And time shall waste this apple-tree.
Oh, when its aged branches throw
Thin shadows on the sward below,
Shall fraud and force and iron will
Oppress the weak and helpless still?
What shall the tasks of mercy be,
Amid the toils, the strifes, the tears
Of those who live when length of years
Is wasting this apple-tree?

"Who planted this old apple-tree?"
The children of that distant day
Thus to some aged man shall say;
And, gazing on its mossy stem,
The gray-haired man shall answer them:
"A poet of the land was he,
Born in the rude, but good old times;
'Tis said he made some quaint old rhymes
On planting the apple-tree."

* * * * *

RAY.

So Beltran was a Rebel.

Vivia stood before the glass, brushing out black shadows from her long,
fine hair. There lay the letter as little Jane had left it, as she had
let it lie till all the doors had clanged between, as she had laid it
down again. She paused, with the brush half lifted, to glance once more
at the clear superscription, to turn it and touch with her finger-tips
the firm seal. Then she went on lengthening out the tresses that curled
back again at the end like something instinct with life.

How long it had been in coming!--gradual journeys up from those Southern
shores, and slumber in some comrade's care till a flag of truce could
bear it across beneath the shelter of its white wing. Months had passed.
And where was Beltran now? Living,--Vivia had a proud assurance in her
heart of that! Her heart that went swiftly gliding back into the past,
and filling old scenes with fresh fire. Thinking thus, she bent forward
with dark, steady gaze, as if she sought for its pictures in the
uncertain depths of the mirror, and there they rose as of old the
crystal gave them back to the seeker. It was no gracious woman bending
there that she saw, but a scene where the very air infused with sunlight
seemed to glow, the house with its wide veranda veiled in vines, and
above it towering the rosy cloud of an oleander-tree, behind it the far
azure strip of the bay, before it the long low line of sandy beach where
the waters of the Gulf forever swung their silver tides with a sullen
roar,--for the place was one of those islands that make the perpetual
fortifications of the Texan coast. Vivia, a slender little maiden of
eleven summers, rocks in a boat a rod from shore, and b