The kind minister soothed the poor old soul with those gentle, quieting
tones which had carried peace and comfort to so many chambers of sickness
and sorrow, to so many hearts overburdened by the trials laid upon them.

Old Sophy became quiet in a few minutes, and proceeded to tell her story.
She told it in the low half-whisper which is the natural voice of lips
oppressed wish grief and fears; with quick glances around the apartment
from time to time, as if she dreaded lest the dim portraits on the walls
and the dark folios on the shelves might overhear her words.

It was not one of those conversations which a third person can report
minutely, unless by that miracle of clairvoyance known to the readers of
stories made out of authors' brains. Yet its main character can be
imparted in a much briefer space than the old black woman took to give
all its details.

She went far back to the time when Dudley Venner was born,--she being
then a middle-aged woman. The heir and hope of a family which had been
narrowing down as if doomed to extinction, he had been surrounded with
every care and trained by the best education he could have in New
England. He had left college, and was studying the profession which
gentlemen of leisure most affect, when he fell in love with a young girl
left in the world almost alone, as he was. The old woman told the story
of his young love and his joyous bridal with a tenderness which had
something more, even, than her family sympathies to account for it. Had
she not hanging over her bed a paper-cutting of a profile,--jet black,
but not blacker than the face it represented--of one who would have been
her own husband in the small years of this century, if the vessel in
which he went to sea, like Jamie in the ballad, had not sailed away and
never come back to land? Had she not her bits of furniture stowed away
which had been got ready for her own wedding,--two rocking-chairs, one
worn with long use, one kept for him so long that it had grown a
superstition with her never to sit in it,--and might he not come back
yet, after all? Had she not her chest of linen ready for her humble
house-keeping with store of serviceable huckaback and piles of neatly
folded kerchiefs, wherefrom this one that showed so white against her
black face was taken, for that she knew her eyes would betray her in "the
presence"?

All the first part of the story the old woman told tenderly, and yet
dwelling upon every inc