is gone--with the rest!

Your thought--wayward now, and flickering--runs over the old days with
quick and fevered step; it brings back, faintly as it may, the noisy
joys, and the safety, that belonged to the old garret-roof; it figures
again the image of that calm-faced father,--long since sleeping beside
your mother; it rests like a shadow upon the night when Charlie died; it
grasps the old figures of the schoolroom, and kindles again (how strange
is memory) the fire that shed its lustre upon the curtains, and the
ceiling, as you lay groaning with your first hours of sickness.

Your flitting recollection brings back with gushes of exultation the
figure of that little, blue-eyed hoiden,--Madge,--as she came with her
work to pass the long evenings with Nelly; it calls again the shy
glances that you cast upon her, and your _naive_ ignorance of all the
little counter-play that might well have passed between Frank and Nelly.
Your mother's form too, clear and distinct, comes upon the wave of your
rocking thought; her smile touches you now in age as it never touched
you in boyhood.

The image of that fair Miss Dalton, who led your fancy into such mad
captivity, glides across your vision like the fragment of a crazy dream
long gone by. The country home, where lived the grandfather of Frank,
gleams kindly in the sunlight of your memory; and still,--poor, blind
Fanny--long since gathered to that rest where her closed eyes will open
upon visions of joy--draws forth a sigh of pity.

Then comes up that sweetest and brightest vision of love, and the doubt
and care which ran before it,--when your hope groped eagerly through
your pride and worldliness toward the sainted purity of her whom you
know to be--all too good,--when you trembled at the thought of your own
vices and blackness in the presence of her who seemed virtue's self. And
even now your old heart bounds with joy as you recall the first timid
assurance that you were blessed in the possession of her love, and that
you might live in her smiles.

Your thought runs like floating melody over the calm joy that followed
you through so many years,--to the prattling children, who were there to
bless your path. How poor seem now your transports, as you met their
childish embraces, and mingled in their childish employ; how utterly
weak the actual, when compared with that glow of affection which memory
lends to the scene!

Yet all this is gone; and the anxieties are gone, which k