ress the pretty, blue-eyed
Madge.

It is late afternoon when you come in sight of the tall sycamores that
shade your home; you shudder now, lest you may meet any whom you once
knew. The first keen grief of youth seeks little of the sympathy of
companions: it lies--with a sensitive man--bounded within the narrowest
circles of the heart. They only who hold the key to its innermost
recesses can speak consolation. Years will make a change;--as the Summer
grows in fierce heats, the balminess of the violet banks of Spring is
lost in the odors of a thousand flowers;--the heart, as it gains in age,
loses freshness, but wins breadth.

----Throw a pebble into the brook at its source, and the agitation is
terrible, and the ripples chafe madly their narrowed banks;--throw in a
pebble when the brook has become a river, and you see a few circles,
widening and widening and widening, until they are lost in the gentle
every-day murmur of its life!

You draw your hat over your eyes, as you walk toward the familiar door:
the yard is silent; the night is falling gloomily; a few katydids are
crying in the trees. The mother's window, where at such a season as this
it was her custom to sit watching your play, is shut, and the blinds are
closed over it. The honeysuckle, which grew over the window, and which
she loved so much, has flung out its branches carelessly; and the
spiders have hung their foul nets upon its tendrils.

And she, who made that home so dear to your boyhood, so real to your
after-years,--standing amid all the flights of your youthful ambition,
and your paltry cares (for they seem paltry now), and your doubts, and
anxieties and weaknesses of heart, like the light of your hope--burning
ever there under the shadow of the sycamores,--a holy beacon, by whose
guidance you always came to a sweet haven, and to a refuge from all your
toils,--is gone, gone forever!

The father is there indeed,--beloved, respected, esteemed; but the
boyish heart, whose old life is now reviving, leans more readily and
more kindly into that void where once beat the heart of a mother.

Nelly is there,--cherished now with all the added love that is stricken
off from her who has left you forever. Nelly meets you at the door.

----"Clarence!"

----"Nelly!"

There are no other words; but you feel her tears as the kiss of welcome
is given. With your hand joined in hers, you walk down the hall into the
old, familiar room,--not with the jaunty college