upon her companion's knees as she heard
that boding sound. Stronger it grew, and sadder, and deepened into the
tone of a death-bell, knolling dolefully from some ivy-mantled tower
and bearing tidings of mortality and woe to the cottage, to the hall
and to the solitary wayfarer, that all might weep for the doom
appointed in turn to them. Then came a measured tread, passing slowly,
slowly on, as of mourners with a coffin, their garments trailing on
the ground, so that the ear could measure the length of their
melancholy array. Before them went the priest, reading the
burial-service, while the leaves of his book were rustling in the
breeze. And though no voice but his was heard to speak aloud, still
there were revilings and anathemas, whispered but distinct, from women
and from men, breathed against the daughter who had wrung the aged
hearts of her parents, the wife who had betrayed the trusting fondness
of her husband, the mother who had sinned against natural affection
and left her child to die. The sweeping sound of the funeral train
faded away like a thin vapor, and the wind, that just before had
seemed to shake the coffin-pall, moaned sadly round the verge of the
hollow between three hills. But when the old woman stirred the
kneeling lady, she lifted not her head.

"Here has been a sweet hour's sport!" said the withered crone,
chuckling to herself.

THE TOLL-GATHERER'S DAY.

A SKETCH OF TRANSITORY LIFE.

Methinks, for a person whose instinct bids him rather to pore over the
current of life than to plunge into its tumultuous waves, no
undesirable retreat were a toll-house beside some thronged
thoroughfare of the land. In youth, perhaps, it is good for the
observer to run about the earth, to leave the track of his footsteps
far and wide, to mingle himself with the action of numberless
vicissitudes, and, finally, in some calm solitude to feed a musing
spirit on all that he has seen and felt. But there are natures too
indolent or too sensitive to endure the dust, the sunshine or the
rain, the turmoil of moral and physical elements, to which all the
wayfarers of the world expose themselves. For such a man how pleasant
a miracle could life be made to roll its variegated length by the
threshold of his own hermitage, and the great globe, as it were,
perform its revolutions and shift its thousand scenes before his eyes
without whirling him onward in its course! If any mortal be favored
with a lot analogous to th