ghty indeed; and these thoughts of yours are so
dreary, how can one believe in them and live!"

"We are compelled to live," replied he, "even by that same decree which
binds us to the infinite chain. Were it not so, man would imitate the
day-flies, and die at sundown, that he might escape the dark night which
reveals to him the mystery of his being, whereat he trembles and sobs;
and all this is also in the decree."

"But if all these things are so," said Rachel, "what do you say of
happiness? Is there no joy in the world? Are not the birds happy, when
in the morning the woods resound with their song, and so, too, every
animal after its kind? Are not children joyful when the house rings with
their mirth? and have not men and women their pleasures of a thousand
kinds? nay, might not I myself have been one of the happiest of beings,
if, with the fortune which is to be left to me, that locket had been
engraved with the name of Rachel Grierson in place of Agnes Ainslie?"

"Yes," replied he, "happiness is in the decree as well; and," he added
with a smile, "it is always cropping out around us, but no one can
manufacture the article. If you wait for it, you may feel it; if you run
after it, you will probably not find it, because it is not ready by
those eternal laws which, at their beginning, involved its coming up at
a certain moment of long after-years. Then, at the best, pleasure and
pain are mere oscillations; but the first movement is downwards, for we
cry when we come into the world; and the last is also downwards, for we
groan when we go out of it. It is the old rhyme--

'We scream when we're born,
We groan when we're dying;
And all that's between
Is but laughing and crying.'"

A parade of philosophy all this which at another time might have had but
a small effect upon a youthful mind, but Rachel was in the meantime
occupied by looking at the inscription on the fatal toy; and we all know
that the feeling of the dominant idea of the moment assimilates to its
own hue the light or shade of all other ideas of a cognate kind; and
there is in this process also a selection and rejection whereby all
melancholy ideas cluster in the gloomy atmosphere, if we may so term it,
of the prevailing depression, and all joyful ones come together by the
attraction of a joyful thought; and so Rachel was impressed by views
which, if they had been modified by the comforting doctrines of
Christianity, might have enabled her at