half-past ten. I too had gone half asleep, when a couple of officers whom we knew, drove noisily into the court-yard.

"Hallo! what's Mandeville's old trap doing here at this hour of the night?" said Captain Sparks to Lieutenant Jarvis, “Quito a family trap,-full of children I declare. Look here young Mandeville what are you after ?"

We hated Captain Sparks. He was a man from whom children, brought up as we had been, would shrink with instinetive aversion. At being wakened rudely by his voice and touch, and smelling, as he peered into my face, his hot breath redolent of brandy, I began to feel myself quite powerless in his hands. I fancied that our father had forgotten us, and given us up; that he was never never coming back again; that like the Babes in the Wood, we were alone and lost. The tide of utter desolation swept over my spirit. I seemed to stand at one end of a perspective glass, and view the life before me stretching lonely into eternity. Infinite vastness of misery opened before me in a moment-infinite loneliness. I began to shriek aloud; to call for "my papa-my own papa, my dear, dear papa." My cries woke up Veronica, who with responsive lamentation demanded. her lost Mammy. The officers half tipsy, stood amazed and much annoyed by the clamor they had awakened. In vain they coaxed and threatened us to make us silent. The stable-yard resounded with our cries. I was unmanageable with terror. Max indignantly reproached Captain Sparks for waking us. insisted on getting out of the chaise and finding my papa. And Captain Sparks, very willingly to annoy Max (who having just learned to repeat "Cassabianca" was bent on obeying orders, and detaining us in the carriage till our father's return) said; "Come to me, little Miss Mary, I will take care of you, you little witch, and we'll go and find papa." He lifted me out, screaming and

I

red in the face. He carried me in his arms, holding the hands with which I attempted to push away the blood-shot eyes and horrid lips with which he tried to kiss me. Lieutenant Jarvis took up Veronica. Max, like a dog whose puppies are borne off, was sullenly compelled to follow us.

The officers were perfectly acquainted with the old Inn and its stone passages. Captain Sparks led the way and shouted. "Waiter!" with his loud hoarse voice. Boots came at the summons, loud and coarse, reverberating along the passages.

"Waiter, hold the light!" and he went on with tipsy oaths to order him to conduct him to Colonel Mandeville, for that I—(to whom he applied a very uncomplimentary epithet) kicked, screamed and struggled "like the very devil." "And I say Boots," added he, "better ring a bell and wake 'em up, if you've got any more children in the house you know."

Boots, with his cat-like steps, went on before. At length, after some windings and turnings, for we had entered the old building by the kitchen, he stopped before a door, and said in a hushed voice, “It is here, gentlemen; had I not better call out the Colonel ?"

"Call him out? No! hang you! I'm not the fellow, am I Jarvis? to call out my commanding officer."

As Captain Sparks said this, with a great ringing tipsy laugh, the door before which we stood suddenly opened, and a servant of the house came out, with some towels in his hand, and with a pail of water. He looked up in the reveller's face with grave reproof, and something awed both me and Captain Sparks in his hushed manner. But at that instant, Veronica caught sight of the turbaned head of her black nurse. She sprang from the Lieutenant's arms, and was in the apartment in a moment. "Oh, my Mammy! Oh, my dear Mammy!”

She clung fast to her neck, and sobbed-and sobbed as if her little heart would burst. It was not struggling, frightened grief, like mine, but something much more piteous. It was such an indulgence of grief as in times of great repression one has yearned for, saying, "Ah! when all is over-when the clouds have broken, and the storm is past, I may lay down my weary head, and weep and weep, and, tell then, for the first time, how wretched I have been."

Max and I saw our father and cousin Lomax also in the chamber. The officers, sobered, had drawn back; but our father beckoned us, and Max and I went in. The window was opened

the chamber shone the

on to the clear night, and full into frosty stars. What was it made us shudder as we stepped in lightly, drawing closer to each other, holding our breath, and clasping each other's fingers? We stood for the first time face to face with death; and though no person told us what had taken place, we recognized by instinct traces of the Destroyer.

