urch up over the hills! and the long Sunday walk at mother's
side with the sunshine glowing on the dusty road and beating on the
river flowing far beyond! The same road, the same river of Monday and
Tuesday but how different it looked to the boy; almost like another
scene, as if Sunday clothes were on the world as well as upon his
restless little limbs. How he longed for it to be Monday though he did
not say so; and what a different day Saturday would have been if only
there was no long, sleepy Sunday to follow it.

But the mother! She did not dread that day. Her eyes used to brighten
when the bell began to ring from the old church steeple. Her eyes! how
they mingled with every picture! They seemed to fill the night. What a
sparkle they had, yet how they used to soften at his few hurried
caresses. He was always too busy for kisses; there were the snares in
the north woods to be looked after; the nest in the apple-tree to be
inquired into; the skates to be ground before the river froze over; the
nuts to be gathered and stored in that same old garret chamber under the
eaves. But now how vividly her least look comes back to the tired man,
from the glance of wistful sympathy with which she met his childish
disappointments to the flash of joy that hailed his equally childish
delights.

And another scene there is in the embers to-night; a remembrance of
later days when the mother with her love and yearning was laid low in
the grave, and manhood had learned its first lessons of passion and
ambition from the glance of younger eyes and the smile of riper lips.
Not the picture of a woman, however; that was already present beside
him, shining from its panel with an insistence that not even the putting
out of the lights could quite quench or subdue, but of a child young,
pure and beautiful, sitting by the river in the glow of a June sunshine,
gazing at the hills of his boyhood's home with a look on her face such
as he had never before seen on that of child or woman. A simple picture
with a simple villager's daughter for its centre, but as he mused upon
it to-night, the success and triumph of the last ten years faded from
his sight like the ashes that fell at his feet, and he found himself
questioning in vain as to what better thing he had met in all the walks
of his busy life than that young child's innocence and faith as they
shone upon him that day from her soft uplifted eyes.

He had been sitting the whole warm noontide at the