reaper will come, and the golden grain will bow before him, for this is
Nature's law; but in its death lies the highest work of its circling
life. All was fair; but this is fairest of all. It dies, indeed, but
only to continue its beneficence; and with fresh beauty and new vigor it
shall blossom for other springs.

Fainter, but distinctly still, comes the chilling voice,--

"Though every summer green the plain,
This harvest cannot bloom again."

False still! This harvest shall bloom again in perpetual and
ever-increasing loveliness. It shall leap in the grace of the
lithe-limbed steed, it shall foam in the milk of gentle-hearted cows, it
shall shine in the splendor of light-winged birds, it shall sleep in the
baby's dimple, toss in the child's fair curls, and blush in the
maiden's-cheek. Nay, by some inward way, it shall spring again in the
green pastures of the soul, blossoming in great thoughts, in kindly
words, in Christian deeds, till the soil that cherished it shall seem to
seeing eyes all consecrate, and the Earth that flowers such growths
shall be Eden, the Garden of God.

DOCTOR JOHNS.

XXXI.

Madame Arles was a mild and quiet little woman, with a singular absence
of that vivacity which most people are disposed to attribute to all of
French blood. Her age--so far as one could judge from outward
indications--might have been anywhere from twenty-eight to forty. There
were no wrinkles in that smooth, calm forehead of hers; and if there
were lines of gray amid her hair, this indication of age was so
contradicted by the youthfulness of her eye, that a keen observer would
have been disposed to attribute it rather to some weight of past grief
that had left its silvery imprint than to the mere dull burden of her
years.

There are those who stolidly measure a twelve-month always by its count,
and age by such token as a gray head; but who has not had experience of
months so piled with life that two or three or four of them count more
upon the scale of mortality than a score of other and sunny ones? Who
cannot reckon such? Who, looking back, cannot summon to his thought some
passage of a week in which he seemed to stride toward the END with a
crazy swiftness, and under which he felt that every outward indication
of age was deepening its traces with a wondrous surety? Ay, we slip, we
are forged upon the anvil of Time,--God, who deals the blows, only knows
how fast!

Yet in Madame Arles we have no