s is the ayah in her eyes; and, if the ayah should
insist on her worshipping herself as the goddess Railroadina or
Steamboatina, that made England and the sea and Bengal, it is certain
that the little thing would do so, asking no question but this--whether
kissing would do for worshipping.

Every evening at nine o'clock, as the ayah sits by the little creature
lying awake in bed, the silvery tongue of a dial tolls the hour. Reader,
you know who she is. She is the granddaughter of her that faded away
about sunset in gazing at her twin orphans. Her name is Grace. And she
is the niece of that elder and once happy Grace, who spent so much of
her happiness in this very room, but whom, in her utter desolation, we
saw in the boudoir with the torn letter at her feet. She is the daughter
of that other sister, wife to a military officer, who died abroad.
Little Grace never saw her grandmama, nor her lovely aunt that was her
namesake, nor consciously her mama. She was born six months after the
death of the elder Grace; and her mother saw her only through the mists
of mortal suffering, which carried her off three weeks after the birth
of her daughter.

This view was taken several years ago; and since then the younger Grace
in her turn is under a cloud of affliction. But she is still under
eighteen; and of her there may be hopes. Seeing such things in so short
a space of years, for the grandmother died at thirty-two, we say--Death
we can face: but knowing, as some of us do, what is human life, which of
us is it that without shuddering could (if consciously we were summoned)
face the hour of birth?

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Being constantly almost an absentee from London, and very often
from other great cities, so as to command oftentimes no favourable
opportunities for overlooking the great mass of public journals, it is
possible enough that other slanders of the same tenor may have existed.
I speak of what met my own eye, or was accidentally reported to me--but
in fact all of us are exposed to this evil of calumnies lurking
unseen--for no degree of energy, and no excess of disposable time, would
enable any one man to exercise this sort of vigilant police over _all_
journals. Better, therefore, tranquilly to leave all such malice to
confound itself.

NORTHERN LIGHTS.

"It was on a bright July morning that I found myself whirled away
by railroad from Berlin, 'that great ostrich egg in the sand,'
which the sun o