While the youth sat for a moment, engrossed with reflections which the words suggested, two persons approached the dial, and stopped before it. They were husband and wife, refined in appearance, and considerably past the prime of life. They stood quite still for two or three minutes, their eyes fixed on the inscription. The woman was the first to speak. Turning her face full on her husband, though still retaining his arm, she exclaimed: "Now I know why you left the young people at Martigny to follow us in the morning; I have not forgotten this spot; I have not forgotten that thirty years ago this day"—and tears started to her eyes as she spoke—"you and I were here, in this very place, reading these same lines: impulsive, vivacious, and very happy; we were just married; these lines struck me as full of sentiment, but it never occurred to me that they conveyed a moral lesson, for a moral lesson just then seemed quite out of place. So I thought, at least, when, with serious, almost solemn, look, you said to me, 'No, it returns no more again! Let us live so that we shall never have one regret that it does not return; let us live so that, growing wiser and happier each day, to go back to yesterday would only be a lessening of our joys.' But I did not forget what you said, Walter," she added, after a moment's pause.
"You did not, Maude," replied her husband gently; "and here we stand, before this mute monitor, to thank God that we did not pass it unheeded. Thirty years seem compressed into a day," he continued in a less serious tone; "indeed I do not feel one hour older."
"Neither do I," responded the wife; "and as for you, your heart positively seems younger than on the morning you spoke so seriously." There was an interchange of affectionate looks, when she said to him, "And yet, Walter, how insensibly events steal upon us! What agency is at work, unseen, unfelt, and unperceived, till we are taken by surprise by what is accomplished? Do you not think"———
"Holloa, there! is there any thing worth seeing up yonder?" echoed from a coarse voice below, so startlingly that our youth lost the remainder of the sentence. At the same moment, from another
