ed, finding their way
softly to each other's sorrows and sympathies, each meeting some
counterpart to the other's experience of life, and startled to see how
the different, yet parallel, lessons they had been taught by suffering
had led them step by step to the same serene acquiescence in the
orderings of that Supreme Wisdom which they both devoutly recognized.

Old Sophy was at the window and saw them walking up and down the
garden-alleys. She watched them as her grandfather the savage watched
the figures that moved among the trees when a hostile tribe was lurking
about his mountain.

"There'll be a weddin' in the ol' house," she said, "before there's
roses on them bushes ag'in. But it won' be my poor Elsie's weddin', 'n'
Ol' Sophy won' be there."

When Helen prayed in the silence of her soul that evening, it was not
that Elsie's life might be spared. She dared not ask that as a favor of
Heaven. What could life be to her but a perpetual anguish, and to those
about her an ever-present terror? Might she but be so influenced by
divine grace, that what in her was most truly human, most purely
woman-like, should overcome the dark, cold, unmentionable instinct which
had pervaded her being like a subtile poison: that was all she could
ask, and the rest she left to a higher wisdom and tenderer love than her
own.

* * * * *

GYMNASTICS.

So your zeal for physical training begins to wane a little, my friend? I
thought it would, in your particular case, because it began too ardently
and was concentrated too exclusively on your one hobby of pedestrianism.
Just now you are literally under the weather. It is the equinoctial
storm. No matter, you say; did not Olmsted foot it over England under
an umbrella? did not Wordsworth regularly walk every guest round
Windermere, the day after arrival, rain or shine? So, the day before
yesterday, you did your four miles out, on the Northern turnpike, and
returned splashed to the waist; and yesterday you walked three miles
out, on the Southern turnpike, and came back soaked to the knees. To-day
the storm is slightly increasing, but you are dry thus far, and wish to
remain so; exercise is a humbug; you will give it all up, and go to the
Chess-Club. Don't go to the Chess-Club; come with me to the Gymnasium.

Chess may be all very well to tax with tough problems a brain otherwise
inert, to vary a monotonous day with small events, to keep one awake
during