ands that had thrown poison into the
stream of their lives. Giovanni trembled. Beatrice shuddered nervously,
and pressed her hand upon her heart.

"My daughter," said Rappaccini, "thou art no longer lonely in the
world. Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister shrub and bid
thy bridegroom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him now. My
science and the sympathy between thee and him have so wrought within
his system that he now stands apart from common men, as thou dost,
daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then,
through the world, most dear to one another and dreadful to all
besides!"

"My father," said Beatrice, feebly,--and still as she spoke she kept
her hand upon her heart,--"wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable
doom upon thy child?"

"Miserable!" exclaimed Rappaccini. "What mean you, foolish girl? Dost
thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts against which
no power nor strength could avail an enemy--misery, to be able to quell
the mightiest with a breath--misery, to be as terrible as thou art
beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak
woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?"

"I would fain have been loved, not feared," murmured Beatrice, sinking
down upon the ground. "But now it matters not. I am going, father,
where the evil which thou hast striven to mingle with my being will
pass away like a dream-like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers,
which will no longer taint my breath among the flowers of Eden.
Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart;
but they, too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was there not, from the
first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?"

To Beatrice,--so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by
Rappaccini's skill,--as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote
was death; and thus the poor victim of man's ingenuity and of thwarted
nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted
wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at
that moment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and
called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the
thunderstricken man of science, "Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is THIS
the upshot of your experiment!"

MRS. BULLFROG

It makes me melancholy to see how like fools some very sensible people
act in the matter of choosing wives. They perplex t