heek, alone
prevented her from seeming a statue of the purest marble, fashioned
after some Grecian model. Beauty and youth had come back to her reposing
features, and peace and rapture too. A smile, such as no living lips
ever wore, lingered round her mouth and softened its mute expression.
She was happy. God had given his beloved rest. She was happy. It was not
death on which I was gazing; it was life,--the dawn of immortal, of
eternal life. Angels were watching around her. I did not see them, but I
felt the shadow of their snow-white wings. I felt them fanning my brow
and softly lifting the locks that fell darkly against the sheet, so
chilly white. Others might have thought it the wind sighing through the
leafy lattice-work; but the presence of angels was real to me,--and who
can say they were not hovering there?

That scene is past, but its remembrance is undying. The little cottage
is inhabited by strangers. The grass grows rank near the brink of the
fountain, and the mossy stone once moistened by my tears has rolled down
and choked its gushing. My mother sleeps by the side of the faithful
Peggy, beneath a willow that weeps over a broken shaft,--fitting
monument for a broken heart.

I will not dwell on the desolation of orphanage. It cannot be described.
My Maker only knows the bitterness of my grief for days, weeks, even
months. But time gradually warms the cold clay over the grave of love;
then the grass springs up, and the flowers bloom, and the waste places
of life become beautiful with hope, and the wilderness blossoms like the
rose.

But oh, my mother! my gentle, longsuffering mother! thou hast never been
forgotten. By day and by night, in sunshine and shadow, in joy and in
sorrow, thou art with me, a holy spirit, a hallowed memory, a chastening
influence, that passeth not away.

CHAPTER XI.

What a change, from the little gray cottage in the woods to the pillared
walls of Grandison Place.

This ancestral looking mansion was situated on the brow of a long,
winding hill, which commanded a view of the loveliest valley in the
world. A bold, sweeping outline of distant hills, here and there
swelling into mountains, and crowned with a deeper, mistier blue,
divided the rich green of the earth from the azure of the heavens. Far
as the eye could reach, it beheld the wildest luxuriance of nature
refined and subdued by the hand of cultivation and taste. Man had
reverenced the grandeur of the Creator, and