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penitence—you shall not despise me! But ah, ; what am I saying? You love another now—you would love her if you lived—you will claim her for your wife in heaven. Oh, Paul!” and, sob- bing bitterly, she bent her face upon his knee.
Alice,” and the sick man’s hand was laid tenderly on her bowed head, ‘this unnerves me, I cannot bear it! Oh, Alice, I have loved you— I love Jessie now much as I dare love in this hour when the earthly grows dim and the eyes of man look beyond the portals of Immortality. But oh, Alice, in the land where I am going we read, ‘They marry not, neither are given in marriage.’ Strive to meet me there. Promise me this, Alice Rossiter!”
“I promise! I will try!” sobbed the humiliated woman, snatching his hand and covering it with kisses. ‘‘Now, Paul, I am going—for I cannot stay to see you die!” and gathering up her sweeping sable robes, she passed out. - -
And while the carriage which held Mrs, Rossiter rolled down the green, fern-bordered country road, little Jessie Moore, with tear-filled eyes, but a smile of resignation on her face, gently held her lover’s hand, looked into his triumphant eyes, and caught the last breath which passed his lips as his earthy life lapsed into the better.
Too late the earnest “call” which came from the wealthy city church for the talented, genius- dowried, yet humble and child-hearted servant of the cross, for he had passed to the mansions prepared for him in the city of the Great King; too late the soft, lilac-scented airs which played round his native farm house home, where they bore him with the fatal splendors of consumption on his cheek; but not too late the gentle love of sweet Jessie Moore, who kissed his pale forehead as she closed his eyes, saying softly to the - weeping mother, ‘We shall meet him again in heaven!”
But oh! the anguish—the shrinking from a dreary, rayless future that stretched away bleak and bare before her—which came to Alice Rossiter when they told her,
‘The minister of Hawthornwold is dead!”
Oh, whoever, reading this, dares to thrust away from his heart a pure and deathless love for the lure of station, wealth, or any other blandishment, let him bethink—ere it be forever too late—of the ghosts that nor will nor pride have power to lay—the ghosts of remorse, that, so sure as love is of the soul and the soul is of God, will walk with him, hand-in-hand, through all his future!
IN THE SUGAR CAMP.
BY F. H. STAUFFER.
How it snows! How it blows!
Quite enough to freeze one’s toes,
Or make one mutter as he goes,
“How confoundedly it blows!”
It is March, and the larch
Moans such dreary moans!
And the trembling poplar trembles
As the white pine flings her cones
On the rocks and scraggy stones!
It augers little good
When through the maple wood
The borers wend their noisy way!
To be rapping, to be sapping
With a sort of syrup-titious tapping
Where the juicy veins may lay!
Through tubes of elder or sumach
Flows the dripping sap;
And such nectar! even Hector
Would have stood protector
By those vessels filling to the rim,
Running over at the brim!
How the smoke is curling
And unfurling
Upward from the low-roofed shed;
While the men with faces red
Under the kettles and the boilers,
Eighteen and twenty gallon boilers,
Thrust the blazing wood!
Oh, it does one good
Just to catch the flavor,
And the savor
That comes from the scum,
And the diliquescent gum
That may drip upon the wood,
If through carelessness it should!
How the girls, with eyes like pearls
Shining through their curls,
Pour the sugar into moulds
With the dipper each one holds!
Verses improvising as they watch it crystalizing
“In the icy air of night;”
What a sight!
In itself a crystalline delight,
A saccharine delight!
There are foot-prints in the snow
By the maples far below,
And peals of laughter ring upon the air,
Startling the drowsy hare,
And waking echoes here and there!
Have a care, and beware!
Such kisses, pretty Misses
May steal your hearts away
Some Winter day,
So they may!
