the slightest evidence that he was aware of her approach.

"For the love of Heaven, Reuben, speak to me!" cried Dorcas; and the
strange sound of her own voice affrighted her even more than the dead
silence.

Her husband started, stared into her face, drew her to the front of the
rock, and pointed with his finger.

Oh, there lay the boy, asleep, but dreamless, upon the fallen forest
leaves! His cheek rested upon his arm--his curled locks were thrown
back from his brow--his limbs were slightly relaxed. Had a sudden
weariness overcome the youthful hunter? Would his mother's voice arouse
him? She knew that it was death.

"This broad rock is the gravestone of your near kindred, Dorcas," said
her husband. "Your tears will fall at once over your father and your
son."

She heard him not. With one wild shriek, that seemed to force its way
from the sufferer's inmost soul, she sank insensible by the side of her
dead boy. At that moment the withered topmost bough of the oak loosened
itself in the stilly air, and fell in soft, light fragments upon the
rock, upon the leaves, upon Reuben, upon his wife and child, and upon
Roger Malvin's bones. Then Reuben's heart was stricken, and the tears
gushed out like water from a rock. The vow that the wounded youth had
made the blighted man had come to redeem. His sin was expiated,--the
curse was gone from him; and in the hour when he had shed blood dearer
to him than his own, a prayer, the first for years, went up to Heaven
from the lips of Reuben Bourne.

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL

An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along
the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the
light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop. It
was a projecting window; and on the inside were suspended a variety of
watches, pinchbeck, silver, and one or two of gold, all with their
faces turned from the streets, as if churlishly disinclined to inform
the wayfarers what o'clock it was. Seated within the shop, sidelong to
the window with his pale face bent earnestly over some delicate piece
of mechanism on which was thrown the concentrated lustre of a shade
lamp, appeared a young man.

"What can Owen Warland be about?" muttered old Peter Hovenden, himself
a retired watchmaker, and the former master of this same young man
whose occupation he was now wondering at. "What can the fellow be
about? These six months past I have never come by