as wine. Mercy was in one of her most mirthful moods. She
frolicked with the negro children, and decked their little woolly heads
with wreaths of golden-rod, till they looked as fantastic as dancing
monkeys. She gathered great sheaves of ferns and blue gentians and asters,
until the Parson implored her to "leave a few just for the poor sun to
shine on." The paths winding among "The Cedars" were in some places
thick-set with white eupatoriums, which were now in full, feathery flower,
some of them so old that, as you brushed past them, a cloud of the fine
thread-like petals flew in all directions. Mercy gathered branch after
branch of these, but threw them away impatiently, as the flowers fell off,
leaving the stems bare.

"Oh, dear!" she exclaimed. "Nature wants some seeds, I suppose; but I want
flowers. What becomes of the poor flower, any way? it lives such a short
while; all its beauty and grace sacrificed to the making of a seed for
next year."

"That's the way with every thing in life, dear child," said Parson
Dorrance. "The thing that shall be is the thing for which all the powers
of nature are at work. We, you and Lizzy and I, will drop off our stems
presently,--I, a good deal the first, for you and Lizzy have the blessing
of youth, but I am old."

"You are not old! You are the youngest person I know," exclaimed Mercy,
impetuously. "You will never be old, Mr. Dorrance, not if you should live
to be as old as--as old as the Wandering Jew!"

Mercy's eyes were fixed intently on the Parson's face; but she did not
note the deep flush which rose to his very hair, as she said these words.
She was thinking only of the glorious soul, and seeing only its shining
through the outer tabernacle. Lizzy Hunter, however, saw the flush, and
knew what it meant, and her heart gave a leap of joy. "Now he can see that
Mercy never thinks of him as an old man, and never would," she thought to
herself; and while her hands were idly playing with her flowers and
mosses, and her face looked as innocent and care-free as a baby's, her
brain was weaving plots of the most complicated devices for hastening on
the future which began to look to her so assured for these two.

They were sitting on a mossy mound in the shadow of great cedar-trees. The
fields around "The Cedars" were filled with low mounds, like velvet
cushions: some of them were merely a mat of moss over great rocks; some of
them were soft yielding masses of moss, low cornel, blue