e gayly, and smiled the old smile, for the gaunt form of
sickness had never been among us children, and we knew not how his touch
made the head sick and the heart faint.

The day looked forward to so anxiously dawned at last; but in the dim
chamber of Rosalie the light fell sad. I must go alone.

We had always been together before, at work and in play, asleep and
awake, and I lingered long ere I would be persuaded to leave her; but
when she smiled and said the fresh-gathered nuts and shining apples
would make her glad, I wiped her forehead, and turning quickly away that
she might not see my tears, was speedily wading through winrows of dead
leaves.

The sensations of that day I shall never forget; a vague and trembling
fear of some coming evil, I knew not what, made me often start as the
shadows drifted past me, or a bough crackled beneath my feet.

From the low, shrubby hawthorns, I gathered the small red apples, and
from beneath the maples, picked by their slim golden stems the notched
and gorgeous leaves. The wind fingered playfully my hair, and clouds of
birds went whirring through the tree-tops; but no sight nor sound could
divide my thoughts from her whose voice had so often filled with music
these solitary places.

I remember when first the fear distinctly defined itself. I was seated
on a mossy log, counting the treasures which I had been gathering, when
the clatter of hoof-strokes on the clayey and hard-beaten road arrested
my attention, and, looking up--for the wood thinned off in the direction
of the highway, and left it distinctly in view--I saw Doctor H----,
the physician, in attendance upon my sick companion. The visit was an
unseasonable one. She, whom I loved so, might never come with me to the
woods any more.

Where the hill sloped to the roadside, and the trees, as I said, were
but few, was the village graveyard. No friend of mine, no one whom I had
ever known or loved, was buried there--yet with a child's instinctive
dread of death, I had ever passed its shaggy solitude (for shrubs and
trees grew there wild and unattended) with a hurried step and averted
face.

Now, for the first time in my life, I walked voluntarily thitherward,
and climbing on a log by the fence-side, gazed long and earnestly
within. I stood beneath a tall locust-tree, and the small, round leaves;
yellow now as the long cloud-bar across the sunset, kept dropping, and
dropping at my feet, till all the faded grass was covered