le. His foreboding spirit deemed it an omen at the
time, and so it proved; for the sweet earthly form by which the Lily
had been manifested to the world was found lifeless the next morning
in the temple with her head resting on her arms, which were folded
upon the slab of dark-veined marble. The chill winds of the earth had
long since breathed a blight into this beautiful flower; so that a
loving hand had now transplanted it to blossom brightly in the garden
of Paradise.

But alas for the temple of happiness! In his unutterable grief Adam
Forrester had no purpose more at heart than to convert this temple of
many delightful hopes into a tomb and bury his dead mistress there.
And, lo! a wonder! Digging a grave beneath the temple's marble floor,
the sexton found no virgin earth such as was meet to receive the
maiden's dust, but an ancient sepulchre in which were treasured up the
bones of generations that had died long ago. Among those forgotten
ancestors was the Lily to be laid; and when the funeral procession
brought Lilias thither in her coffin, they beheld old Walter Gascoigne
standing beneath the dome of the temple with his cloak of pall and
face of darkest gloom, and wherever that figure might take its stand
the spot would seem a sepulchre. He watched the mourners as they
lowered the coffin down.

"And so," said he to Adam Forrester, with the strange smile in which
his insanity was wont to gleam forth, "you have found no better
foundation for your happiness than on a grave?"

But as the shadow of Affliction spoke a vision of hope and joy had its
birth in Adam's mind even from the old man's taunting words, for then
he knew what was betokened by the parable in which the Lily and
himself had acted, and the mystery of life and death was opened to
him.

"Joy! joy!" he cried, throwing his arms toward heaven. "On a grave be
the site of our temple, and now our happiness is for eternity."

With those words a ray of sunshine broke through the dismal sky and
glimmered down into the sepulchre, while at the same moment the shape
of old Walter Gascoigne stalked drearily away, because his gloom,
symbolic of all earthly sorrow, might no longer abide there now that
the darkest riddle of humanity was read.

FOOTPRINTS ON THE SEASHORE.

It must be a spirit much unlike my own which can keep itself in health
and vigor without sometimes stealing from the sultry sunshine of the
world to plunge into the cool bath of solitude