es of letters, and drew
out his mother's little box.

There lay the miniature, still and open-eyed as he had left it. There
too lay the bit of paper, brown and dry, with the hymn and the few words
of sorrow written thereon. He looked at the portrait, but did not open
the folded paper. Then first he thought whether there might not be
something more in the box: what he had taken for the bottom seemed to
be a tray. He lifted it by two little ears of ribbon, and there,
underneath, lay a letter addressed to his father, in the same
old-fashioned handwriting as the hymn. It was sealed with brown wax,
full of spangles, impressed with a bush of something--he could not tell
whether rushes or reeds or flags. Of course he dared not open it. His
holy mother's words to his erring father must be sacred even from the
eyes of their son. But what other or fitter messenger than himself could
bear it to its destination? It was for this that he had been guided to
it.

For years he had regarded the finding of his father as the first duty of
his manhood: it was as if his mother had now given her sanction to the
quest, with this letter to carry to the husband who, however he might
have erred, was yet dear to her. He replaced it in the box, but the
box no more on the forsaken shelf with its dreary barricade of soulless
records. He carried it with him, and laid it in the bottom of his box,
which henceforth he kept carefully locked: there lay as it were the
pledge of his father's salvation, and his mother's redemption from an
eternal grief.

He turned to his equation: it had cleared itself up; he worked it out in
five minutes. Betty came to tell him that the dinner was ready, and he
went down, peaceful and hopeful, to his grandmother.

While at home he never worked in the evenings: it was bad enough to have
to do so at college. Hence nature had a chance with him again. Blessings
on the wintry blasts that broke into the first youth of Summer! They
made him feel what summer was! Blessings on the cheerless days of rain,
and even of sleet and hail, that would shove the reluctant year back
into January. The fair face of Spring, with her tears dropping upon her
quenchless smiles, peeped in suppressed triumph from behind the growing
corn and the budding sallows on the river-bank. Nay, even when the snow
came once more in defiance of calendars, it was but a background from
which the near genesis should 'stick fiery off.'

In general he had a lonely