could never give her the protection, the sense of which she must always feel, within the ring of the isolating sea, and under the roof they had so purely made sacred to themselves. Might he venture, then, to ask of her a last favor-that she would bury him on the bluff. Her consent given, nothing more pertaining to any sentiment, or any thing relating to that which was to come, ever came to be discussed. He balanced his accounts, and taught her to understand them. Once or twice they went to Selhaven together, and several times the doctor visited them at the island. Captain Switzel asked for medicine, the last visit he made, to keep him alive till Lorson came, so that he might take the boy by the hand once more; he believed the dear fellow would feel hurt not to find him above ground. The doctor politely hoped that his prescriptions would prove sufficiently efficacious. The Captain gave one of his short laughs, and said that it would make little difference whether they met or not; Lorson could understand what was meant, when he found himself owner of that part of the ship formerly his own-the meaning would be, that he should go on in the career chosen for him. The Captain's secret instructions, if instructions they were, were placed in Lorson's little Chinese writing-desk in his bedroom. Captain Switzel had also a private interview with Katy Brown, and required a promise from her, which cost him something, that she would not leave his wife, even to make a visit in Selhaven, for at least three years. As the season advanced he and Mary often walked up to the bluff to scan the passing sail and discuss the probabilities of Lorson's return. It was not to be. Before the winds of autumn swept the plain and waste of the sea the kindhearted Captain slept in the loam of the bluff, to crumble with it till the roar and sweep of the great Archangel's pinions should rise above the roar and sweep of the sea now encompassing him and fan the Universe away. Mary wept the tears good women weep when their best friends die-tears which neither wrinkle the brow nor the heart, but which consecrate the memory. She deferred placing a head-stone on the bluff till Lorson should return; she would only have his vision arrested by the familiar sight of the white gulls flying round the spot. But his coming was long delayed. He sailed from one foreign port to another, and a year passed before they stood face to face, with mournful, mute inquiries in their eyes. In the first days there was no diffidence or reserve between them; life moved on with a tacit reference to the habits and tendencies of the Captain, which appeared to have accomplished Mary's future. The topics which covered the ground of ordinary affairs were discussed as usual, with old Katy Brown as an auxiliary. But Katy grew mysteriously demonstrative all at once, and it was by her intervention that he was made to feel the fact that Mary was a widow and he a young unmarried man. From that hour he lost his peace of mind. On making the discovery he went to Selhaven where his ship was laid up for repairs and spent a week. He daily scanned the craft from keel to cross-trees, as if taking counsel with it, but returned to Crusoe no wiser than when he left. As he approached the house an impulse prompted him to knock at the unused front-door and wait for Mary to open it. Taking no pains to account for his impulse he knocked. "The Lord save us!" cried Katy Brown, "who's at that door which has not been opened since the Captain was carried out feet foremost? It's a pirate after Kidd's treasure; it's here somewhere. Bill and Joe are down to the vats; it can't be their fooling?" "I think the men have come from Selhaven with the head-stone," said Mary, going to the door. "Why, Lorson," she said, sharply, when she saw his tall figure filling the doorway, “you know this door is never locked-not at night even." "Time it was locked then," he answered, turning the key in the rusty ward and passing in. Mary quietly unlocked it again and followed him. "Katy mentioned pirates," she said, "when she heard you knock; did you mean to suggest them?" "I guess Lorson is afraid, or he wouldn't have locked the door," Katy remarked. "It would not be a difficult thing, Katy," he said, "to carry you off to the Isle of Palms." He appeared to be musing over the subject till he was called to supper. Early in the evening Katy ostentatiously excused herself from the sitting-room, she was obliged to prepare for an early baking in the oven, and Lorson and Mary were left alone. Mary was netting little bags for the tassels of some new window shades, and Lorson was engaged in holding a newspaper before his face which he did not read. He was absorbed in thought concerning Mary. It was certain, now that she had become a widow, that she stood alone in the world. She had no friend even to whom she could go for companionship; she had never formed a circle of acquaintances, whose common sympathies might have been enlisted in her behalf. He recollected her preference for her solitary home; but how long would it hold? Would it be right for him to accept her present wishes, and allow her to remain without protection on the forlorn island? What could have induced Captain Switzel to leave things in this state when he had had ample time to settle his affairs, and remove Mary to a proper place before he rendered his last account? He wished that he could ask the Captain's advice. Had it been possible that moment for him to step over the