fear meant. Suppose Firefly
threw her, what then? She had been to Mr. Hardwicke, and though her
"Cecilia Jane Langton" was not all she could have wished, because she
was nervous and Mr. Hardwicke's pen was so scratchy, still there it was.
And was not the paper, thus signed, a talisman against all dread of
death?

So her burden was lighter. But what could lighten the other load which
lay on her heart? She hardly knew whether it were love or fear that she
felt for Percival. The long days which had passed since she saw him had
only deepened the impression of that summer evening when they parted.
His reply to her entreaty that he would come back to her had been
exactly what she had feared--as gentle as he himself had been when they
stood face to face in the old drawing-room at Brackenhill, and as
inflexible. If she could forget him--if she could learn to care for
Captain Fothergill or Walter Latimer--what a bright, easy, sunshiny life
might yet be hers! No, ten thousand times, no! Better to suffer the
weariness of dread and doubt and longing for Percival.

But Percival would have been astonished if he could have seen the darkly
heroic guise in which he reigned over Sissy Langton's dreams.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

THE BOY ON A HILL-FARM.

There is nothing like a wide horizon to give a boy aspirations--nothing
like a hill-farm to give him hope--especially the hope of leaving it. In
spring, on a day of expectation, when the warm air has not yet brought
out the flowers, and carts go past with loads of young trees whose dry
roots and branches look like emblems of old hopes still unfulfilled, a
boy is working on the top of Ford Hill. The five-inch soil covering the
solid rock that forms the New York hill--the first of all, perhaps, to
show its head above the pristine waters--has nourished a lofty forest
which, battling with everlasting winds, resembles a body of men strong
from incessant toil: its elms and beeches are so tough they defy the
forester, and are fit only for water-wheel shafts. Working among these
adamantine timbers, the boy stops to look across the broad and deep
valley. Not at the old hill-quarries opposite, in whose depths snow lies
all summer, does he look, nor at the hanging woods above the new piece,
nor at the yellow farmhouse and barn; but higher, toward the west,
where, on a level with his eye, 'twixt hills like cloud-banks, he sees a
white streak, the distant lake. Storms are running down the Deer