in its present, the most brilliant promise of the future.

MARY

A

A Low brown house backed by a hillside, fringed with stately pines. A garden, that suggested a wilderness in every attribute but size, was the sole barrier that separated the house from the public road. The pine-crowned hill seemed to tower, like a sentinel, among the hosts of hills encamped around. large town raised its cluster of steeples just below. The river on which it lay, vexed by the wheels of the swarm of factories, spread itself out to rest in a quiet lake, a mile or two beyond. The magnificent life of June was throbbing among these green hills on the day of which I write this day in the battlesummer of 1862.

What says this affluence of life to the girl who, leaning upon the low gate of the wilderness-garden, looks down the winding road towards the town? The face is not expectant. There is a weary droop in the eyelids, though the large gray eyes are earnest, and might be loving. For the rest, a broad, low forehead, shaded with thick chestnut hair, full of wavy brightness, comports well enough with the expression of the eyes. But the mouth is sadly at variance with the rest of the face. It was meant to be delicate, sensitive-the lip curls easily even now; but habit has compressed it painfully. Its curves hint of firm endurance; its smiles have been too infrequent.

She is not happy. You might read that in the very droop of her form, as she stands there, her thin white hands clasped nervously upon each other. Rather hard and cold has been the life of Mary Wilmerdings. Barren, compared with the life she might have chosen; but God help us!-not many of us can choose.

There lies the channel, narrow, bedded with rocks, it may be, pent between unyielding walls, against which the untamed stream chafes in vain; a little

foam-that is all-flying back into the dark. But delicate flowers bloom in the black crevices which the stream wets with spray, and far above, the rocky walls are fringed with trees, and the light of God pours down into the abyss, telling the prisoned stream of the meadows where it shall one day broaden its course in the yielding soil, and its turbulent flow be quieted till it spreads abroad, enriching all the land.

Five years ago it was, five years this very month, that she had stood here as now, looking over hill and valley, but not as now, with sad eyes and sinking heart. Then she was full of zeal; capabilities as yet unmeasured stirred within her. True, a cherished hope had died in her heart, but she would not sit down helplessly beside its grave. Life opened broad before her: she would live it out bravely.

She was restless with energies that the usual round of sweeping, washing, and sewing could not keep down. She longed for action in that world of which she saw glimpses, when she looked forth from her sheltered nook among the hills. 'Had God made no place for her in that world?' she had asked earnestly. She had tried among her longings to be practical. Perhaps teaching was her work-at all events she would try. It must be teaching in a city, too; she thought the quiet of the country would pain her. But there were difficulties to be overcome. She was without influ ential friends, but she evinced the strength and courage of a man in the ardor with which she bore down all obstacles. Her faith in herself exercised a strange magnetic influence, even upon the matter-of-fact business men to whom she applied.

She was successful. A situation was secured in a large school in a neighboring city. For a time she was happy. It was something to be able to supply

her home with many comforts-to give to her young brother advantages for which through childhood she had longed. True, the wild, merry-hearted Charley did not appreciate them as she would have done she felt that. She was alone in one sense in her own family-beloved but not understood. Apparently, not from either parent had she inherited her peculiar temperament and mental endowments. From some forgotten greatgrandfather they had come, perhaps, as streams flow underground, unsuspected oftentimes, but by-and-by the water bubbles up, pure and clear, with all the peculiar properties of the fountain, miles away, and mayhap unknown; and so people wonder that this spring should possess virtues unshared by neighboring wells.

