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fortunes. It is indeed sad when the heart | ing, to my ill-concealed surprise she said to me,

is wrung in infancy."

"What is she crying for?" whispered Frances to me.

Suddenly she clasped her hands, and looked up, exclaiming,

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They are in coloured dresses ah me! and what a colour - pink!"

"Mr. Brandon proposed to take my dear little nieces to their grandmamma, but I could not bear the thought that my little desolate ones should go alone; so I said I hoped it would be no inconvenience to Captain Rollin if I accompanied them."

"Yes, ma'am" put in Mrs. Brand, who seemed struck with admiration of this sensibility; "we had nothing black for them to wear when they came on board; their own frocks were torn to shreds, I do as-ly added, looking round. sure you."

I thought he would very much dislike to have a lady passenger, and I said nothing by way of encouragement.

"I hope this has not been an additional pang to their tender hearts," continued Miss Tott. "You have explained to them, doubtless, that there has been no intentional disrespect."

She spoke to me, and not without secret wonder I replied,—

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They have not noticed it. They are too young to feel deeply; but I have heard them speak with affection of their dear mamma and the baby."

Miss Tott dried her eyes and held out her hand to Nannette, who drew back. "This is little Nannette's aunt," I whispered. "Go to her."

The troublesome little creature instantly said aloud,—

"But hasn't she brought us something pretty from London ?"

That was because Mr. Brandon had promised each of them a toy.

I pushed the chubby little thing nearer, and she shook back her shining lengths of straight hair, and condescended to take the hand presented to her.

"And so my little darling has no dear papa and mamma, and no sweet baby sister, now?"

“It isn't a baby sister," lisped the child, softly; "it's my little baby brother; he's got two teeth."

"But he is gone now. baby brother now." "Yes, I have."

Nannette has no

"Is it possible that they are in ignorance of these things?" cried Miss Tott, "or are they devoid of feeling?"

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Neither; but they do not understand

you."

"He did cry," said Nannette, with great simplicity, "when he was on the raft,'

"But he is very happy now," put in the other child. "Mr. Brandon says he never cries at all; God took him up to heaven." "He likes to be up there," said Nan

nette.

"I see abundance of room," she present

"But not at my disposal," I answered. "Oh, do not let that disturb you," she said very sweetly, and with a soothing tone that I rather resented; "your brother will speak to Captain Rollin when he comes on board -no responsibility shall rest on you, the gentlemen will do all, and after the captain's noble hospitality, I have no anxious feelings about the result; so," she continued very softly, "would it be too much to ask that I might be alone with the dear children for a short time?"

I was rather glad to comply with her request, and went away with the admiring Mrs. Brand, shutting Miss Tott in with the children.

In the chief cabin I found Mr. Brandon and Tom, the former marching about in a very impatient style; he was evidently vexed and fretted.

They had been mildly and sweetly obliged by Miss Tott to bring her and her luggage on board, and each being soothed and assured that he should not have any unpleasant responsibility, had been told what a relief it would be to "the captain" to find the children's best and nearest protector was ready to go with them.

"And what did my uncle say?" I asked. "He pulled a long face, but he evidently means to submit."

I said it was a very odd thing. "The whole journey has been odd," observed Tom.

"Yes," said Mr. Brandon," I saw when we called on her that she was full of pensive obstinacy and tender humbug."

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Why did you bring her with you then?""

She

"She made us; she would come. felt that the captain' would expect no less of her, and she could not disappoint him."

"You should have assured her to the contrary."

"We did, over and over again - no use; she did not intend to hear. Graham, I wish we had been lost in that fog, and

Miss Tott looked scandalized at this infantile talk, but her boxes now appear-never found her house."

"A fog! we have had none here."

brother. In fact, we thought she seemed to consider it a mark of the favour of Providence towards herself that her sisterin-law had been taken."

"We had a very thick fog," said Tom, "directly after the thunder-storm - a soupy fog; we took a cab and set off in it to find the grandfather and this aunt. The remainder of that day was not at all Drove a long way and saw nothing; at last comfortable. Miss Tott's tender regrets after a sharp turn, and one or two most over the children always seemed to preposterous jolts, we heard a loud knock i and came to a stand. The driver had given matters up, and the horse, in despair of finding the right turn, had gone up the steps of a house and was knocking at the door with his nose."

"The footman opened it," said Mr. Brandon, "and uttered a manly screech. We asked where we were, and found we were in Eaton Square. The horse, all this while, foolishly stared in at the hall door. We managed to get on into Chester Square; and if Graham would only have stood by me, you would have seen a different result."

