A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life.

es! The green things don't know

her plants, which had been green and flourishing, but persisten

in her eyes, upon the pleasant window, and the bright, fresh things it framed. Not the least bright and fresh among them was the human creature in her earl

biggening,' as Elspie says." Leslie turned round, with her little

Cousin Delight; so true, so pure, so unselfish, so made to give,-like pe

agrance-for those whose delicate sense could perceive it. The very face was a pansy face; with its deep, large, purple-blue eyes, and golden brows and lashes, the color of her hair,-pale gold, so pale that careless people who had perception only for such beauty as can flash upon you from a crowd, or across a drawing-room, said hastily that she had no brows or lashes, and that this spoiled her. She was not a beauty, therefore; nor was she, in any sort, a belle. She never drew around her the common attention that is paid eagerly to very pretty, outwardly bewitching girls; and she never seemed to care for this. At a party, she was as apt as not to sit in a corner; but the quiet people,-the mothers, looking on, or the girls, waiting for partners,-getting into that same corner also, found the best pleasure of their evening there. There was something about her dress, to

ar older than her mother; on her father's side, a broken and scattered family had left few ties f

e will go back now to

eyes, "I often think, of how something else was found,

asive quickness, and turned round wit

d that "nobody liked a nicely pointed moral better than she did; only she would just as lief it shouldn't be pointed at her." The fact was, she was in that sensitive state in which many a youn

for that. She turned toward the table by which she sat, and pulled toward her a heavy Atla

ling,

you came. I wonder if I ever shall travel, in reality. I

ne of the stereotyp

en a river and a hill, or in a little seashore nook. Those are the places, after all, that I would hunt out, if I had plenty of money to go where I liked with. It's so pleasant to imagine how the people live there, and what sort of folks th

ce you're at jus

r something, first. But Winsted has such a sweet, little, quiet, English sound. I know it never began with a mill. They make pins and clocks and tools and machines there now; and it's 'the largest and most prosperous post-village of Litchfield County.' But I don't care for the pins and machinery. It's got a lake alongside of i

yet been thirty miles away. Her father was a busy lawyer, making a handsome living for his family, and laying aside abundantly

ightened under the parlor windows and about the porch. Just greenness and bloom enough to suggest, always, more; just sweetness and sunshine and bird-song enough, in the early summer days, to whisper of broad fields and deep

nversation this morning, somehow. She dropped the map-traveling sudd

. Mrs. Linceford has just got home from Paris, and brought them wardrobes to last to remotest posterity! And such t

ry of wisdom which she had adopted, that when girls were once old enough to care for and pride themselves on a plentiful outfit, it was best they should have it as a natural prerogative of young-ladyhood, rather than that the "trousseau" should come to be, as she believed it so apt to be, one of the inciting temptations to heedless matrimony. I have heard of a mother whose passion was for elegant old lace; and who boasted to her female friends that, when her little daughter was ten years old, she had her "lace-box," with the beginning of her hoard in costly contributions

the fresh, white, light-lying piles that had already begun to make promise of

, done at odd minutes, and for "visiting work,"-there was something prettier and more precious, really, in all this than in the imported fineries which had come, without labor and without thought, to her friends the Haddens. Besides, there were the pleasant talks and readings of the winter evenings, all threaded in and out, and associated indelibly with every seam. There was the whole

as stirred often by this, or any other of the objects and circumstances of her life, and which kept her standing there with her hand upon the bureau-knob, in a sort of absence, while Cousin Delight look

ut the fig-tree! I suppose it's awfully wicked, but I never could see. Is everything fig-leaves that isn't out and out fruit, and is it all to be cursed, and why should ther

ther people," said Cousin Delight. "It used to be a puzzle and a trouble to me

hatically. "It always seems to me s

wards the window once more, and stood with her back to Miss Goldthwaite, almost as if she wished to have done, again, wit

ld say such words; knowing, as only he knew, all that they meant, and what should come, inevitably, of such a sentence. 'And presently the fig-tree withered away.' The life was nothing, any longer, from the moment when it might not be, what all life is, a reaching forward to the perfecting of some fruit. There was nothing to come, ever again, of al

hardly cleared. There were many things that crowded into her thoughts, and might have been spoken; but it was qui

Cousin Delight, feeling an intuition of much that held and hind

e spoke, she turned again quickly, as if to be motionless longer were to invite more talk, an

old," said Delight gently. "The

et, to rinse and refill the little drinking-vessel.

leaf, we may have hope of the f

perceived a quick lifting and lightening upon it; then a q

iss Goldthwaite's side, which she had been occupying before all this talk began. "Other people p

ick foliage. It is often only when the winds shake their leaves down, an

shall grow the broadest and tallest, and flaunt out, with the most of them. After all, it's natu

or the leaves, and to be glad of th

k of real things, and let

to her bureau again, and f

hat fluttered with fresh ribbons. "How much of this outside business is right, and how much wrong, I should be glad to know? It all takes time and thoughts; and those are life. How much life must go into the leaves? That's what puzzles me. I can't do without the things; and

ves; the world is full of other outside business,-as much

g, and going, and doing, and seeing, and hearing, and having

esponds to thought and purpose in the soul-urges always to the finishing of its life in the fruit. The leaves are only by

now, and her head making little appreciative nods. "That's like condensed milk; a

er a little kiss on the top of her head. If Cousin Delight had seen, there was a bright softn

n the head with a punch, like a carpenter," Leslie said of her. She believed that, in mor