r and purer, if some absurd
trifle had not seemed to play into the hands, as it were, of your
destiny, and to set you in a path whereof no one could at the time
foresee the end.

Some one had looked out their train in last month's Bradshaw, unwitting
of the autumn alterations, and was kept from you till the next day. You
took the left instead of the right side of the square on your way home,
or you stood for a minute gossiping at your neighbour's door, and there
came by some one who ultimately altered and embittered your whole life,
and who, but for that accidental meeting, you would, probably, never have
seen again; or some evil adviser was at hand, whilst one whose opinion
you revered, and whose timely help would have saved you from taking that
false step you ever after regretted, was kept to the house, by Heaven
knows what ridiculous trifle--a cold in the head, or finger-ache--and
did not see you to warn and to keep you back from your own folly until it
was too late.

People say these things are ordered for us. I do not know; it may be so,
but sometimes it seems rather as if we were irresponsible puppets, tossed
and buffeted about, blindly and helplessly, upon life's river, as
fluttering dead leaves are danced wildly along the swift current of a
Highland stream. Such a trifle might have saved us! yet there was no
pitying hand put forth to avert that which, in our human blindness,
appeared to us to be as unimportant as any other incident of our lives.

Life is an unsolvable problem. Shall we ever, in some other world,
I wonder, read its riddles aright?

All these moral dissertations have been called forth because Vera Nevill
went to stay for a week at Shadonake. If she had known--what we none of
us know--the future, she doubtless would have stayed away. Fate--a
beneficent fate, indeed--made, I am bound to confess, a valiant effort in
her behalf. Little Minnie fell ill the day before her departure; and the
symptoms were such that everybody in the house believed that she was
sickening for scarlet fever. The doctor, however, having been hastily
summoned, pronounced the disease to be an infantile complaint of a
harmless and innocuous nature, which he dignified by the delusively
poetical name of "Rosalia."

"It is not infectious, Mr. Smee, I hope?" asked Marion, anxiously.
"Nothing to prevent my sister going to stay at the Millers' to morrow?"

"Not in the least infectious, Mrs. Daintree, and anybody in the house can