, I found
A half-healed, curious wound,
An ancient scar in the bark, but no initial of mine!

Then the wise old boughs overhead
Took counsel together, and said,--
And the buzz of their leafy lips like a murmur of prophecy passed,--
"He is busily carving a name
In the tough old wrinkles of fame;
But, cut he as deep as he may, the lines will close over at last!"

Sadly I pondered awhile,
Then I lifted my soul with a smile,
And I said,--"Not cheerful men, but anxious children are we,
Still hurting ourselves with the knife,
As we toil at the letters of life,
Just marring a little the rind, never piercing the heart of the tree."

And now by the rivulet's brink
I leisurely saunter, and think
How idle this strife will appear when circling ages have run,
If then the real I am
Descend from the heavenly calm,
To trace where the shadow I seem once flitted awhile in the sun.

AGNES OF SORRENTO.

CHAPTER XII.

PERPLEXITIES.

Agnes returned from the confessional with more sadness than her simple
life had ever known before. The agitation of her confessor, the
tremulous eagerness of his words, the alternations of severity and
tenderness in his manner to her, all struck her only as indications of
the very grave danger in which she was placed, and the awfulness of the
sin and condemnation which oppressed the soul of one for whom she was
conscious of a deep and strange interest.

She had the undoubting, uninquiring reverence which a Christianly
educated child of those times might entertain for the visible head of
the Christian Church, all whose doings were to be regarded with an awful
veneration which never even raised a question.

That the Papal throne was now filled by a man who had bought his
election with the wages of iniquity, and dispensed its powers and
offices with sole reference to the aggrandizement of a family proverbial
for brutality and obscenity, was a fact well known to the reasoning and
enlightened orders of society at this time; but it did not penetrate
into those lowly valleys where the sheep of the Lord humbly pastured,
innocently unconscious of the frauds and violence by which their dearest
interests were bought and sold.

The Christian faith we now hold, who boast our enlightened
Protestantism, has been transmitted to us through the hearts and hands
of such,--who, while princes wrangled with Pope, and Pope with princes,
knew nothing of it all, but, i