t the superscription. The ghost
was gazing at it, too, with startled interest.

"What beautiful writing it is, pa," murmured the young girl. "Who
wrote it to you? It looks yellow enough to have been written a
long time since."

"Fifteen years ago, Netty. When you were a baby. And the hand that
wrote it has been cold for all that time."

He spoke with a solemn sadness, as if memory lingered with the
heart of fifteen years ago, on an old grave. The dim figure by his
side had bowed its head, and all was still.

"It is strange," he resumed, speaking vacantly and slowly, "I have
not thought of him for so long a time, and to-day--especially this
evening--I have felt as if he were constantly near me. It is a
singular feeling."

He put his left hand to his forehead, and mused,--his right clasped
his daughter's shoulder. The phantom slowly raised its head, and
gazed at him with a look of unutterable tenderness.

"Who was he, father?" she asked with a hushed voice.

"A young man, an author, a poet. He had been my dearest friend,
when we were boys; and, though I lost sight of him for years,--he
led an erratic life,--we were friends when he died. Poor, poor
fellow! Well, he is at peace."

The stern voice had saddened, and was almost tremulous. The spectral
form was still.

"How did he die, father?"

"A long story, darling," he replied, gravely, "and a sad one. He
was very poor and proud. He was a genius,--that is, a person without
an atom of practical talent. His parents died, the last, his mother,
when he was near manhood. I was in college then. Thrown upon the
world, he picked up a scanty subsistence with his pen, for a time.
I could have got him a place in the counting-house, but he would
not take it; in fact, he wasn't fit for it. You can't harness
Pegasus to the cart, you know. Besides, he despised mercantile
life, without reason, of course; but he was always notional. His
love of literature was one of the rocks he foundered on. He was
n't successful; his best compositions were too delicate, fanciful,
to please the popular taste; and then he was full of the radical
and fanatical notions which infected so many people at that time
in New England, and infect them now, for that matter; and his
sublimated, impracticable ideas and principles, which he kept till
his dying day, and which, I confess, alienated me from him, always
staved off his chances of success. Consequently, he never rose
above the drudgery of some em