brooks babbled away through pleasant woods and meadows, and children filled the air with shouting and laughter; but none of those could make our Miriam smile and yet it was not seldom that we saw her smile-no, not seldom; and what a glad, sunny smile it was, making us who watched it very glad.

My mother said that Miriam had a secret of her own that made her glad, a ceaseless undersinging in her heart, that sang to her a sweeter song than those she might not hear. And because she heard them not, she seemed ever listening to that inner music, that helped her smiling on her silent way.

Could we help it that we loved her so, that in time she grew to be our very idol? Could we help it that, as day after day and year after year passed by us, our lives grew closer and closer to hers, so close at last, that often while we watched her we would ask each other, Could we live without her now? would it be easy to forget her, and take up again the threads of the old life that we left off weaving when she came to us; would it be very easy? And we always answered, No, how could we? for was she not the brightener of our winter, the sunshine of our June, so to speak, our angel in the house ?

I was away at school when Cousin Miriam came to make her home among us; she was my mother's orphan niece, the child of her lost sister.

Just two years separated us; she was fourteen, I twelve. How well I remember coming home for the holidays one midsummer day (the pleasant summer holidays), and finding her at my mother's side, filling a daughter's place to her.

How well I remember my first boyish impressions of her, and yet I cannot describe them as I would; but as I look at her now through the faithful mirror of memory, she comes before me as distinctly as I saw her that midsummer day, with her pale, sweet, quiet face, and soft brown hair that fell about it like a shadow; and her eyes-Grace, I thought I had never seen any eyes like them before; so loving, and earnest, and thoughtful; so eloquent with their own sweet language, out of which her young heart-world looked forth, calm, tender, and beautiful; clear, faithful eyes that, like a pure stream, reflected the stars as well as the sunlight.

Not many days went by before we each felt her presence in the house, like a sweet holy influence that wove new threads of gladness, and hope, and comfort into our daily little joys and sorrows.

My mother's heart, if she was cast down by some household care or perplexity, would grow light again when Miriam came in at the door,

and to my father she grew dearer every day; as for me, I soon learnt to call her sister, and she called me brother (speaking to each other in that mute finger-language); we said it was in jest, but there was more of earnest than of jest in those names: I knew that afterwards, when we lost her.

O Miriam, that was a dreary day, the day we lost you, the day you went away from us, and we had nothing left of you but your empty place and sweet memory, and the presence of a great sad blank where you had sat, or stood, or walked among us! O Miriam, Miriam! I am glad to think you never knew how wearily we missed you. I am glad to think you could not hear that troubled cry in our hearts that was ever calling to you from morning till evening, from evening till morning, Miriam ! Miriam and every room and corner in the house and garden only echoed, Miriam. And so she lived her life among us, her quiet, kind, patient, self-forgetting life; and those midsummer holidays were the happiest I had ever spent. What pleasant bright memories I carried back to school when they were over (how much too quickly over) of long days' rambles through fields, and woods, and lanes, we two all by ourselves, with the blue sky over our heads, and soft mosses and wild flowers under our feet, and sunlight around us and within us, and cool green shadows that kept many a resting-place for us, quiet, consecrated spots (like those other resting-places we all consecrate in youth, and return to in after years with tired steps to look upon through tears of reverent affection, to sit down once again under their cool deep shadows from the heat and dust of life's busy day of travel), and of coming home at evening, when the dew was falling, and the nightingales were singing, though only one of us might listen to their sweet mournful music-only one. And then, when "good night" came to be said, how pleasant it seemed to remember that we should meet again the next day, and the next, and the next, that we should be together every day through the long, long holidays. It was wonderful how soon the people in our village grew to love Cousin Miriam; wonderful how men and women and little children felt a throb of glad ness whenever she crossed their path. Yet no, it was not wonderful, for Miriam had such a gentle sympathising way about her, such a ready interest in all that pleased or troubled those she met in her silent way, such kindness in rejoicing with them, such skill in comforting, that people grew to love her every day, and knew it not. I was always her interpreter; through me she heard many a little household story of joys and troubles, hopes and anxieties,

many a heart and life history; and through me passed back again the word of sympathy, or help, or counsel that the sealed lips might not express, though the tender heart was always ready.