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Nothing of the sort," said Tom; "you were quite as helpless as I was, if not more So. She made us come and fetch her too, and her great chests, and what with all your tailor's parcels and mine, and that great Noah's ark nearly as big as a child's coffin (and some great woolly dogs that he bought too, Dorothea, which barked in the parcel whenever we moved them), I never suffered so with luggage in my life!"

"Yes, I have been round the world with less," said Mr. Brandon.

"So here she is," proceeded Tom; "she wants to persuade the old grandmother that she ought to take the entire responsibility of the children: her father she says cannot afford it. Now their grandmother, who was brought up a French Protestant, has lately become a Roman Catholic; and Brandon naturally hoped the children would be taken by the father's family and brought up in the religion of their parents. But no, they cannot afford it, they say."

A great deal of crying and scuffling at my cabin-door was now heard; we looked at one another.

"Let them alone," said Tom; "she has no doubt, made the children cry by some dismal talk. Now let her manage them herself; she has a right to be alone with her own nieces if she likes."

"You seem to forget, poor thing, that she has only heard within the last day or two of the death of her sister-in-law; really, I think she may be excused for being sorrowful."

“She took that matter very composedly," said Tom; "she even informed us that dear Fanchon had been a very bad manager, and a very bad match for her VOL. XXVI. 1200

LIVING AGE.

uply reproof of somebody else, and as they took a great dislike to her I found it difficult to make them behave tolerably. When at last they were put to bed, each insisted on taking her woolly dog with her, and as long as they could possibly keep awake, they made them bark at intervals. They had been well taken care of during the voyage, but not kept in order, and consequently they were troublesome. Mrs. Brand and I had not established much control, and while one was being dressed, she would set off and run round the cabin. Then the other would rebel in some infantine fashion, poking her fingers into the pomatum, or spilling my eau de Cologne. These things it would have been ridiculous to treat as serious offences, but by dint of grave looks, a little scolding, and a little coaxing, we got on pretty well, and they would soon have been very good children, but they chanced to be particularly full of spirits the first morning of their aunt's presence, and when she found that nothing she could say had any effect, she sat down in a corner and drooped, leaving Mrs. Brand and me to catch and dress the little rebels. When these operations were over, I lectured them both very gravely, and received kisses in token of penitence, but Miss Tott could not recover her spirits, and from that hour she never did anything for them, and seemed instinctively to shrink from interfering in the least.

She evidently knew nothing of children excepting from books. She expected to find some ready-tamed little mortals, calm, and rather depressed, instead of two chubby things, quite wild, unconscious of orphanhood, and mischievous, penitent, naughty, and good again every hour of the day.

To me they were the greatest amusement possible, and to Mrs. Brand a delight that it did one good to see; but they certainly did not do themselves justice that morning.

Nannette talked at prayers, and had to be carried out crying. Frances got away from Mrs. Brand while we were at breakfast, and ran triumphantly into the chief cabin, where her rash act was rewarded by Uncle Rollin, who gave her sausage and toast, and afterwards carried her on deck, to the great scandal of her aunt.

"No doubt the beauty and grandeur of the world is very invigorating, very elevating."

I had bought some black alpaca at South- however, I resisted this, and there it still hampton, and after breakfast Mrs. Brand lay, as if to appeal to my better self; my and I set to work to cut out frocks for the ordinary self being covered with blushes, children, that we might take them to their because Tom and Mr. Brandon were lookgrandmother in mourning clothes; and ing at me. At last, I said, Mrs. Brand, cheerful and happy, in the prospect of having almost more to do that day than she could possibly accomplish, was such a pleasant companion, that I might have stayed below another hour, if Tom had not come to remind me that I had left Miss Tott to amuse herself as best she could, which did not seem altogether | don, coming to the rescue; "her first polite.

My uncle was in the chief cabin reading the morning papers, which had come in just before we sailed. I came on deck with my work, and found Miss Tott with Mr. Brandon and Tom sitting on deckchairs under the awning. We were about ten miles south of Southampton; the sea was blue, the deep sky empty and bare, the sun hot, the air delightful.

"A shame to shut out such a firmament, is it not?" asked Mr. Brandon.

I replied without considering. "I should think so, if it was not absolutely empty and open."

"Indeed, and why?"

"Oh! because there is something so pathetic in those awful deeps of empty blue-something to fear in that waiting infinitude, with no islands up aloft, nothing that belongs to us; only God's great desert."

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You prefer to have some of it shut out; you want a tent over your head even when you are out of doors?"

"Yes, I like to feel enclosed, and in my home; clouds are very sublime no doubt, but not oppressively so."

Miss Tott, on hearing this, laid her hand on my arm, with an air not quite of reproof, but rather of tender pity.

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You speak as of some abstract truth that you have nothing to do with." "Miss Graham speaks of what will not always bear discussion," said Mr. Bran

words showed rather an over-sensitiveness to the influence of the sublime than the absence of it."

