r little thing, and took her hand in hers, and
laid her cheek upon the pillow, and in less than five minutes she was
sound asleep, and breathing as she hadn't breathed before since she had
been fished out of the water, nearly three weeks back, on her way to
Fairy-land.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A FADED LEAF OF HISTORY.

BY REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

One quiet, snowy afternoon this winter, I found in a dark corner of one
of the oldest libraries in the country a curious pamphlet. It fell into
my hands like a bit of old age and darkness itself. The pages were
coffee-colored, and worn thin and ragged at the edges, like rotting
leaves in fall; they had grown clammy to the touch, too, from the grasp
of so many dead years. There was a peculiar smell about the book which
it had carried down from the days when young William Penn went up and
down the clay-paths of his village of Philadelphia, stopping to watch
the settlers fishing in the clear ponds or to speak to the gangs of
yellow-painted Indians coming in with peltry from the adjacent forest.

The leaves were scribbled over with the name of John,--"John," in a
cramped, childish hand. His father's book, no doubt, and the writing a
bit of boyish mischief. Outside now, in the street, the boys were
pelting each other with snowballs, just as this John had done in the
clay-paths. But for nearly two hundred years his bones had been crumbled
into lime and his flesh gone back into grass and roots. Yet here he was,
a boy still; here was the old pamphlet and the scrawl in yellowing ink,
with the smell about it still.

_Printed by Rainier Janssen_, 1698. I turned over the leaves, expecting
to find a sermon preached before Andros, "for the conversion of
Sadducees," or some "Report of the Condition of the Principalities of
New Netherland, or New Sweden, for the Use of the Lord's High
Proprietors thereof" (for of such precious dead dust this library is
full); but I found, instead, wrapped in weighty sentences and backed by
the gravest and most ponderous testimony, the story of a baby, "a
Sucking Child six Months old." It was like a live seed in the hand of a
mummy. The story of a baby and a boy and an aged man, in "the devouring
Waves of the Sea; and also among the cruel devouring Jaws of inhuman
Canibals." There were, it is true, other divers persons in the company,
by one of whom the book is written. But the divers persons seemed to me
to