silent, a few words of undoubted authority settled all appearance of disturbance, but left the poor bride of a day to the petty torments of a lifetime.

The coming of Benny Rollin was the signal of better nature outwardly on the part of Miss Araminta, and but for this lull in the domestic turmoil, the young wife would have wept her eyes blind. She tried, poor thing! to be good and pleasant, and her absurd attempts at being agreeable were worse than any thing else for them to endure.

Benjamin had taken on the polish of a gentleman, and had that air which a refined nature gets so soon from contact with its kind. Not that this is needed exactly to make a true man, but those graceful acts of politeness, those delicate amenities of cultivated life, carry a wonderful amount of influence with them, and Benjamin had felt the need of them when he first emerged from his backwoods life, but without positive attention, unconsciously adopted them. To Mary Winthrop, whose two hands were held out to him in greeting, he was the same noble and true friend, and she stilled her heart and studied her voice to say :

"I am very glad, Benny, so happy to hear your voice once more," and he looked down into her saintly soul through her quiet, steadfast eyes, and said nothing for the choking that hindered his speech, and great round tears gathered and fell upon the hand he held, and he turned to Mrs. Winthrop, dear motherly Mrs. Winthrop, and to the beloved teacher, with warm greeting. Mary went outside the little "spare room," that she might lift that hand made sacred now, unseen, to her lips, and coming presently sat silent listening to the conversation,

and to the casual observer seemed as if she were only a hearer, because she must be; but the deepening of the dark of her soft eyes, the pressure of the exquisite lips against her two rims of pearls, and now and then a caressing attention to that hand on which the tear fell, revealed more than she had even whispered to herself in the stillness of her chamber. Oh, but she asked nothing more of life than it gave her now! Her cup was brimmed with happiness and jeweled with hope! It was to her believing nature tangible enough, and she did not strive to unwind the tangled threads that glistened in the future, waiting only for fate to unite the web and woof of their two lives with the ceaseless shuttle of time. As in a dream it all came to her, and she believed as if it were a real and sacred revelation.

All were happy in his return, save perhaps John Haxton, who felt a two-fold emotion when he took the hand of the boy and bade him welcome. One was of sincere gladness and intense satisfaction, and the other the faded hope of his own first-born, the one who lay in his great broad bosom a little tender helpless thing, and made the first soft nestling place it had ever carried.

But he tugged at his hope for this one, and tried to escape with it into the future, leaving the past and present with its burden of sorrows. He was so strangely softened, that Rollin was amazed, until when the evening had waned, he called "Silly" to "fetch the Bible and let Benny read a verse or two, as his eyes were somehow bad that night." And "Silly" was only too happy to perform any service for her only friend in the household. Charlie was home that night, and it was a remarkable event, that it should happen so, but for

Benny's sake they thought, and it was, as they supposed. Through kindly feeling, when Benny had read the FiftyFirst Psalm, and lifted up his eyes from the sweet singer's plaintive notes, his gaze fell upon the dark, fierce eyes of Charles Haxton, and from that look he measured the hatred of his boyhood's companion. He knew then that if the future held any sorrow for him that did not come direct from the All-loving, it would be dealt by the hand of this votary of the distiller. He knew Charlie was and always had been envious, bitterly so, but he was cowardly, and whatever he did to an enemy was in the dark, always. To be careful, to be obliging, and to forbear noticing his mood, was the intent of Rollin, and for the sake of the father who looked so broken, to avoid even by endurance any rupture between them. He treated "Silly" with the same unaffected kindness and respect that he gave to the other members of the family, which more than any thing served to allay the storm for a little. She, poor soul! was fascinated by the charm of his manner, and like a true descendant of "La belle France," adapted his deportment to her own use with singular variations, to the amusement of her new father, and to the anger and disgust of her husband. Patient Benny did not quite like to be caricatured, even though the most reverential of friends performed the principal parts, with the intensest admiration for her inspiration in her new role. Poor "Silly!" she bore her husband's neglect and his harshness with not a word of retort or expostulation, and only that her sleeve or the corner of her apron did duty for her wet eyes, no one would have known that she felt her position. But she grew thin and pale, and when the hard duties of the farmer's

household were performed, she went away alone as if solitude and silence were the only friends. A word of kindness from her husband, or a trifling gift, would lift her changeable spirits into a state of extatic delight. The summer wore away, and Benny studied the books the professors had recommended to him, and a skeleton loaned him by the old doctor, who had long since ceased to wonder at its marvelous mechanism, amid the dulling routine of his sluggish life. This last he kept hidden away, and only with bolted door, ventured an examination of this once soul animated frame work. Had any one save Mr. Haxton discovered this new inmate in the house, there would have been troublous times with the young secker after strange truths. People unaccustomed to biology have a natural antipathy for human bones, which changes to reverent admiration, with the study of their structure. This should be taught children very early, but it was not ventured upon at this time, even by Nelson Winthrop, who dared do almost any thing that was right, but the steps of progress are slow, and he felt that the time for such mysteries had not yet dawned upon the Log School House.

CHAPTER VIII.

"How blessed are the beautiful!
Love watches o'er their birth;
O beauty! in my nursery

I learned to know thy worth;
For even there I often felt

Forsaken and forlorn;

And wished-for others wished it, too-
I never had been born."

ANNETTE GORDON taught only as she had learned the art from the various instructors who had swayed the scepter in the Log House. She was orderly, prompt, and diligent. She exacted the most prompt and perfect obedience from her pupils,—a lesson she had learned at home where parental rule was autocratic. She did not soften the little hearts of the children by the ugly ferule with which she used to harden their small hands. This was the only mode of punishment of which she had any knowledge, except stooping to point to a crack in the floor for a half hour, or holding a stone in the hand with the muscles firm and straight. These last were too time-consuming, and she preferred the first as expeditious and effectual. She had mingling with her virtues and failings, a love of pretty things, and she taught what she had never learned herself, namely, drawing.