Miss Tott took no notice of him, but continued to gaze at me, and keeping her hand on my arm oppressed me further by saying with pensive compassion,

"But is there no solace for the heart in communing with nature in her wilder moods, and coming to be healed by her when your spirit is crushed?"

The tender, old words, "Is there no balm in Gilead?" flashed across my mind and a thought of "the physician there;" but I was much too shy to put my thought into words, and answered instead,

"I don't exactly know; I never am crushed."

"Ah!" she replied, withdrawing her hand, "you will be, some day."

"Don't, Miss Graham," exclaimed Mr. Brandon. "I wouldn't if I were you!"

I looked up; he and Tom sat opposite, enjoying the dialogue, but neither moved a muscle of his face; and, to my discomfiture, Miss Tott took up her crochet, and murmured some low sentence in which we distinguished the word "profane;" but she seemed to be more in sorrow than in anger, and as she worked, she handled the very needle with a tenderness that might have shown us the depth of her compassion for us.

And yet," she said, "we ought not to shrink from nature in her deeper sublimities; nature in the dark midnight sky, and Tom and Mr. Brandon glanced at one the green, surging billows nothing else another with eyes that seemed to say, can so well soothe the racked and bur-"We have got into a scrape," and presdened mind, and still the turbid passions ently, to my surprise, Tom said, in a tone of the soul." of apparent feeling,

I had often heard people say this kind of thing, and read it in books, but my narrow experience had not yet brought it before me, and Miss Tott uttered her speech in a way that I rebelled against a little. She seemed so much to feel the sweetness and wisdom of her own words, and to fancy that she was tenderly instilling so much truth into a hardened nature, that, instead of making any reply, I felt an unworthy wish to shake off her hand;

"There is a sort of yearning after the infinite, a kind of a brooding over the irrevocable past, looking as it were over the vessel's side, to see the waves of existence pass slowly by, which

"Ah!" exclaimed Miss Tott, interrupting him. "I thought those speaking features could not have deceived me. thought there must be a heart with such a voice as that."

I knew, of course, that he was amusing

himself at her expense, but I am not sure whether Mr. Brandon did.

"I say, old fellow," he exclaimed; "that sort of thing seems more like a dismal aggravation of a crushing process than a remedy."

"It's one that I always use," persisted Tom.

"Ah!" said Miss Tott again.

"Unless I'm crushed quite flat," continued Tom; " and then I find that nothing does me so much good as a bottle of soda-water-with- with a little brandy in it! What do you take, Brandon?" "I am sick of the very word," said Mr. Brandon, with a short laugh. "I shall answer with your sister that I never am crushed, I would rather be excused."

"Oh! but it's nonsense to struggle," said Tom, appealing to Miss Tott with his eyes. "You may kick and struggle as much as you like, but you must submit."

"I won't," he repeated, coolly. "At least, not if I can possibly help it; and not for long together, as long as I can speak a word or wag a finger I won't admit that I'm crushed. It was never intended that I should be. I hate the word. I hate the feeling it describes. Trouble does not come by chance - it is sent to make us rise, not to make us sink."

"All right," said Tom; "but we were not talking of any trouble worth mentioning! I like to hear him fire up," he continued, audaciously looking at us.

Miss Tott opened wide her dark eyes. "What is that?" she exclaimed, very tartly.

"We were not talking of the troubles of widows and orphans, you know, of pinching poverty and remorse for crime, or the agonies of broken bones and carking care," said Tom, addressing her with suave gravity. "We were talking of poetical yearnings, and general dissatisfac-| tion, of dyspeptic nervousness, and the discomfort of having nothing to do. I

am

sure I ought to speak feelingly of these ills. No one is a greater martyr to them than I am."

"It is very evident," said Miss Tott, with exceeding sharpness; "that none of you have ever known any trouble worth the name."

"Even if we have," I ventured to say, "surely the good has outweighed the evil."

"What, in this world of sorrow?" she answered. "You do not know what you are talking of."

"I beg your pardon. I did not mean to vex you.

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"I am not vexed: but your remark is contrary to reason, religion, and experience."

"To experience, perhaps; but is it contrary to religion?"

"Of course it is. Did not our Saviour say, 'In the world ye shall have tribulation?""

"Yes; but, perhaps he may have meant that his religion would never exempt them from ordinary ills, nor from that envy of the wicked which makes them sometimes persecute the good."

"I think he meant that they should be afflicted."

"But they knew that before," said Mr. Brandon. "They knew that earth was not paradise."

"Then you wish to prove that our Saviour's words meant nothing."

"On the contrary; they were meant (among other things) to inform the first disciples that in their day would come the worst trouble that the world had ever known. And now it is over-now the Christian nations are richer, wiser, healthier, and stronger than other people." "What do you mean by other people?" "All but professed Christians.'

