real evil could come to the loving
spirit. The shadow of earth had fallen on his heart, but the light of
heaven still beamed brightly there. Years passed with Mr. Sinclair in
that deep quiet of the soul which is "the sober certainty of waking
bliss." His labors were labors of love, and he was welcomed to repose by
all those charms which woman's taste and woman's tenderness can bring
clustering around the home of him to whom her heart is devoted. But a
darker trial than any he had yet known awaited him.

War is in our borders, and that quiet town in which Mr. Sinclair's life
has passed is destined to feel its heaviest curse. Its streets are
filled with soldiery. The dark canopy of smoke from which now and then a
lurid flame shoots upward, shows that their work is destruction, and
that they will do it well. Terrified women flit hither and thither,
mingling their shrieks in a wild and fiend-like concert with the crack
of musketry, the falling of houses, and the loud huzzas and fierce
outcries of excited men. At a distance from that quarter in which the
strife commenced, stands a simple village church, within whose shadow
many of those who had worshipped in its walls during the last half
century, have lain down to rest from the toils of life. No proud
mausoleum shuts the sunshine from those lowly graves. Drooping elms and
willows bend over them, and the whispering of their long pendent
branches, as the summer breeze sweeps them hither and thither, is the
only sound that breaks the stillness of that hallowed air. Near the
church, on the opposite side from this home of the dead, lies a garden,
whose roses and honey-suckles perfume the air, while its bowers of lilac
and laburnum, of myrtle and jessamine, almost shut from the view the
pretty cottage to which it belongs. All around, all within that cottage,
is silent. Have its inmates fled?

The neighboring houses have been long deserted, and those who left them
would gladly have persuaded their pastor to accompany them; but when
they called to urge his doing so, he could only point to the bed on
which, already bereft of sense, and evidently fast passing from life,
lay one "all lovely to the last." Mrs. Sinclair's health, delicate for
years, had rapidly failed in the last few months, till her anxious
husband and child, aware that a moment's acceleration of the pulse, a
moment's quickening of the breath from whatever cause, might snatch her
from their arms, learned to modulate