eyes. The voice was tender and the eyes were kindly.

"O honest thrush," cried the rose, "is it you who have come to reproach
me for my folly?"

"No, no, dear rose," said the thrush, "how should I speak ill to you?
Come, rest your poor head upon my breast, and let me bear you home."

"Let me rather die here," sighed the rose, "for it was here that my
folly brought me. How could I go back with you whom I never so much as
smiled upon? And do they not hate and deride me in the valley? I
would rather die here in misery than there in shame!"

"Poor, broken flower, they love you," urged the thrush. "They grieve
for you; let me bear you back where the mother-tree will shade you, and
where the south wind will nurse you--for--for he loves you."

So the thrush bore back the withering rose to her home in the quiet
valley.

"So she has come back, has she?" sneered the dormouse. "Well, she has
impudence, if nothing else!"

"She was pretty once," said the old hoptoad; "but she lost her
opportunity when I made up my mind to go wooing a certain glossy damsel
in the hedge."

The rose-tree reached out her motherly arms to welcome her dying
daughter, and she said: "Rest here, dear one, and let me rock you to
repose."

It was evening in the quiet valley now. Where was the south wind that
he came not with his wooing? He had flown to the North, for that day
he had heard the spring-time's voice a-calling, and he went in answer
to its summons. Everything was still. "Chirp-chirp, chirp-chirp,
chirp-chirp," piped the three crickets, and forthwith the fairy boy and
the elf-prince danced from their habitations. Their little feet
tinkled over the clover and the daisies.

"Hush, little folk," cried the rose-tree. "Do not dance to-night,--the
rose is dying."

But they danced on. The rose did not hear them; she heard only the
voice of the thrush, who perched in the linden yonder, and, with a
breaking heart, sung to the dying flower.

THE PAGAN SEAL-WIFE[1]

It is to tell of Harold, the son of Egbert, the son of Ib; comely was
he to look upon, and a braver than he lived not in these islands, nor
one more beloved of all people. But it chanced upon a time, while he
was still in early manhood, that a grievous sorrow befell him; for on a
day his mother Eleanor came to her end in this full evil wise. It was
her intent to go unto the neighboring island, where grazed the goats
and the kine, and it fortuned that, as she