Miss Tott was silent for a while, till seeming to remember a point that would yield her some triumph, she turned to Mr. Brandon and exclaimed,

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Pray, did you feel inclined during the shipwreck to think lightly of trouble, and to be as philosophical as you are to-day?" "I have often been in danger before," he answered, hastily; "so has Graham.”

"But what did you think?"

This was rather an unkind cut, and I thought, considering the circumstances, a little ungrateful. He was not willing to discuss the matter, so he tried to put her off by saying,

"I thought what a number of bones there were in the human frame."

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That was an odd reflection, surely." "Not at all, if most of them are bruised, and you have nothing to lie on but planks and spars."

"And after that?" she said, still questioning him as if for his good and to elicit some better feeling.

"Too much to be repeated easily. My Yankee friend and I had a great deal to do; but I believe we both felt very strongly the sweetness of life."

"And what next?" she continued, whereupon he gave way to the pressure and replied,

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"I felt the baser part of my nature rising up within me; thoughts so distinct,

that they seemed to come from without,
buzzed in my ears like wasps. They rep-
resented it as hard that the presence of
worn-out women and helpless children
should make my chance of life so much
fainter; hunger, wet, fatigue and pain,
things that bad stood aloof from me before
drew near, and made me feel their weight
and power.
They gnawed at my heart

and chilled my blood."
"But I suppose you did not feel
crushed?" said Miss Tott, in the clearest
tones of her high-pitched voice.

He seemed to dislike this question exceedingly, and yet to be determined to

answer.

66 No."

"What did you feel?" she asked.

"I felt that this world was utterly gone by, but that the other world was not so near as it had often been in times of no danger at all. It was not within our grasp; there was something first to be felt and to be seen - but though all was lost and as yet nothing gained I believed it would be gained. After that there came a time of forgetfulness, I did not hear, or feel, or see anything."

"And all this while you were not overwhelmed?"

"I did not expect to live after the first twenty-four hours, because the pitching of the raft put us in such imminent danger, but I did not despair."

66

"Ah! well, we need uot argue about the meaning of words; some of us are better able to bear distress than others; indeed, some of us feel it far less."

This was the very thing that I had anticipated when talking with him some days before, but he did not seem to remember it.

"Then the worst thing you felt when you became exhausted," she said, "was a kind of forgetfulness."

"Oh no, it was not!" he exclaimed; and such a look of horror leapt out of his eyes as for the moment quite astonished

us.

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Curiosity got the better of Miss Tott here. She quite forgot to point the obvious moral.

"Was that in the yacht?" she said.

"I think it must have been, because of the steps; besides what enabled me at last to struggle out of that blackness and horror was the touch of something soft on my forehead. I gathered sense by it to perceive that I was still in the body, and I opened my eyes."

He paused, and a smile came over his face.

"I saw a vision," he said; "I knew not what else it could be, and I saw light."

"Indeed!" exclaimed Miss Tott. Here was an experience that just suited her. "What was the vision?"

"I saw a small hand -a child's hand I thought it was at first, and it appeared to hover before my face. There was something bright in it, through which the light was shining. The child-the angel whatever it might be was leaning over me, but I only saw the hand. It offered me bread, too; but my senses were so dim that I connected something sacramental with this bread and wine, and would not touch it because my hands and my lips were so begrimed. Then I went back into the blackness again and the hand floated away; but a voice, inexpressibly sweet and pathetic, appeared to be reasoning with me. I heard the sound, but could not understand the words; and, after what seemed to be a mighty struggle, I got my eyes open, and there was the hand again, and the long folds of a gown floated down at my side."

"Was it very beautiful?" said Miss Tott, in a tone of pleasure and awe; "was it in white?"

"It was my sister, of course," exclaimed Tom; for he saw that she was completely mystified. "It was Dorothea."

Never shall I forget the look of astonishment and contempt she darted at me when she heard this; she drew up her head and set her lips as if she scorned me, and would not on any account have betrayed such interest if she could only have known what this really meant.

He certainly had not intended to mislead, and answered her last question without looking at her.

He seemed to be collecting his thoughts. "We had been lashed together," he said, “and I have some sort of recollection of going down and down an almost endless flight of steps, and thinking that I must and would get to the bottom before | I died. After that came a terrible time, "Yes, in white, I think. I did not see when I seemed to be hemmed in by some- the face, and the hand appeared to hover thing intensely black, and an awful thought before me till I came more to myself. Then pressed me down, that I was dead and I drank the wine and ate something, and it was not what I had expected! I felt was in this world again." sure I was dead, and I appeared to go spinning on with that thought for years.'

Miss Tott attracted my attention the more strongly because she was the first

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