untry where distinction is a
pillory! But I could not live here. It is my misfortune that my
tastes are so modified by that long and compulsory exile, that
life, here, would be a perpetual penance. This unmixed air of
merchandise suffocates me. Our own home is tinctured black with it.
You yourself, in this rural Paradise you have conjured up, move in
it like a cloud. The counting-house rings in your voice,
calculation draws together your brows, you look on everything as a
_means_, and know its cost; and the calm and means-forgetting
_fruition_, which forms the charm and dignity of superior life, is
utterly unknown to you. What would be my happiness with such a
wife? What would be yours with such a husband? Yet I consider the
incompatibility between us as no advantage on my part--on the
contrary, a punishment, and of your inflicting. What shall I be,
anywhere, but a Tantalus--a fastidious _ennuye_, with a thirst for
the inaccessible burning in my bosom continually!

"I pray you let us avoid another meeting before my departure.
Though I cannot forgive you as a lover, I can think of you with
pleasure as a cousin, and I give you as your due ('damages,' the
law would phrase it,) the portion of myself which you thought most
important when I offered you my all. You would not take me without
the fortune, but perhaps you will be content with the fortune
without me. I shall immediately take steps to convey to you this
property of Revedere, with an income sufficient to maintain it, and
I trust soon to hear that you have found a husband better worthy of
you than your cousin--

"Philip Ballister."

FRIEND BARTON'S CONCERN.

By Mary Hallock Foote.

(_Scribner's Magazine, July,_ 1879.)

It had been "borne in" upon him, more or less, during the long winter;
it had not relaxed its hold when the frosts unlocked and the streams
were set free from their long winter's silence among the hills. He grew
restless and abstracted under "the turnings of the Lord's hand upon
him," and his speech unconsciously shaped itself into the Biblical
cadences which came to him in his moments of spiritual exercise.

The bedrabbled snows of March shrank away before the keen, quickening
sunbeams; the hills emerged, brown and sodden, like the chrysalis of
the new year. The streams woke in a tumult, and all day and night their
voices called f