the stolid Deacon Tourtelot about his official
duties; and it was further reported that he had talked open infidelity
with a young physician who had recently established himself in Ashfield,
and who plumed himself--until his tardy practice taught him better--upon
certain arrogant physiological notions with regard to death and disease
that were quite unbiblical. Long ago the Doctor had given over open
expostulation; every such talk seemed to evoke a new and more airy and
more adventurous demon in the backslidden Reuben. The good man half
feared to cast his eye over the books he might be reading. If it were
Voltaire, if it were Hume, he feared lest his rebuke and anathema should
give a more appetizing zest.

But he prayed--ah, how he prayed! with the dead Rachel in his
thought--as if (and this surely cannot be Popishly wicked)--as if she,
too, in some sphere far remote, might with angel voice add tender
entreaty to the prayer, whose burden, morning after morning and night
after night, was the name and the hope of her boy.

And Adele? Well, Reuben pitied Adele,--pitied her subjection to the iron
frowns of Miss Eliza; and almost the only earnest words he spoke in
those days were little quiet words of good cheer for the French girl.
And when Miss Eliza whispered him, as she did, that the poor child's
fortune was gone, and her future insecure, Reuben, with a brave sort of
antagonism, made his words of cheer and good-feeling even more frequent
than ever. But about his passing and kindly attentions to Adele there
was that air of gay mockery which overlaid his whole life, and which
neither invited nor admitted of any profound acknowledgement. His
kindest words--and some of them, so far as mere language went, were
exuberantly tender--were met always by a half-saddened air of
thankfulness and a little restrained pressure of the hand, as if Adele
had said,--"Not in earnest yet, Reuben! Earnest in nothing!"

WIND THE CLOCK.

Warden, wind the clock again;
Mighty years are going on,
Through the shadow and the dream,
And the happy-hearted dawn.
Wind again, wind again,--
Fifty hundred years are gone.

Through the harvest and the need,
Wealthy June and dewy May,
Grew the year from the old,
Grows to-morrow from to-day.
Wind again, wind again,--
Who can keep the years at bay?

Four-and-twenty conjurers
Lie in wait on land and sea,
Plucking down the startl