t the door."

"Your carriage, indeed!"

"Yes, dearest, it waits but for you, to bear us to Belmont Hall, my
lovely villa on the Hudson."

"And your mother?"

"I have no mother, alas! The old woman down stairs is an old servant
of the family."

"Then you've been deceiving me, Frank--how wicked!"

"It was all done with a good motive. You were not born to endure a
life of privation, but to shine the ornament of an elegant and refined
circle. I hope you will not love me the less when you learn that I am
worth nearly half a million--that's the melancholy fact, and I can't
help it."

"O Frank!" cried the beautiful girl, and hid her face in his bosom.

She presided with grace at the elegant festivities of Belmont Hall,
and seemed to support her husband's wealth and luxurious style of
living with the greatest fortitude and resignation, never complaining
of her comforts, nor murmuring a wish for living in a cottage.

THE CAREER OF AN ARTIST.

I woke up one morning and found myself
famous.--BYRON.

Julian Montfort was a farmer's boy; bred up to the plough handle and
cart tail. His father and mother were plain, honest people, of
hard-working habits and limited ideas, and without the slightest dash
of romance in their temperaments. Their house, their lands were
unprepossessing in appearance. The soil was impoverished by long and
illiberal culture; and old Montfort had a true old-fashioned prejudice
against trees. Instead of smiling hedgerows, with here and there a
weeping elm or plumy evergreen to cast their graceful shadows upon the
pasture land, his acres were enclosed with harsh stone walls, or an
unpicturesque Virginia fence with its zigzag of rude rails. The farmer
had an equal prejudice against books, "book larnin', and book-larned
men." Of course, with these ideas, Julian's education was limited to a
few quarters' schooling under an old pedagogue, whose native language
was Dutch, and who never took very kindly to the English tongue.
Besides, teaching was only an episode with him; for his vocation was
that of a clergyman, and he held forth on Sundays in alternate Dutch
and English to his little congregation--as is still the custom in many
of the small agricultural parishes in New York State, where the scene
of our veritable story lies.

Our hero, young Julian, early began to show a restiveness under the
training he received, which sadly perplexed his plain matter-of-fact
father. The latter c