elf; for now, all is untried,
the present is restless, and the future perplexing. It is so difficult
for me to curb my impatience, to remember that our progressive path
must be trodden step by step, it may be, through thorns and
temptations. Patience is the golden rule of talent, the indispensable
companion of success; for the 'worm may patiently creep to the height
where the mountain-eagle has rested.' The hardest task for genius to
learn is, through toiling, to hope on, and though baffled, never to
despond."

Her face flushed with her own eagerness as she spoke, and Gerald
looked on her with mingled admiration and want of comprehension, and
something of that pity with which boyhood is prone to regard the
wildness of girlish aspirations. It was with hopes and tears united,
that Theresa bade me farewell; and as I turned away to seek my quiet
home, the old feeling of desolation and loneliness, which interest in
my favorite had long dissipated, returned upon me with its depressing
weight. Our walk to the parsonage was taken in unbroken silence, for
Gerald, like myself, was busy with the future--to him a smiling world
of compensation and promise, to me, the silent land of fears and
shadows. A whole year was to elapse before Theresa's return to us, and
in the interval she engaged to write every week, either to her mother
or myself.

For more than an hour that evening I sat beside my window, looking on
the serene prospect around me, and endeavoring to lay something of
that external stillness to the restlessness of my disturbing fancies.
All around was spiritualized by the moonlight; the trees on the lawn
threw long shadows on the grass, and far away, in their mysterious and
majestic silence, stood the eternal mountains; like gigantic watchers,
they kept their vigil over the placid scene beneath--the vigil of
untold centuries. Cloudless, unsympathizing, changeless, they had no
part in the busy drama of human experience their loftiness overlooked,
and now they loomed with shadowy outline, through the sanctifying
light, habitants alike of earth and sky.

I anticipated tidings from Theresa with that interest which slight
occurrences lend a life whose stirring events are few.

To me, she engaged to record her thoughts and impressions as they
came, and to be to me what, under similar circumstances _she_ would
have been, whose sweet face for a few years brightened my life, and
who now sleeps, in her childish beauty, by her mot