given to toil, his strength to perilous blasts.
In freezing floods when tempests hurled the deep,
And battling winds clashed in their icy caves,
Scared housewives, waking, thought of him, and said,
"'The Stormy Petrel' is abroad to-night,
And watches from the cliffs."

He could not rest
When shipwrecked forms might gasp amid the waves,
And not a cry be answered from the shore.

Now Heaven has quenched his sight; but when he hears
By his lone hearth the sullen sea-winds clang,
Or listens, in the mad, wild, drowning night,
As younger footsteps hurry o'er the beach
To pluck the sailor from his sharp-fanged death,--
The old man starts, with generous impulse thrilled,
And, with the natural habit of his heart,
Calls to his neighbors in a cheery tone,
Tells them he'll pilot toward the signal guns,
And then, remembering all his weight of years,
Sinks on his couch, and weeps that he is blind.

A STORY OF TO-DAY.

Margaret stood looking down in her quiet way at the sloping moors and
fog. She, too, had her place and work. She thought that night she saw it
clearly, and kept her eyes fixed on it, as I said. They plodded steadily
down the wide years opening before her. Whatever slow, unending work
lay in them, whatever hungry loneliness they held for her heart, or
coarseness of deed, she saw it all, shrinking from nothing. She
looked at the tense blue-corded veins in her wrist, full of fine
pure blood,--gauged herself coolly, her lease of life, her power of
endurance,--measured it out against the work waiting for her. The work
would be long, she knew. She would be old before it was finished, quite
an old woman, hard, mechanical, worn out. But the day would be so
bright, when it came, it would atone for all: the day would be bright,
the home warm again; it would hold all that life had promised her of
good.

All? Oh, Margaret, Margaret! Was there no sullen doubt in the brave
resolve? Was there no shadow rose just then, dark, ironical, blotting
out father and mother and home, coming nearer, less alien to your soul
than these, than even your God?

If any such cold, masterful shadow rose out of years gone, and clutched
at the truest life of her heart, she stifled it, and thrust it down.
And yet, leaning on the gate, and thinking drearily, vacantly, she
remembered a time when God came nearer to her than He did now, and came
through that shadow,--when, by t