oor at dusk. I was going away before daylight in the morning. It was
in the autumn: some dry leaves flittered about on the stone at her
feet, and she was watching them. I said good-by again, and she did not
answer me: but I think she knew I was going away, and I am sure she was
sorry, for we had been a great deal together; and, child as I was, I
thought to how many friends she must have had to say farewell.

Although I wished to see my father and mother, I cried as if my heart
would break because I had to leave the ferry. The time spent there had
been the happiest time of all my life, I think. I was old enough to
enjoy, but not to suffer much, and there was singularly little to
trouble one. I did not know that my life was ever to be different. I
have learned, since those childish days, that one must battle against
storms if one would reach the calm which is to follow them. I have
learned also that anxiety, sorrow, and regret fall to the lot of every
one, and that there is always underlying our lives, this mysterious and
frightful element of existence; an uncertainty at times, though we do
trust every thing to God. Under the best-loved and most beautiful face
we know, there is hidden a skull as ghastly as that from which we turn
aside with a shudder in the anatomist's cabinet. We smile, and are gay
enough; God pity us! We try to forget our heart-aches and remorse. We
even call our lives commonplace, and, bearing our own heaviest burdens
silently, we try to keep the commandment, and to bear one another's
also. There is One who knows: we look forward, as He means we shall,
and there is always a hand ready to help us, though we reach out for it
doubtfully in the dark.

For many years after this summer was over, I lived in a distant,
foreign country; at last my father and I were to go back to America.
Cousin Agnes and cousin Matthew, and my mother, were all long since
dead, and I rarely thought of my childhood, for in an eventful and
hurried life the present claims one almost wholly. We were travelling
in Europe, and it happened that one day I was in a bookshop in
Amsterdam, waiting for an acquaintance whom I was to meet, and who was
behind time.

The shop was a quaint place, and I amused myself by looking over an
armful of old English books which a boy had thrown down near me,
raising a cloud of dust which was plain evidence of their antiquity. I
came to one, almost the last, which had a strange familiar