nnection or cause, rose suddenly within her--animating, awakening,
inspiring. She started up. 'The garden, father--the garden!' she
cried breathlessly. 'Remember the food that grows in our garden below!
Be comforted, we have provision left yet--God has not deserted us!'

He raised his face while she spoke; his features assumed a deeper
mournfulness and hopelessness of expression; he looked upon her in
ominous silence, and laid his trembling fingers on her arm to detain
her, when she hurriedly attempted to quit the room.

'Do not forbid me to depart,' she anxiously pleaded. 'To me every
corner in the garden is known; for it was my possession in our happier
days--our last hopes rest in the garden, and I must search through it
without delay! Bear with me,' she added, in low and melancholy
tones--'bear with me, dear father, in all that I would now do! I have
suffered, since we parted, a bitter affliction, which clings dark and
heavy to all my thoughts--there is no consolation for me but the
privilege of caring for your welfare--my only hope of comfort is in the
employment of aiding you!'

The old man's hand had pressed heavier on her arm while she addressed
him; but when she ceased it dropped from her, and he bent his head in
speechless submission to her entreaty.

For one moment she lingered, looking on him silent as himself; the
next, she left the apartment with hasty and uncertain steps.

On reaching the garden, she unconsciously took the path leading to the
bank where she had once loved to play secretly upon her lute and to
look on the distant mountains reposing in the warm atmosphere which
summer evenings shed over their blue expanse. How eloquent was this
little plot of ground of the quiet events now for ever gone by!--of the
joys, the hopes, the happy occupations, which rise with the day that
chronicles them, and pass like that day, never to return the
same!--which the memory alone can preserve as they were, and the heart
can never resume but in a changed form, divested of the presence of the
companion of the incident of the departed moment, which formed the
charm of the past and makes the imperfection of the present.

Tender and thronging were the remembrances which the surrounding
prospect called up, as the sad mistress of the garden looked again on
her little domain! She saw the bank where she could never more sit to
sing with a renewal of the same feelings which had once inspired her
music; she sa