And so the years went by us; summer after summer, and winter after winter, came and went; June after June, and Christmas after Christmas, I came home for the holidays, and still that other face was there to add its smile of welcome to the dear home greetings. Yes, Miriam, my heart's own sister, you were one more drop of gladness in my cup at cominghome time; but also one drop more of pain when the last-day of the holidays came, and the last good-bye was said. It is always so in our life here each new tree that grows in our garden both bears us fruit and blossom to add to our store, and also casts another shadow across our path. Happy if, after we have gathered the flowers, we can rest quietly under the shadow, still enjoying the perfumed leaves, even while they are fading one by one in our hand. Happy if our cherished tree be an evergreen, so leaving us a shadow for rest afterwards, and not the chilling sight of cold, dry, leafless branches marking the place where the flowers have been. So the years went by us year after year till we counted six. Miriam was a woman now, and I had left school and entered college. Yes, Miriam was grown to be a woman, a gentle, thoughtful, earnesthearted woman, very good, very beautiful, very patient.

But the years which had brought strength and vigour to her inner life, unfolding day by day its quiet beauty, brought little or none to the frail outer being. Miriam was not strong, she had never been strong from her childhood. It always seemed to us that the thread of her human life but held her with a slender clasp that grew more slender every year, gently unwinding itself day by day, as if it feared to let her feel too painfully the slackening of its hold. My mother began to speak of Miriam in her letters as being delicate, that her cough made her feel uneasy; she had had it so long that she thought her paler and thinner than she used to be. Still, I knew my mother was apt to be over-anxious, so I hoped on in spite of her troubled words.

At last she wrote to say that the doctors had ordered sea air for Miriam; and so, when the long summer vacation came, we all went for a few weeks to the sea. It was a pleasant happy time we spent there, a quiet, tranquil time, filled with sunny hours, to be laid by for after-memories, treasured sacredly for ever. We used to sit for long, long hours on the shore, Miriam and I, watching the wild, ceaseless,

unresting waves, that would never be still for a moment, that have never been still since the day when the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and will never rest till the earth and the heaven shall be dissolved, and there shall be no more sea.

Long, long hours we sat there by the sea, Miriam and I, and wearied not, though to her it must have seemed but as the restlessness of a great silence, the strife and tumult of life without the music. And so we let the hours go by without ever staying to count them, sitting there watching the waves come and go, like the hopes, and dreams, and yearnings that make the tides of our life, or reading those wonderful poems of Mrs. Browning, wonderful for truth, wonderful for their rich wealth of thought, wonderful for strength, living, earnest strength.

How Miriam delighted in those poems; how I have seen her eye kindle and her cheek glow as page after page opened to some new chamber in the treasury of thought. How every chord in her nature seemed to thrill to the sure true touch of that master-hand, as it could thrill to no other-no other but hers.

Two months passed away, two bright months, and then we all went home again; and Miriam, though she had been very happy at the sea, yet was glad to be once more in the old home, glad to sit by the open window in the drawingroom inhaling the sweet breath of the flowers, that came in from every nook and corner of the garden, still glowing in all the fresh, full beauty of late summer.

We had some quiet days and weeks after that, seeing little or no change either for better or worse in our gentle invalid. Gently day by day that slender thread of her life was unwinding itself gently and painlessly. Very quietly the river was flowing away to the sea, and we who walked beside it heard it singing as it went, making sweeter and gladder music as we listened, sweeter and gladder; and we could not sigh or weep.

It was the middle of October when I returned to college; only for eight weeks, Miriam and I said to each other, the last evening before I went away-only for eight weeks; and then she put into my hand a little Bible, nicely bound, with my name and hers written in the beginning, asking me to keep it always for her

sake.

that.

Surely there was little need to ask

I took it up to my own room, and turning over the leaves before I packed it up, I found a little mark in that verse which speaks of the land where the ears of the deaf shall be un

stopped, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.

