d quietly away that day.

The bereaved father and daughter were wild with grief, and they
abandoned themselves to their bitter sorrow. They felt it to be
impossible to take leave of the loved woman who till now had filled
their whole lives and to commit her body to the earth. But this frantic
burst of grief passed, and then they took possession of their own
hearts again, crushed though they were in resignation. In spite of this
the daughter's life seemed to her desolate. Her love for her dead
mother did not grow less with time, and so keen was her remembrance,
that everything in daily life, even the falling of the rain and the
blowing of the wind, reminded her of her mother's death and of all that
they had loved and shared together. One day when her father was out,
and she was fulfilling her household duties alone, her loneliness and
sorrow seemed more than she could bear. She threw herself down in her
mother's room and wept as if her heart would break. Poor child, she
longed just for one glimpse of the loved face, one sound of the voice
calling her pet name, or for one moment's forgetfulness of the aching
void in her heart. Suddenly she sat up. Her mother's last words had
rung through her memory hitherto dulled by grief.

"Oh! my mother told me when she gave me the mirror as a parting gift,
that whenever I looked into it I should be able to meet her--to see
her. I had nearly forgotten her last words--how stupid I am; I will get
the mirror now and see if it can possibly be true!"

She dried her eyes quickly, and going to the cupboard took out the box
that contained the mirror, her heart beating with expectation as she
lifted the mirror out and gazed into its smooth face. Behold, her
mother's words were true! In the round mirror before her she saw her
mother's face; but, oh, the joyful surprise! It was not her mother thin
and wasted by illness, but the young and beautiful woman as she
remembered her far back in the days of her own earliest childhood. It
seemed to the girl that the face in the mirror must soon speak, almost
that she heard the voice of her mother telling her again to grow up a
good woman and a dutiful daughter, so earnestly did the eyes in the
mirror look back into her own.

"It is certainly my mother's soul that I see. She knows how miserable I
am without her and she has come to comfort me. Whenever I long to see
her she will meet me here; how grateful I ought to be!"

And from this time the weight o