As the life passed on that she had so striven to gain, Mary wondered at and blamed herself for discontent. She wearied of the routine. In school she looked forward eagerly to the end of the term and the comparative freedom that awaited her in her home. Once there, and the excitement of the glad welcome over, she was again conscious of the presence of her old enemy. Her powers of endurance seemed to give way at length. She had strange mental experiences; a belief haunted her that gradually, surely, the secret power was slipping away from her that she had always wielded as a teacher. She struggled against it; but she could not blind herself to the fact that, besides the mental torture that she was enduring, her physical strength was failing. In the midst of this, whispers began to reach her of dissatisfaction with her efforts. Some of her patrons thought that 'Miss Wilmerdings was losing her interest in the work.' Stung to the quick, she rallied all her forces to the encounter. Night after night she lived over in a strange excitement the scenes of the day, and fell asleep in the hope that the morrow should see the success of her carefully formed plans. But she awoke in the brightening dawn with a dull pain in her

head and a weight at her heart. With a far higher standard than those around her, she seemed to herself to fall short of their attainments—the earnestness of her striving after success, the very intensity of her chagrin, when it was not attained, making the performance of the task she had imposed upon herself the more impossible. She forced herself to go to the school-room in the morning before it was necessary, because, in the reaction to which she was subject, she hated the very sight of the place of her trial, loathing the thought of the day's heavy tasks with a loathing that would not be controlled.

You say her failing health induced this state of mind. She had not that comfort, for she religiously believed that her mental suffering caused her physical ailments. The missionary, relinquishing all that awaited him at home, to combat with darkness and ig norance in a distant land, rose to saintship in her eyes. What had she, who fainted by the way, to do with the great throng of the world's benefactors who held out to the end? Harder and harder grew the struggle. She had a faint perception that influences from outside were brought to bear upon her school, which she was daily growing more weak to combat. She thought sometimes if she could throw off the sense of responsibility, the thought of the influence she was exerting upon the impressible children committed to her charge, as her fellow-teachers seemed to do, taking up the burden, and throwing it down carelessly when the day's task was done, she might eventually conquer. As it was, she saw no choice but to resign her position at the close of the term.

She came home in the new year of 1861, when all earnest women, as well as men, in our country had a heavy burden to bear. Her personal trouble seemed nothing. She was ashamed to think of it when it was no longer forced upon her; but she thought of her country's future till thinking was a pain, and then she prayed. None about her seemed to

feel the pressure with the intensity that she did; she wondered sometimes when men raged about the interruption to material prosperity, as though that were the highest good-whether all patriotism had died out in the children of those whose stern self-sacrifice had won our liberties. It seemed strange to her, as she walked the busy streets of the town, that the manufacturers bustled about as usual, and the shop-keepers smiled and bowed behind their counters in the same self-satisfied way as if the fate of the latest-born republic, the hope of the staggering Old World, was not trembling in the balance. Now that we have left those days so far behind, the apparent apathy that prevailed seems like the memory of a dream; but surely there was small token then of the harvest of deeds of heroic self-sacrifice which, far more than iron-clads or material resources, are the earnest of our ultimate success in the great struggle for national life through which we are passing.

The winter wore away while she labored night and day at the problem, seeing no way to solve it but in the old way of blood and suffering. Had not our civilization carried us beyond that? Was the law of Christ, prevailing to an extent among individuals, never to permeate the masses? Was there no process by which nations could adjust their differences, which should be more humane, more Christian, than throttling each other like bull-dogs? Sometimes when she lay awake in the early morning, it seemed like a disturbing dreamthis national trouble-and she imagined the ringing of bells and the jubilant shout which would peal from sea to sea, if the misguided States should see the warning Hand stretched over them from the vaulted heavens, and return to their allegiance.

But a sharper trouble came upon her; pressed into her very soul. Her mother, with only a few hours' illness, died. Never till she closed the blue eyes for ever, did Mary know how dear that

well.

mother had been to her-how all her little homely ways were stamped upon her heart. But she was reticent by nature. People said she bore her trouble None knew how, in the long lonely nights that her mother lay in the dark, old-fashioned parlor, Mary's head had striven to bury itself, as of old, in the mother-bosom; how she had pressed to her heart the dead hands, noting the marks of constant toil they bore; how passionately she had kissed a small purple mark on one of them a slight bruise made accidentally a day or two before, in performing some slight service for her! They buried her under the pines, behind the house. Her husband would have it so.

'Mr.