We knew that rigid solemn whiteness in the centre of the room (they had removed it from the bed on to a couch) was the dead body. Awful, awful outline of what had been life, lying under that white sheet waiting for its coffin!

Cousin Lomax and our father, with awestruck, solemn faces, stood apart from it. They spoke with hushed voices; they trod with hushed feet. They were still men, and this cold clay had also been a man, but was a man no longer. To us, children, it seemed as if we heard the very rushing of the wings of the Death Angel; the cold air in which we shivered had been parted by his flight; he had quenched the spark of life-borne off the soul-left that behind (ashes to ashes, dust to dust) to be gathered to its earth, and taken his strong flight to the immortal stars. Our father stepped forward, folded back the covering

from the awful face, and turned to us. "Come," said he, "and look at him."

That icy look froze itself into my heart. I have seen death since, but this first view remains my type of it. It was a man apparently about fifty years old, tall, and grey haired, with a high forehead; even in life the features must have been sharply chiselled. He had probably been out of health for some time, for he was much attenuated.

Oh! awful to our childish hearts was the unbreathing, frozen stillness which had settled on his features. We realized that darkness lay under the lids of those closed eyes; we realized those rigid hands could never be drawn apart. The soul had put off this her tabernacle. Nurse had taught us heavenly truths. I instinctively realized the necessity of immortality, and ever since that moment this conviction has been prominent in my thoughts, whenever I have stood beside the dead.

Every line of his fixed face came out as the blood retreated further and further from his features. Every little scar, even the hurts of infancy, over which his mother, long since in her own grave, may have grieved, revealed themselves as flaws upon the livid whiteness. The features had been drawn into a smile, not natural, I should think. A smile they never were to lose, day nor night-long days and many nights-till they changed with dreadful change such as one dares not even think of— changing in the dark-in the closed coffin.

The old black Mammy, in her strange, quaint dress, sat at the dead man's feet, and about her clung Veronica.

"Oh! look at him, honey," she cried. "Thar'll be a change in his dear face. Look at him, honey; look at him!" she

repeated, finding the orphan did not stir.

"Honey, your pa is

dead. Your poor, poor pa is dead; you's 'lone in all de worl',

honey. We's far from old Varginny, in a strange, new land. You's nobody left you now, 'cepts your poor Mammy."

Veronica would not look up. We could see by the strained muscles of her rigid little hands how tightly she had clasped them round her nurse, who also held her close, laying the child's cheek on her ample breast, and rocking herself to and fro.

"Oh! honey, to think he should have brought us all this long way, honey-over the seas, and in the ships, and just to die so mighty soon. An' all 'lone, too, honey. None of his own servants, nor nobody 'bout him, 'seps poor Mammy. Oh! my dear Mas'r! The Lord he knows! The Lord he knows! Take dis stroke 'way, Lord! Oh my dear Mas'r. Oh! honey, be a good girl, honey, and den when de Angel Gabriel's a comin'comin', darlin', for to fetch away poor Mammy-ah! you's be 'lone den-all 'lone. All 'lone, in this wide worl', widout Mammy. And de worl' mighty big, and mighty bad worl' my sweet honey! Oh! honey, look at his poor face. Look at his face, dat allerst had a smile on it for us, honey. I'se gwine to sit by him. I'se gwine to watch by him till dey's come put him in de coffin. You hasn't got nothin' else left, honey; nothin' else left now but poor old Mammy, chile; and he was mighty rich, mighty rich once. I tell you he was, honey! When I was a little, black gal, jus growed up, tendin' on Miss Edmonia, your grandma, honey, thar warn't no kind a young man in all our section o' country was any kind o 'count compared with my young Mas'r. And he's lying dead here, an' I'se laid him out. Lying dead, honey, an' no soul but old Mammy dat knowed him, 'seps his brother. I'll sit by him till he's buried, honey. Ole Mammy ain't gwine to leave him, honey. She'll sit by him all this blessed night,