uld see the home he was
leaving, perhaps forever. Here he stopped for a few moments, leaned
his rifle and bundle against a large, long-limbed, butter-nut, and sat
down upon a decaying log at its foot, to gaze, for the last time, upon
the old mansion which had been his home from earliest remembrance.

It has been said that there are times when the stoniest hearts are
softened; when the sternest natures are made mild, and when the most
abandoned are like little children. That moment had now come for David
White. It was strange, passing strange. He had committed crime upon
crime, yet scarcely felt a moment's remorse; for years he had acted
toward his mother as if his whole soul were naught but selfishness;
but when he came to leave that mother, that old homestead, and all the
bright and beautiful objects around it, a softness breathed over his
iron-nature, and the fount of tears sent up its gushing libations. I
have often thought that such feelings must be akin to those
mysterious, indefinable, and gloomy forebodings--those dim and
indescribable fears and shrinkings within self, that sometimes come
over our spirits like a creeping, icy thrill--in the midst of a giddy
round of pleasure, or, as we stand by the grave's brink to see our
friends entombed, and yet which no earthly or human cause is able to
explain.

He was beholding everything for the last time, and he looked around
him as the dying man upon his nearest friends, when he feels the cold
hand of death pressed heavily upon his brow, and the silver chords of
his spirit's harp gathering to their utmost tension, and snapping, one
by one, like reeds before the blast. There was the home which had
sheltered him in his helplessness, glowing in a shower of soft
moonlight, and seeming more beautiful than he ever saw it before.
There the only true love this wide world of cold and bitter
heartlessness can know, beamed on his infant eyes; and there he had
spent the only happy moments in all his boyhood existence. In that
little room he had first learned to pray, and there, first forgotten
the duty. There his mother had watched over him night after night,
when he had a burning fever, and the grave had half-opened its
terrible portals for his entrance. And now he was going to abandon
that mother who had loved and cherished him so fondly--leave her all
alone, a joyless, childless widow, and for what cause? He choked down
the emotion that rose to his mind, and turned hurriedly in