The grass was springing green upon. her grave when every one was startled by the news of the nineteenth of April. Charley Wilmerdings came up from the town that night with a flush on his dark cheek and a fire in his eye, that told of excitement hitherto strange to the boy's young frame. 'I'm going, Mary,' he said in a strange, husky voice. Adams will keep my place for me till I come back-my place as clerk, you know. Oh! I must go!' His sister's eye rested on him proudly for a moment; then the light went out as she gasped: 'What will father say?' She knew the boy was his pride more to him than both his daughters — and she dreaded the shock for the old man, who even now wandered aimlessly, many times a day, to that newly-made grave under the pines.

'O Charley! Charley! if I could only go in your place your life is so much more than mine!' And she glanced at her father coming up the path, leading little Rose.

Charley's lip trembled. 'I know, Mary; but think of those poor Massachusetts fellows! mangled-dead-in Baltimore, as dear to some one as I am to you and father! I shall be ashamed of myself as long as I live if I don't go!' And the boy drew himself up proudly.

The old man heard his determination with a muttered exclamation that sounded like an oath; his daughter knew it was a segment of a prayer. He was broken down completely. The planning and preparation came upon Mary. Months of anxious waiting, brightened only by frequent letters from Charley, ensued. At last came the fearful tidings of Bull Run; there was sorrow and trembling in many a home among the New-England hills that Monday night. No more letters. A few days after Mary saw the paper drop from her father's hand as he sunk back with an inarticulate cry. Glancing at the list of the killed, she saw Charley's name. The days crept on painfully after that. The old man would sit hours with his head drooping on his hands; only little Rose seemed to have power to rouse him. They heard nothing of the circumstances of Charley's death; they knew not whether the boy was shot down among the fleeing, or whether he died bravely, as the old Wilmerdings blood would have prompted-his face to the foe.

After the first few weeks the father seemed to rouse himself; the needful work of the farm was attended to; he seemed to find solace in working hard and long; perhaps the consciousness that another cloud was gathering over them was the stimulus. The farm was mortgaged, and the thought of the accumulating interest rested heavily, after a time, upon Mr. Wilmerdings and his daughter. Her savings, carefully husbanded as they had been, were now nearly exhausted. On the June day with which our story opens, affairs at the Hill Farm seemed to have reached a crisis; a week more, and unless the money were paid, the old man and his two daughters were homeless.

It was not generally known; they were hardly on intimate terms now with their neighbors; Mrs. Wilmerdings, with her cheery, kindly ways, had been the link that bound the family to the social life around them. 'Mary,' the

country-folk said, 'was a bit proud;' they could not get on with her. 'Mis Wilmerdings, her mother, was of another sort - with a kind word for every body.' And so the girl, whose aching heart was full of sympathy for her kind, was misjudged. Had she been happier, she would have made herself felt in her true character.

For weeks now she had been battling with the inexorable question that met her at every turn: How was the money to be obtained to pay the interest on the mortgage? It was easy enough to borrow, but she could not bring herself to do it unless she saw some prospect of speedily liquidating the debt. Leaving her father in his present state was not to be thought of; so she could not go away and teach; besides, she still distrusted herself. Much as she had suf fered, a different strain upon her energies had acted beneficially in one respect — she had regained partially the strength of nerve that had once characterized her. Still she loathed the thought of fighting the battle over again in a strange school. All her plans narrowed themselves down to this-whatever employ ment she attempted, she could not leave her father and little sister.

The town, which seemed to lie just beneath the hillside, was really more than a mile distant. The principal factories were farther yet-more than two miles away. The manufacturers were only running their mills about seven hours a day. The long walks to-and-fro she had thought she could easily endure, it would only take her away a part of every day. Her pride winced here; but she put it down manfully. Better fac tory-work, if she could do it well, than the experience of her last three months in teaching.

But a new difficulty met her-she would have as soon fired a gun as put in motion the machinery of a loom. It was deplorable; she despised herself for the weakness. She remembered her visits to the mills in her childhood, and the horror they had inspired. She had