en out into the great all-where of air, as if some mysterious
presence encompassed him.

Very lowly I said,--

"Forgiveness is of God;" and I remembered the vision that came in my
dream. The little voice that steals into hearts crowded with emotions,
and tells tiny nerves of wish which way to fly, went whispering through
the niches of my mind, "Tell the dream."

Mr. Axtell went back to his monumental resting-place. I said,--

"I have had a wonderful dream to-day;" and I began to tell the opening
thereof.

The first sentence was not told when I stopped, suddenly. I could not go
on. He asked me, "Why?" I only re-uttered what I felt, that I could not
tell it.

"Oh! I have had a dream," he said,--"one that for eighteen years has
been hung above my days and woven into my nights,--a great, hopeless
woof of doom. I have tried to broider it with gold, I have tried to hang
silver-bells upon the drooping corners thereof. I have tried to fold it
about me and wear it, as other men wear sorrows, for the sun of heaven
and the warmth of society to draw the wrinkled creases out. I have
striven to fold it up, and lay it by in the arbor-vitae chest of memory,
with myrrh and camphor, but it will not be exorcised. No, no! it hangs
firm as granite, stiff as the axis of the sun, unapproachable as the
aurora of the North. Miss Percival, could you wear such a vestment in
the march of life?"

"Your dream is too mystical; will you tell me what it has done for you?
As yet, I only know what you have not done with it."

"What it has done for me?"--and he went slowly on, thinking half aloud,
as if the idea were occurring for the first time.

"It touched me one soft summer day, before the earth became mildewed and
famine-stricken. I was a proud, wilful Axtell boy; all the family traits
were written with a white-hot pen on me. My will, my great high will,
went ringing chimes of what I would do through the house where I was
born, where my mother has just died, and I swung this right arm forth
into the air of existence, and said, 'I will do what I will; men shall
say I am a master in the land.'

"My father sent me away from home for education. I walked with intrepid
mind through the course where others halted, weary, overladen, unfit for
burden.

"To gain the valedictory oration was one goal that I had said I would
attain to. I did. That was nineteen years ago. I came home in the soft,
hot, August-time. It was the close of the month. The m