Why had she marked that verse now? did she feel as if from her that land was not so very far off? And the next day, as I bade my mother good-bye, I whispered in her ear, "Will Cousin Miriam die, mother; is she going to leave us soon?" and my mother answered, "I hope not, Willie-I trust not. Not yet," she added (as if speaking to herself), "O God! not yet;" and all my heart echoed, "not yet." And then I went away with a hope and a fear growing side by side in my heart; but even as I watched them growing I saw that the hope had taken the deepest root. It is ever so with us; thank God, it is ever so. Wild and bitter must be the storm, sharp and sudden the uprooting, that can deprive us of that priceless tree of life which God's hand has planted in the midst of our human garden. Is it not an emblem of that other tree, growing by the river-side, in the midst of His Paradise, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations? and are not nations made up of human hearts? Only eight weeks, Miriam and I had said to each other, on that last evening, only eight weeks; yet how slowly they seemed to pass; slowly to me, counting week by week, day by day. At last they were ended, and I left off counting; and once more the glad Christmastime came, and once more I was at home again. How well I remember that home-coming, so different from all the others that had gone before it. My father meeting me at the door alone; the empty drawing-room, silent, deserted, and dreary, though the warm winter fire was shedding around and on everything the same bright living light it had shed there many, many Christmases; and things were in their old places, and nothing was changed; everything was just where it had always been, except Miriam. She never left her room now (my father said), and my mother watched beside her night and day.

Could we live without her now? It was years since we had ceased to ask each other that question, now we must ask it once more, yet not to each other, but to God; we must ask Him for strength to enable us to answer it according to His will, not ours.

And so through all that Christmas week we watched the quiet waning of her life, like the waning of a summer moon. Calmly, hopefully, without the shadow of one passing cloud to cross its brightness, we watched it fade away before the golden sunrise of that other life which is for ever. And when our watch was ended we could but sit and weep for our loss; but soon there came to stay our tears the thought of how she was among the angels, joining all their praise, in the land where the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped, and the

THE Grand Trunk Railway of Canada-one of the most shaky and rickety in the world-is not, at the outset, the most pleasing of routes whereby to commence a journey homewards; a train, or at least a "bullgine (engine), running off the track being an event of quite ordinary occurrence. We arrived at Montreal on the morning of the 26th of March, well dusted, and jostled almost to death, but with appetites sharpened by the involuntary exercise which we had been taking day and night; so, in company with a "skedaddler " from a Michigan cavalry regiment, I adjourned to the Miranda “Hotel,” so called. The small barroom was crowded by a host of Lower Canadian habitants, with a sprinkling of some halfdozen chattering Frenchwomen. Hungry and tired, I entered the dining-room, a dirty little apartment about ten feet square, in which my head, albeit that of a short man, nearly touched the ceiling, while my olfactory nerves were sorely discomposed. Huge chumps of bread were distributed round the table, at one end of which was a tureen of black beau-soup, and at the other a large dish of fish, which might have been fresh a week before; so, hungry as I was, I hastily quitted the company. A few doors from the Miranda, I discovered a phlegmatic German, stout and greasy withal, busily employed in the concoction of saveloys, Bologna sausages, &c., from whom I made a few rapid purchases, with which, and a pocket-pistol in the shape of a brandy-bottle, I hurried to catch the train, then almost on the point of starting from Montreal for Island Pond.

On the way we formed some new acquaintances bound for home by the same steamer with ourselves. Among them were an old farmer and his son, on their road from the far backwoods to Dublin, to inherit an income of 7001. a year; and a veteran Irishman "skedaddling" from the New York cavalry. From Montreal to Portland (Maine) the railroad is even worse than that portion of it which traverses Canada West; and on our arrival, at midnight, at that miserable locality called Island Pond, I was black and blue. We were escorted to a dilapidated building-a perfect dog-hole, yclept an hotel; it was worse than any backwoods shanty, Irish shebeen, or underground habitation into which I have crept in the course of my wandering life. The Yankees,

