al from whom these fateful words
came. I had had so much hope! In very desperation of feeling, I strove
to look up to his face. My eyes were arrested before they reached him.

"'By what?' did you ask?"

Her long silence had incited me to question, and she turned her face to
me, and slowly said,--

"By the Lightning of Life.

"Two sisters, in one night,--one unto Death, the other unto Life. Beside
Doctor Percival was standing one. I do not know what he was like, I
cannot tell you; but, believe me, it is solemnly true, that, that
instant, this human being flashed into my heart and soul. I saw, and
felt, and have heard the rolling thunder that followed the flash to this
very hour. It was very hard, over my Alice. If I had only been she, how
much, how much happier it would have been!--and yet it must have been
wiser. She could not have endured to the end. She would have failed in
the bitterness of the trial.

"My Alice! I am devoutly thankful that you are safe in heaven!"--and for
a moment the hands were lifted up from the treasured packet; they closed
over it, and she went on.

"Alice was wrapped up in earth. In the moment when the first fold of the
clod-mantle, that trails about us all at the last, fell protectingly
over her, I was in that condition of superlative misery that cries out
for something to the very welkin that sends down such harsh hardness;
and I hurried my eyes out of the open grave, only to find them again
arrested by the same soul that had stood beside Doctor Percival and
Alice in her death. They said something to me, kinder than ever came out
of the blue vault, and yet they awoke the fever of resistance. I would
have no thought but that of Alice. What right had any other to come in
then and there?

"September came. Its days brought my sorrow to me ever anew. The early
dew baptized it; the great sun laid his hot hand upon its brow and named
it Death, in the name of the Mighty God; and the evening stars looked
down on me, rocking Alice in my soul, and singing lamentful lullabies
to her, sleeping, till such time as Lethean vapors curled through the
horizon of my mind, and hid its formless shadows of suffering.

"Mary Percival was Alice's best friend; as such, she came to comfort and
to mourn with me. One day, it was the latest of September's thirty, Mary
lured me on to the sea-shore, and into her small boat once more. Little
echoes of gladness sprang up from the sea; voices from Alice's silence
fl