it never left her. Why? Because she feared that, God forgive them, they were ungrateful to their greatest earthly benefactor.

IX.

The little town is in

Let us turn the glass once more. utter consternation. Mr. Strawbridge is rushing, bareheaded, for the doctor; the clerks of Strong & Co. are so pale and palpitating, that every ribbon and silk in the store might be carried away and they unable to resist; the very lawyer runs out, leaving all his papers for the winds to play with, in order that he may learn the particulars. Alas! the particulars are few and soon learned, - Ned Pond in lifting a case of goods has broken a blood vessel, and has been carried home, dying or dead. Every man, woman, and child, as the word spreads, feels as though a little piece had been taken from his own heart. No one knew how dear Ned had been to him till now that Ned is gone, that bright face gone, that pleasant voice stilled to all earthly ears. Night comes half an hour sooner than it ever did before, sinks upon every threshold with deeper darkness. Away in the country men put their hands to their chins and tell how sudden it was! and at his mother's? at his home? dare you go thither?

X.

Look at this scene. Bob has been suddenly wakened from his afternoon nap by slamming doors. He starts up with a look of singular anxiety. He has been dreaming, what he often dreams lately, that Ellen, pale as a spirit, has been to beseech him to save her husband. He had heard the doctor say three months ago that Ned could not live if he did not stop working so. "He chooses to do it,' said Bob to hisconscience. Conscience entered into no discussion, but intimated that he was not telling the truth, and

Bob turned away. But in his dreams conscience plays the tyrant; he is haunted before his time. A year has passed since that cruel note to the sick wife, and day by day he has seen the husband fail, and speak no word. He begins to tremble; he questions whether he has been as generous as he deemed himself; he is resolved to release his partner from his old bond that has enslaved him now these seven years. He starts up, as we say, with a strange look of anxiety; rubs his eyes; resolves he 'll do it to-morrow, and lay this ghost that pursues him. Calmed by his good resolution, he tries to sleep again, when the door opens, his eldest girl rushes in, and, forgetting all in her grief for Ned, whom she loved dearly, throws herself at her father's knees, and sobs out, "O papa! papa! he's dead!” "Who? what? when? "Dear Ned Pond, papa! he died at the store, died at his work!" Died at his work! How will you lay the ghost now, selfishly generous man?

XI.

Once more we look into the chamber of the invalid. The little saucepan is silent; the voice of time, as instant after instant is told off, alone breaks the stillness. Who sits by the bedside? It is the beetle-browed Englishman, calm and mournful. Is he watching by the sick? No, but by the dead. And where is Ellen? Too ill to be here? No, she is here, and never did her plain features seem so beautiful; but the eye is closed, yes, closed in death. The blow was too much for one so weak. Side by side they lie there ; or no, not they, but their decaying and corruptible frames. They at last are free: the family circle is again formed: the parents and the children have met together.

A knock is heard on the door, a step in the entry; the silent hinges turn; Robert Strong enters the room. He has been requested to watch there with John Strawbridge, and he dares not refuse. How the night lingers! Not a word;

not a motion, unless when the air from the half-opened window stirs the bed-curtains, and the shadows dance and whisper, and then sleep again. Hour after hour the watch ticks, and the pulses of the living beat, and their breath comes and goes, and memory and conscience have all the conversation to themselves. It is a terrible night to Robert; but is it only terrible? Does no clearer insight into life and duty come to him? no comprehension that mere impulse is not God's voice, and that no kindly-selfishness will take the place of true, thoughtful, consistent, enduring, self-denying kindness? Let us trust that he is learning in these silent hours that there is an aid which is no aid, a generosity which is robbery, a kindness that kills.

CHARITY IN THE COUNTING-HOUSE AND OUT OF IT.

Of a cold,

It's a desolate place, that suburb of Fulton. dark evening, when the easterly wind draws down the valleys, and the clouds drift by with a snow-spit now and then, I know not of a more desolate place on earth. The long Front Street of Cincinnati, which runs by the river-side, and follows the vagaries of the stream, at length runs close under the hills, and melts into the single avenue which forms the thoroughfare of the superb city of Fulton. In front rolls the turbid Ohio; behind rise the precipitous hills, whence clay avalanches for ever noiselessly slide, pressing houses and stores hourly forward, forward, like an inexorable fate.

Slowly, wearily, through the mud of that single thoroughfare, now on planks, now on the railway which runs in the midst of the street, now on the curb-stone of some intended, but never completed sidewalk, the straight, soldier-like form of Ferdinand Spalding glanced amid the increasing snowflakes, as he struggled, after a long day's work, to seek the material of more work. On his left lay the ship-yards, with their ribs of future leviathans glistening in the ghostly snow-light. Hill-pressed houses, nodding in tipsy reverie, uncertain when to tumble, glowered on his right. Before him, the locomotive, filling the street with its black-white

breath, and turning the snow-flakes to grains of gold with its fiery eye, came screaming, crushing onward. But Ferdinand saw not the silent spectral forms around him, heard not the shriek of the monster that drew near. The voiceless electricity, which, overhead, was carrying on the chitchat of men a thousand miles apart, had no interest for him at that moment. He had left hungry children, a fireless hearth, a sick wife, behind him; and his soul, commonly as free from care as a bird, was for a while bowed down. Slowly, wearily, Ferdinand has passed by the embryo steamers, the grating saw-mills, the chipping, splitting, planing machines, the subterranean rolling-mills, where halfclad, brawny men struggle for ever with red-hot serpents of iron, and has entered the city, as street after street becomes conscious of gas.

It was the same snow-spitting evening; two men, longer in conversation than usual, still sat over the store stove in Main Street. The gloomy night grew darker, and still they talked.

"I give freely," said the younger, buttoning his sackcoat over a somewhat corpulent person, and drawing himself up with an air of satisfaction. "For my means, Deacon Stiles, I give freely. I know the wants of the poor, Sir. I have visited the poor. My wife, your niece, Sir, does nothing but mother them. I give freely, but never blindly, Deacon Stiles; never blindly.”

The elder, who had been sitting, doubled up, with his small, quiet eyes fixed upon the stove, suddenly opened those eyes to double dimensions, laughed in a supernaturally noiseless manner, and turning his cud, repeated, "Never blindly, never blindly, Reuben; freely, I know it, but never blindly"; and he chuckled again, like a spectre.

"There are men in business," said Reuben, emphatically nodding his head, "who do as well as I do, and buy real estate out of their profits, and who give nothing to the suf