boundary of the unseen world to confer with a disembodied soul he would have done so for her sake. Was it in the line of his duty to throw up his profession, which suited him exactly, and settle upon the island, and round off his life, as the Captain "Plans fail, even on desert islands." A silence ensued, which was broken by Mary's winding the clock-a signal to him for retiring. Hour by hour that night his reflections nar had, with running cargoes of salt into Selhaven? | wonted energy; "the business of this world is He was roused from his meditations by the rat- as shifting as sand." tling down of a window shade upon Mary's head, she had attempted to fix one of the nets to the tassel, and the cord had slipped from the roller. He sprang into a chair to adjust it for her, and she held up a lamp close to her up-rowed to the simple belief that he must stand turned face. He noticed while rolling up the curtain, for the first time in his life, the liquid brilliancy of her large dark eyes; they were not ardent, quick, moving, like his, but serene, serious, sincere. His investigations went on after he had resumed his chair and paper. The idea of age which he had always connected with her, from her relation to the Captain, faded suddenly away. Venus rose not more beautiful from the sea than Mary as she emerged a young, beautiful woman before his vision. He dropped the paper, for his hands had become weak and told, and looked about him as if he expected to see a glorious transformation every where. The sober sameness and the old silence brought him to his senses. Presently he remarked that the wind must have veered to the north by the shaking of the porch door and windows. before Mary in the light of a lover. The probabilities and possibilities of such a relation toward her terrified him. Having assumed that responsibility, and making the attempt to thrust the responsibility upon her of accepting his love, of returning it-what a back-ground rose upthe recollection of Captain Switzel! He shuddered at the wish he had indulged in of consulting him; he longed to forget him, ungrateful as it might be. He was not permitted to forget his benefactor, for the next morning Mary asked him to attend to the shipping of the Captain's head-stone in Selhaven, which should have arrived weeks ago. "Is there any thing else to attend to ?" he asked, with calm desperation. 'Mercy on us!" exclaimed Katy Brown; "I am tired looking for that head-stone. It should "Yes," she replied, "the sound reminds me have been set and done with six months ago. that fall is at hand." Here the good man has been dead most two years." I re "To-day is the 24th of August." "To-morrow I shall be twenty-two. How are the repairs on the ship advancing?" "I think I was twenty-two last week. collect my last birthday in Denmark. A cake, with fourteen or fifteen candles, was placed on the supper table; but my memory received a shock when I was shipwrecked. The workmen were scraping the hull yesterday." Mary felt slightly embarrassed. She had never heard him refer to his early life: the Captain, years ago, had asked her not to speak of Lorson's shipwreck-the terrible effects of it had so long been apparent. She hastily said: "Did you see the steamboat that is being built to run between Banyan Point and Selhaven? She will touch at our wharf whenever we signal her to stop. I can go up to Selhaven every other day, if I choose; and I was thinking that, as she will carry freight, it would be better not to depend on the schooner any longer, but send up the salt by the boat." "Confound the salt!" Lorson cried, angrily -"the island will be overrun with curiosityhunters and bathers, and I anticipate you will go to Selhaven every trip." "Katy!" said Mary, reproachfully. "I mean it seems so. Well, it is fifteen months." Mary remorselessly felt, after she had spoken, that the event did seem far back in the past. "I dreaded, Lorson," she said, "to have it meet your eye as you rounded the headland. I felt as if you might put your ship about if you saw it on the bluff." "Did you, Mary?" he asked, in a deep, repentant voice. Mary looked at him, sadly and sweetly. "Did you think of me then, Mary?" he added, in perfect abstraction, thinking and feeling nothing but the power which was growing absoJute within him. She blushed painfully, and Katy Brown said, audibly, "Sho!" He started at the sound; said that he should not return for some days-the ship required his attention-and hurried away. "Sho!" repeated Katy Brown, after he had gone. Mary looked at her with indignation; but the cunning old woman said nothing, and Mary took He forgot that he had been mentally deplor-up her netting with a strange feeling of dullness. ing the extreme isolation of Crusoc. Within a day or two a boat arrived, bearing the head-stone and the men to set it. For several days following Mary visited the grave after tea, and remained there till the stars came out and then walked pensively home. On Saturday night, a week after Lorson had left, she staid in. The wind was against any sail standing from Selhaven; but Katy Brown said that Lorson would be in by midnight, and she should prepare supper for him before she went "Indeed," said Mary, surprised at his un- to bed. Mary must set the kettle over the "I do not care much about keeping the saltworks," she replied, placidly; "the Captain hoped that things would go on the same, because he believed that active employment would keep me from discontent." "You can't go on