A Devotee

sson, de fleurs, de gravier, qui, rivière, qui, fleuve,

is loved. She sets the broom ablaze among the gray rocks, yellow along the river's edge, yet hardly yellower than the leaves on the young oak just above. The larches hear her voice, and hundred by hundred peep over each other's heads upon the hillside, all a-tremble with fairy green. The shoots of the dwarf cherry, scattered wide upon the uplands,

he primroses are coming up all the same, and the young shafts of the bluebell pierce the soft earth in spite of our heartache. A hedge-sparrow has built him a house in the nearest tangle of white hawthorn. There will be chi

as the first violent emotion of a feeble and impulsive mind in a feeble body, both swayed by veering influe

e reverently folded her devotion in her heart and have gone on her way ennobled by it. But wit

r than the gulf of years, which separated him from her. She imagined no one appreciated him, or entered into the dark places of his mind, as she did. She mistook his patient comprehension of her trivial aspirations, and hi

with great care, out of the mixed admiration and pity with which she inspired him, in the hope that, in later years, when her feet would be swept from under

ot gauged the measure of its shallowness. His deep enthusiasms, tried and tempered before she was born, weary now with his own weariness, aroused hers as the Atlantic wave, sweeping up the rocks, just reaches and

ing-the teaching is nothing. And when he is removed, they passively drift under another personal influence, as under another wave, and the work of the first, the

She had perceived their truth and beauty; but she cared nothing for them in reality, a

afternoon, she looked more fragile and ethereal than ever. The faint colour had gone from her cheek, and with it half her evanescent prettiness had departed. Her slight, willowy figure seemed to have no substance beneath the many folds of white material in which her despai

er-worn stones had been gleaned into heaps, and where so many thousands still remained among the springing corn. The long labour and the patience and the partial failure which that

sliding water, which ran deep and brown as Crack's brown eyes, and loitered shallow and yellow as a yellow sapphire among its clean gray stones and gleaming rocks. A pair of oyster-ca

to herself. 'They do not

it seemed to have been permanently embittered by the close contemplation of military character. He had been round the world. He knew the principal smells of our Eastern empire, but no reminiscences of his many travels served to brighten the gloomy tenor of his thoughts. He was sad, disillusioned, still apt to hurry and shorten himself through doors, and to retreat under sofas to brood over imaginary wrongs. All games distressed him. He went indo

s edge and sat down on an o

elings were so entirely under control that he could scratch himself while observing an object of interest; and he did so now. But he did not move from his seat on Sibyl's gown. He was disillusi

bank stooped to gaze at a flickering fairyland of broom and larches in the wide water. The deep valley of the river

' she thought,

towards her along the littl

bling, her hands pres

as looking for her. He was coming

ar and took her nerveless hands in silence, and looked into her face, he saw again in her deep eyes th

nderness-reverence for her untarnished youth, and tenderness for the