Bohemian was visible. She had run ashore in trying to make the fort, with the loss of forty of her steerage passengers. She had belonged to the same company as our own vessel; and as they had lost eight fine steamers in the course of seven years, it was not very encouraging when a terrific gale came on, dead ahead. The heavy seas made clean breaches over us, washing away our bulkheads, and for some time it was doubtful whether or no the good ship would weather the storm. Every timber trembled and creaked. Down she dipped deep into the ocean's trough, seemingly lost for awhile, but rising gallantly again; and each time she recovered herself another tremendous sea would strike her, deluging her with tons of water fore and aft. At the end of five days the weather moderated, and joyful faces were then to be seen amongst the steerage passengers. A slight sketch of some of these may perhaps be not altogether devoid of interest or amusement to the reader, and may convey to his mind some idea of the actual state of the American army.

To begin with an eccentric little Hibernian, working his passage home. While the gale was at its height I saw a creature, measuring about four feet, and with a face not unlike that of a Gibraltar baboon, emerge, covered with coal dust, from the opposite cabin, on his way to the scene of his labours in the stoke-hole. On his return I entered into conversation with him, and found him a regular Irishman, full of fun and humour and cunning shrewdness. Short as he was (and ugly withal), he had received the bounty and enlisted in the Federal army, and was then marched off some 800 miles southwards. During the passage of one of the rivers, Paddy took advantage of the confusion and contrived to creep into the rear, where he doffed his uniform, wherewith he had on enlisting covered his tattered garments; and when all had passed on he cast it to the winds, and succeeded in making his way nearly to the Canadian frontier. There he had the luck to fall in with an Irishwoman, who had received a pass from the colonial government for her husband. This my friend purchased for 15s., eluded the detectives, crossed the border in safety, and resold his pass for the same sum that he had paid for it. "They thought Paddy was a fool," he told me. "A Yankee came to me, and, Paddy,' he says, 'if you want to buy a watch, here's one for thirty dollars.' 'Begorra! and what's the use of that to the like o' me,' says I; 'sure it isn't one hand I know from another, and as for the numbers, I never could larn 'em.' Faix, they all took me for a fool, but Paddy sold them all; and there

ain't a boy in Derry can say what myself can,

jest three months away from ould Ireland, six weeks at sea, six weeks a-doing nothing at all, and now near Derry again, and all these beautiful goolden drops about me;" and, thrusting his dirty blackened paw into his still dirtier pocket, he pulled out thirty sovereigns. "Now," he continued, "I'll be seeing Judy, and never a word will I spake about the goold; and if she turns up her nose perpendicular, sure I'll be off for another run.'

Besides this worthy, we had four more "skedaddlers" from the different armies of the the North, whose accounts all tallied as to the barbarous mode in which the war is carried on by them; and to the cavalry, it seems, must be adjudged the ignoble palm for precedence in this disgraceful rivalry. "Whenever we came in sight of a Southern town," said "skemy daddler " from the Michigan horse, "and knew that the Southern troops were away, we went in at a rip of a gallop, and made for the goldsmiths' shops; as soon as they were plundered, the other shops and the stores were next gutted; and if there happened to be any large houses, we ransacked them and set fire to the town in several places; we very seldom left anything standing behind us. But in some of the Southern planters' houses we did best; two of our boys hooked four thousand gold pieces from one, and another bagged five thousand from another we generally broke open all the boxes we could find; the silk dresses we used to send to our wives, and I have often heard the ladies imploring our men to leave them some few clothes. In one wealthy planter's house that we went to loot there were two uncommon pretty girls; one of our men got hold of a splendid coverlet, worked all in silk and satin, while one of the young ladies held on to it and begged him to leave it, as she valued it so much, but it was soon wrenched out of her hand. While the men were plundering the room the other young lady was sitting at the piano, playing

On Dixie's land I'll take my stand,
And live and die in Dixie ;

and the piano was not spared."

Two of my shipmates, who had been in the Federal cavalry, told me that these pillaging scenes were of daily occurrence. While the 3rd regiment of Michigan horse were rushing through one of the towns, a lady shot the major dead as he was passing her window; the troops returned, but the bird had flown, and so fortunately escaped their vengeance; however, they retaliated by burning the house, a measure on their part hardly to be wondered at on this occasion, "We generally found