till the day of Judgment making salt; besides, the duty is greatly reduced on foreign importations. You will make little money hereafter." She put her arms about his neck like a happy, loving child, and laughed joyously. They conversed till long after the water had ceased to boil in the tea-kettle. Katy Brown's superior sagacity discovered the situation early the next morning. Nobody had taken the teakettle from the fire; it had simmered and simmered, and it was a wonder, she commented to herself, that the bottom had not melted off. But young folks would be young folks; and she was glad of it. She reckoned that Mary was being, young for the first time, and the Lord must forgive her for thinking so. kitchen-fire, if she got tired waiting for him, and he could make tea for himself. Mary promised to do all that was necessary. Between eleven and twelve she stirred the kitchen-fire, put the tea-kettle over it, the pot beside it, and then closed the door between the kitchen and sitting-room. Covering over the fire in the latter she put out the lamp, and softly rolling up the window-shade sat down before it. A tide of moonlight poured in, and she moved back, so that she might not be seen. All the gray ground was silvered by the moon's rays; the bluff rose up a dim wall against the sea and faded before her vision could reach the Lorson and Mary were married. But a grave there: the sea rolled to the right and the shadow lay between them; a pale cloud floated left its luminous billows toward her, and the in their zenith. One day when Mary was ensky over her was traversed by tremendous gaged in packing away furniture-for the house whirling clouds which floated swiftly over the was to be shut up on account of her going to sea island. It was easy to discern Lorson and his with Lorson-she came across the little Chinese man as they struck the belt of light which en-writing-desk and opened it. She found inside circled the house; they entered the beaten a sealed letter in the Captain's handwriting adpath which passed the front-door and ended at dressed to Lorson. She carried the letter to a side-door, the usual entrance. She saw Lor- him and they read it together. It was short, son scanning the house, and felt that his eyes and its contents were these: rested on the window where she was; she heard him address a few words to his man, who moved down the path, and then perceived that he himself intended to come into the room where she was. "You are still up," he said, quickly, pulling off his over-coat and throwing down his hat. "It was so pleasant," she answered, hastily rising; "I will make tea for you." "Sit still. I told John to dispatch his supper. I'll wait a little." He moved a chair to the window and sat down with the light streaming over him. Mary remained standing. "The moon never shone as it shines tonight," he said. "How free and splendid God's world looks now! See, Mary, the moon is just above us." She turned her face upward. Lorson saw it in all its sweet, quiet beauty. "Oh, Mary, you are like the moonlight, pure, lovely; you draw me toward you as the moon draws the full, wild sea. Shine on me, light me along my voyages, and my voyage through life." "Lorson, you and I owe too much to Chance not to trust her once more. I have thought matters all over, you may be sure. Am I not right? And I thought it would be well to drop you a line-human nature is a marvelous instrument, don't you find it so?-and express clearly what I think. It will be best for you to become Mary's husband in time; I have no wish that my poor girl should go into any suttee business. If she thought it, this may change her mind; if you thought so, this may suggest that you should follow out my idea. With all, and through all, I give you a mutual blessing." Lorson and Mary exchanged a long look of thankfulness. The cloud of doubt and remorse disappeared, and the good Captain was rewarded. A VALEDICTORIAN'S FATE. I AM a Valedictorian, and the curse of the Valedictorian is on me. See if it be not. I entered college aged fourteen, arrayed in a close-buttoned roundabout, with a goodly amount of Latin syntax, Greek roots, and algebraic formulæ in my head, and a deal of ambition in my heart. Always fond of books, I lost none of my fondness in college. After the first term I was praised by my "Society" friends, envied by others, as the "head of my class." Though big, bewhiskered chaps laughed at my home-cut-and-made jacket, and called me "Liliput," I could scan Greek choruses and construe Latin more easily, and see farther into the analytic millstone than any of them. On the Commencement stage, when the class-all my seniors-rose to hear my valedictory, I felt that some old scores of sneers were canceled. I had never been much noticed in college circles, being neither fast, witty, nor rich; but the closing scene balanced that account also. But then my star culminated. A classmate, whom, handsome, rich, and popular, I had ponied through term after term, in Latin, Greek, and mathematics, and who by three or four escaped the honor of "footing" the class, said to me, as I left the stage: "Now, Rush, you know we 'poor sticks' always beat you 'honor men' in the world; so take your triumph while it lasts." So I did. I was praised and flattered, was more noticed abroad in a week than in four years before, and at home I was autocrat. But what should this talented Valedictorian do? I was too young to study law just then; and, moreover, not being from patrician ranks or