beheld her own person gliding to the couch, kneeling there and promising to be a mother to the motherless.

A third, worked up as if each figure stood like a statue in clear relief, revealed her own room on that eventful night when Anteros, Love's impure counterfeit, sought to tempt the soul from duty with visions of a selfish paradise. An angel hovered over the pillow with her own crown, while a lurid fiend was projecting tempting thoughts into the mind to become there dream-pictures before the eye. Another angel at the foot of the couch was holding up a golden cross, whose intense effulgence, falling upon her breast, caused a distinct sensation there of the self-sacrifices involved in becoming the friend and teacher of a family of orphans. In the midst her own spirit appeared, struggling through its vails of flesh and blood against the evil influence of the tempter, and seeking to draw that shining cross into the heart to bear it there.

A fourth, to which she turned her eyes, was the sad, parting interview with Charles Bloomfield. The manly lover was kneeling at her feet and urging his suit, the soul trembling in the bosom like some frightened bird that hears its mate, and longs to fly away, responsive to the wooing call. The features were encircled by unutterable light and the eyes enkindled with celestial glory, all flashing out from the cross, which now, its golden lustre dipped in crimson, seemed to stand within the heart itself, while all the obedidient affections of the spirit were kneeling round in worship.

Then, rapidly glancing till her eye had completed the circle of that room, each distinguishing incident of her life was set into its own compartment, wrought into splendid frame work of burnished gold. At last the meaning of it grew into a defined thought, almost overpowering. In accepting the life of self-sacrifice, the life of duty and of faith, she had taken in to her spirit a guiding inspiration, emanating from the bosom of the Crucified One. No deed of mercy

had been planned or executed by her unaided powers. Acting in complete freedom it had been nevertheless her privilege to do the daily behest of human nature's ever-present Friend. No accident, no fortuitous combination of circumstances had ever interfered, to prevent the consummation of the Heavenly Father's benevolent design.

The mystic wonder deepened. Awe upon awe! A group of little children met her sight. They were playing around the Christmas tree. Visioned in the air above them the circumstances under which each had been committed to her protection grew into visible imagery, and here the maiden observed that every one of the band had been sent to her as an especial trust, by the Lord of childhood, the Savior of mankind.

Unable to gaze longer, the sacred lustre becoming more effulgent, as if colored from the vivid hus of the Divine Love, the dreamer bowed the head, when a voice, sweeter than the tones of any angel, thrilled her to the heart's core. "Marian!" The soul seemed to pause and listen through the sense. More sweet, more tender, the charmed air thrilled with it,-" Marian!" On lifting up the eyes to behold, He stood before her, whose feet, when He sojourned on earth, a woman's hand had once anointed with costly fragrance, bedewing them with her tears, and kissing them unrebuked, while pressing to their thrice holy substance her streaming and abundant hair. All that brightness was but the shadow from His face. In a voice without words, that, seeking no inlet of sensation, made the soul all ear to listen, all thought to comprehend, all joy to gather in its preciousness, He bade her welcome. Lowly kneeling at His feet she called Him Lord and Master, desiring to break her very heart and pour it out in meek oblation. But again He smiled, till the look of unutterable love bathed her in its divine element, transfiguring the soul in unearthly light. Then, with one wave of that majestic hand, point

ing to the imaged group, He said, "Inasmuch as thou hast done it unto the least of these, My little ones, thou hast done it unto Me." And then He laid those hands upon her head and blessed her, saying, "I will be with thee always, and with all those who do my will."

Marian related the vision to none, but soon after found a record of one almost identical, in the life of that devout Christian teacher, Philip Doddridge. In the morning this dear girl met the little band, overflowing with a tenderness toward all its members never felt before. Those indeed can be loving whose hearts are fountains for a full stream from Him who is Love itself.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE FORTUNES OF THE WALLINGFORDS.

The Wallingfords were an old family of New England in colonial times. Their quaint mansion, built of rough stone, adorned with brick facings imported from the Mother Country, and with an escutcheon of arms in bold relief above the entrance, remained a score of years ago in one of the oldest towns of Massachusetts. A friend of Hampden and his compatriots, Sir Miles Wallingford, of Riverside, having put in jeopardy honors and estates by manful resistance to the edicts of the Star Chamber, after striving to reconcile the stormy elements that convulsed the Court of Charles the First had sided with the Commons, distinguished himself in the Army of the Parliament, and served as one of the wisest of the statesmen of the Protectorate.

On the restoration of the Stuart line, life being forfeited by an act of attainder, the estates being sequestered and the family seat at Riverside conferred upon a prime favorite of the Merry Monarch, Sir Lionel Devereux, after many adventures the exile found a quiet harbor for old age in Plymouth Colony.

Many a broad acre, which had owned the sway of the Wallingfords from the days of the Plantagenets, devolved with the fief of Riverside to the new man. The antique mansion beheld gay revels after his accession. There, as tradition averred, Charles II. had enjoyed a May day revel, with dances around the Maypole, and bear baitings on the Green. Humble village lasses, who had scattered flowers

before the royal train, making their grand entrance through the Park gates, had lived to bemoan the hour in shame and

sorrow.

There Anthony Hamilton had jested with Rochester and the Lovelaces of the day. Young John Churchhill had walked apart, perchance happier than after the stormy fights of Ramillies and Blenheim had wreathed laurels amidst the dark shadows upon his brow. There Butler had spun a canto of Hudibras and Dryden taxed the fertile fancy for quaint figures and cunning rhymes. Gay and witty women, the butterflies of the hour, whose portraits are now to be seen at Hampton Court, painted by Peter Lely, danced attendance upon royalty in tapestried saloons, and gathered roses that harbored wasps to sting them to the heart before many days.

The estate, which passed in this manner into the possession of the Devereux's, had seen the family from that time its undisturbed occupants, adding to the old mansion wing, turret and tower, and rising in the peerage till its representative bore the title, Earl of Riverside.

Traditions of the Wallingfords lingered after all traces of the exile and his descendants; stories of knightly and noble deeds keeping their memory green. One of them, as far back as the Crusades, had built the old church of St. Winifred at Richmanstown, leaving a perpetual fund for the maintenance of twelve poor men, on condition that a mass should be said for his soul's repose; and a worn, brass tablet in the chancel, bearing his name, yet concealed the entrance to the family vault in the crypts below. The escutcheon, with its legend, "Right makes Might," was still to be found on time-worn tombs and memorial tablets, both in the walls of St. Winifred and its church-yard. The shield and sword that Hugo, Baron of Riverside, another of that ancient line, bore at Ascalon and Gaza, when he followed Richard the Lion-hearted to