try for a freight back from Naples, otherwise shall
make some excuse to run across the Straits for a look at Vesuvius and
the matters thereabout. St. Paul, you know, voyaged in those seas, which
will interest you in my trip. I dare say I shall find where he landed:
it's not far from Naples, Mrs. Brindlock tells me. Give love to the
people who ever ask about me in Ashfield. I enclose a check of five
hundred dollars for parish contingencies till I come back; hoping to
find you clean out of harness by that time." (The Doctor cannot for his
life repress a little smile here.) "Tell Adele I shall see her blue
Mediterranean at last, and will bring her back an olive-leaf, if I find
any growing within reach. Tell Phil I love him, and that he deserves all
the good he will surely get in this world, or in any other. Ditto for
Rose. Ditto for good old Mrs. Elderkin, whom I could almost kiss for the
love she's shown me. What high old romps haven't we had in her garden!
Eh, Adele? (I suppose you'll show her this letter, father.)

"Good by, again.

"N. B. We hope to make a cool thirty thousand out of this venture!"

Adele had half roused herself at the hearing of her name, but the
careless, jocular mention of it, (so it seemed at least,) in contrast
with the warmer leave-taking of other friends, added a new pang to her
distress. She wished, for a moment, that she had never written her
letter of thanks. What if she wished--in that hour of terrible suspicion
and of vain search after any object upon which her future happiness
might rest--that she had never been born? Many a one has given hearty
utterance to that wish with less cause. Many a one of those just
tottering into childhood will live to give utterance to the same. But
the great wheel of fate turns ever relentlessly on. It drags us up from
the nether mysterious depths; we sport and struggle and writhe and
rejoice, as it bears us into the flashing blaze of life's meridian;
then, with awful surety, it hurries us down, drags us under, once more
into the abysses of silence and of mystery. Happy he who reads such
promise as he passes in the lights fixed forever on the infinite depths
above, that the silence and the mystery shall be as welcome as sleep to
the tired worker!

"It will be of service to Reuben, I think, Benjamin," said Aunt Eliza;
"I quite approve,"--and slipped away noiselessly.

The Doctor was still musing,--the letter in his hand,--when Adele rose,
and, approaching