Mammon-blessed, I must earn money. So I concluded to teach. I found a situation in a boarding and day school-an institute for boys and girls, young men and misses. I taught almost every thing except Coptic and Fejee; breakfasted by candle-light all winter; and stood sentinel, policeman, judge, and executioner for about forty chaps, aged from fourteen to twenty-five, from six A.M. to ten P.M. Salary $200 per year and board. Room was nominally included; I was accommodated with a closet. One of my special duties was to keep each and every of the forty male pupils separate, save at certain specified times, rare enough, from each and every of the forty female pupils, who occupied an adjacent building; no easy matter without a guard of Janizaries in one building and eunuchs in the other. Bless me! Elective affinities and sympathies can no more be ruled down by teachers and shut up behind clap-boards than electricity can be barred out by a shingle. But it was easier after all to part boys and girls than teacher and girls. A youngster of eighteen, if he be pedagogue, is subject as strongly as other youths to the attractions of bright eyes and smiling faces. I certainly was. I flirted out of school, and scolded the girls because they would not obey order in. The consequences were indignation and remonstrance to Principal; Principal remonstrates to Assistant, and a speedy resignation and departure. I carried, however, a consciousness that I left within those old brick walls a heart which beat in unison with mine. There had appeared, in the second term at the school, a dark haired and eyed girl, tall and stately, and as cold and repellent in manner as an iceberg. She was a splendid scholar, and I was attracted. I "fell in love," and by great exertions melted enough of the iceberg for a "smile." But it was cold. Cool draughts, however, often increase fever: mine was not lessened. I continued by exertions while teaching and after. We read Emerson, Schlegel, and Dugald Stewart, and talked a deal of metaphysical baby-talk. I thought that my learning was counting, and that the Valedictorian had won. About a year after our engagement I ascertained, through a short note, that I had only a place in the lady's head-that her heart had run away with her head, and her heart was won by another. The vale was said not by but to me. ing funds enough to hire an office, pay in advance, or buy Voorhees's Code, I took again to the school-room. No boarding-school this time, and as little to do with the girls as might be. I had mainly boys to manage, did very well, and was well paid. Soon I was offered a tutorship in my Alma Mater and accepted. There I stuck! the President always quoting, "Juniores ad labores," and straightway assigning me jobs of all sorts. Meanwhile my classmates were pushing on. One became District Attorney of one of the best counties in one of our finest Western States, took a wife, had children, and made money. Others preached, some in country, some in city churches, and had helpmates of their choice to care for the parsonages. The intellectual Titman of the class became a Western city judge, and married a fat widow with a fat purse. My friend, who warned me on Commencement-day, was junior partner in a large mercantile house in an Eastern city, built a fine house, and placed therein a fine wife to preside at his board and shine in his parlor. I was neither attorney nor judge, had neither parsonage nor residence, no wife to put in one, and no money to support her with if there. In disgust I left off tutoring, plunged out West, and displayed a legal shingle. In six months I had four or five cases in Justice Court, and received some thirty or forty dollars in cash. My previously-earned money showed signs of failing. I saw no prospeet ahead, and so tried again; but I never succeeded. There was always a lucky fellow, not a Valedictorian, to step into the rich placers before me. So, after a time of trial and disappointment, I journeyed eastward, nor have I again passed beyond the Lakes. I am settled down now into a quiet country school-teacher. I earn more than enough to support me, and earn it too by hard work. I could support a wife, but I can not find one. The clever women will not have a rusty pedagogue; the dull ones I will not take. Better be wedded to my books and papers, and kindle the warmth in my heart from the glowing pages of the author geniuses of the past and present; better be unloved by wife or child than have a mass of petticoated dullness dawdling forever around me, and confiding to me her troubles about the scarcity of butter and the stoppage of the kitchen drain. So I expect to live, teaching successive sets of youthful humans-clever, moderate, and dull to "do sums," conjugate "I love," and keep "double entry," and sometimes to solve simple equations-read Virgil, or even inflect “BovAców." I should like a college professorship; but I have no "isms," and only the reputation of having been Valedictorian. When my vale comes to life, it will be given, I hope, in a quiet way; and a few score urchins, with their books and plays, will soon forget their old-bachelor teacher, the College Vale I was then studying law out West. Shortly after being admitted to practice, but not hav-dictorian. OUT OF PRISON. in stupid sleep, others pacing like the beast in his cage, the ghost of hope seems to have for [OW long, how long, the weary days go by! saken them, and to have left only the cold corpse on a dull wash of the