owy folds, and she stood like a _petite_
Venus rising from the froth. Then brother and sister braided their voices
in a simple prayer to Our Father in Heaven. They prayed for kind old Nanny,
and for one on the wide sea.

"When will father come home?" asked Bell, for the hundredth time that day.

"It will not be long now. When the boughs of the cherry trees are an inch
deep with ice, and the logs crackle in the fire-place--then he will come.
Let us go to sleep, and dream of him."

And thus, hand in hand, the two went in to Dream-land--

The world of Sleep,
The beautiful old World!
The dreamy Palestine of pilgrim Thought!
The Lotus Garden, where the soul may lie
Lost in elysium, while the music moan
Of some unearthly river, faintly caught,
Seems like the whispering of Angels, blown
Upon aeolian harp-strings! And we change
Into a seeming something that is not!

II.

_Ah, yes! with joy the April rain
Thrills nature's breast; but mine with pain
Sigheth: "He will not come again!"_

ALBERT LAIGHTON.

II.

THE DEAD HOPE.

_Time's Changes--Fall-down Castles--Little Bell Waiting--When will Father
Come Home?--Little Bell Weary--What the Sea said--Never more._

Longfellow beautifully asks in Hyperion, "What is Time, but the shadow of
the hour-hand on a dial-plate?"

The flowers of the earth and the hearts of men are dial-plates. The shadows
coming and going on them are the hour-hands; when a flower fades, or a
heart ceases to beat, it is only a weight run down. The whole universe is
but one immense time-piece, throbbing with innumerable wheels, heavy with
weights, and wearing itself away! Desire is a restless pendulum, one end
linked to the heart, and the other pointing downward!

A year had added another link to that chain which stretches through
eternity. A year! Battles lost and won: nations in mourning for their dead:
ships gone down at sea; and new paths worn to graveyards!

O, for the castles that blow down in a year!

But time fell gently on the inmates of the Old House. The trees and vines
were a little larger; and winter had somewhat browned the gables. Bell was
paler and more beautiful, and Mortimer was still the same dreamer.

There was a question which haunted the Old House. It was heard in the
garden, at "the round window," and on the stair.

"When will father come home?"

The months flew away, lik