she, bursting into tears."

----Ah, Clarence, where is your youthful pride, and your strength
now?--with only that frail paper to annoy you, crushed in your grasp!

"She sent for father, and taking his hand in hers, told him she was
dying. I am glad you did not see his grief. I was kneeling beside her,
and she put her hand upon my head, and let it rest there for a moment,
while her lips moved as if she were praying.

"'Kiss me, Nelly,' said she, growing fainter: kiss me again for
Clarence.'

"A little while after she died."

For a long time you remain with only that letter, and your thought, for
company. You pace up and down your chamber: again you seat yourself, and
lean your head upon the table, enfeebled by the very grief that you
cherish still. The whole day passes thus: you excuse yourself from all
companionship: you have not the heart to tell the story of your troubles
to Dalton,--least of all, to Miss Dalton. How is this? Is sorrow too
selfish, or too holy?

Toward nightfall there is a calmer and stronger feeling. The voice of
the present world comes to your ear again. But you move away from it
unobserved to that stronger voice of God in the Cataract. Great masses
of angry cloud hang over the west; but beneath them the red harvest sun
shines over the long reach of Canadian shore, and bathes the whirling
rapids in splendor. You stroll alone over the quaking bridge, and under
the giant trees of the Island, to the edge of the British Fall. You go
out to the little shattered tower, and gaze down, with sensations that
will last till death, upon the deep emerald of those awful masses of
water.

It is not the place for a bad man to ponder; it is not the atmosphere
for foul thoughts, or weak ones. A man is never better than when he has
the humblest sense of himself: he is never so unlike the spirit of Evil
as when his pride is utterly vanished. You linger, looking upon the
stream of fading sunlight that plays across the rapids, and down into
the shadow of the depths below, lit up with their clouds of spray;--yet
farther down, your sight swims upon the black eddying masses, with white
ribbons streaming across their glassy surface; and your dizzy eye
fastens upon the frail cockle-shells--their stout oarsmen dwindled to
pygmies--that dance like atoms upon the vast chasm, or like your own
weak resolves upon the whirl of Time.

Your thought, growing broad in the view, seems to cover the whole area
of life: you set u