sea, view nothing but the slow changes of day and night in the upper regions of air. The sun rises, slides over the sky, sinks; the earth swings up the depths of space, and into the fellowship of the stars, till once again the rosy dawn impinges on the awful shadow, and morning is at flood-tide in the world. of rarify the present like a flame. That is to-day; but how will it be to-morrow - still tethered in this corral-how, when yet more months of monotony, longing, and starvation have sapped the juices of faith, and left the will a pensioner? There must be other things, then, to feed the strength-sweeter memories than blossom under the sulphurous clouds of strife, dearer hopes than any that fly to the taking of a battery. Ah, they are mine! I have them; and not for the free sunshine of the sky, for the loose light winds, for all the liberty of earth and heaven, would I exchange them now! That would be to see my boy no more even in dreams; never again to recall the pensive smile always playing round a mouth I know, like gleams of stray sun Ah, how different from all about me now is it then at home! In this place, if a finch could warble, I should not hear him; but, in that, every burdened bough shakes off its spray of song. How the soft mists and pearly vapors then go sifting up the hills! How fresh and fair the dear earth turns her blushing cheek to the sun again! Day breaks, and breaks with what dewiness and fragrance; with what sweet, hushed, and holy silence there; with what gush-shine in a watery sky. To forget the forehead ing music further on! And yet it is the same round world-the spot that, when we tread other planets, will still be as beloved as home. It is I that am other. The beauty that haunts creation is refracted in alien rays from the angles of a cage. Being itself to me becomes bereft of all delight. Though one breathed the delicious airs of the islands of the blest, what bliss would their balm bring him were he no longer free? But yet, but yet, bind as you will, confine my steps, impede my gaze, the soul is still my own. Ah, were that bound, I were a slave indeed! Wild hours of battle, at least your memory is liberty of which they can not deprive me. There are no gyves to fetter my spirit; there is no key to turn upon that indomitable vagrant. Again I live over the march and the bivouac, the riflepit and the trench, the stealthy night-surprise and the charge, with one's soul possessed by a mounting flame. Again we thread the terrible war-path of the Wilderness-all day a blind struggle, a column bending this way and that in a cloud of smoke, the dead dropping beside us, eternity close at hand; all night on our arms, no camp-fires, a biscuit for food, the rain dashing about us, and a hurly of elemental warfare drowning the discord of the wide field; snatching sleep upon the tramp, lying down in pools of water for a moment, and off and away in dreams; starting into line at the word of command, pushing on in the perturbed blackness, our hearts full of fierce vigor. Ah! there was life in those seasons, life that was vivid as light itself, since heightened into such glow by instant contact with the great shadow of deathfreedom, whose mere memories are wings! But here, these men around me-if indeed men they are they have each the same to remember-nights wrapped in flame, days when the heavens rained death, all the intoxication of danger and does it keep their souls alive? As they herd now in the pen, these cowered aside, those fallen on their faces, some sogging away and the eyes of little Madge, and all the tangled lustre of her curls-what liberty of going and coming, what bold gallop across country in tumult of fresh breezes, what cleaving of waves under a rushing keel, what choice of any of all the fantasies of freedom, were worth the loss of that? When I last wound those little tresses round my fingers, the baby silkiness of each golden thread caressing the touch, I thought she was like the sweet-brier rose that her mother gave me once, years before; it made my heart stand still to think the dear and perfect thing was mine. And now? Perhaps she is no longer mine. It may be that the great reaper has made her his own. Perhaps my little flower is transplanted to bloom in the courts of heaven. She would stay in none of the fair fields and gardenplots, I know-she would climb with her wild, sweet graces out the gateway, and be the first to greet met n I came ! How one masks even to himself! If I truly feared I had lost her. And the boy, too-with his smooth, cool cheek-how can I tell what may have happened to him? Who knows? It is so long, so long since I heard. From the hour he was born he assumed the king; a monarch in his small way, the winged world on its flight bears no prouder; at a year old so assured of his identity that all of us about him faded into shadows. I thought to find again my youth in him. He was like me, they said; his mother, when he slept, has how many a time pointed out the long curve of my eyelid in his, as the dark lashes lay along the peachy cheek. Yet why borrow trouble? Here is surely enough to my hand. Let them people my thoughts a while longer with their ardent vitalities; let me believe that, somewhere, this common air is ringing with their fresh voices; let me still hope they live. I am so sure their mother does: something tells me that. I should feel the invisible bond between us other than it is were it on one side lowered into the grave. No; it is alive, and full, and |