lowed
within the house, the wind was laid without, and the night softened with
the beauty of the rising moon. With a sadness on his brow which neither
the old homestead nor the pure heavens cast there, Elbridge went forth
into the calm night, and sitting for a while by the road beneath an
ancient locust-tree, where he had often read his book in the
summer-times of boyhood, he communed with himself. He was happy--what
mortal man could be happier?--in all his wishes come to pass; his very
dreams had taken life and proved to be realities and friends, and yet a
sadness he could not drive away followed his steps. Why was this? That
moment, if his voice or any honorable and sinless motion of his hand
could have ordained it, he would have dismissed himself from life and
ceased to be a living partaker in the scenes about him. Even then--for
happy as he was, he dreaded in prophetic fear, the chances which beset
our mortal path. The weight of mortality was heavy upon the young man's
spirit.

Thinking over all the way he had passed, oh, who could answer that he,
with the thronging company of busy passions and desires, could ever hope
to reach an old age and never go astray? Oh, blessed is he (he thought)
who can lie down in death, can close his account with this world, having
safely escaped the temptations, the crimes, the trials, which make of
good men even, in moments of weakness and misjudgment, the false
speaker, the evil-doer, the slanderer, the coward, the hasty assailant,
and, (oh, dreadful perchance,) the seeming-guilty-murderer himself.
Strange thoughts for a prosperous lover's night, but earth is not
heaven. With the sweat of anguish on his brow he bowed his head as one
whose trouble is heavy to be borne. Yet even then the thought of the
sweet heaven over him, with all its glorious promises, came upon him,
and as he lifted up his eyes from the earth, the moon sailing forth from
the clouds, and flooding the region with silver light, disclosed a
figure so gentle and delicate, and in its features so pure of all our
common passions, it seemed as if his troubled thoughts had summoned a
spirit before him from the better world. As he stood regarding it in
melancholy calmness, it extended towards him a hand.

"No, no," he said, declining the gentle salutation and retiring a pace,
"touch me not, Miriam, I am not worthy of your pure companionship. If
you knew what passed and is passing in my breast, you would loathe me as
a lepe