y which the tide, with its multitudinous cold fingers,
had gently laid upon the beach.

Leighton leaped from his horse, lifted the corpse with a loud cry, and
covered the white wet face with kisses.

Duvernois leaned forward in his saddle, and gazed at both without a word
or a movement.

"Oh, what could have led her to this?" groaned the physician, already too
sure that life had departed.

"Insanity," was the monotoned response of the statue on horseback.

The funeral took place two days later: the coffin-plate bore the
inscription, "Alice Leighton, aged 23." Duvernois read it, and said not a
word.

"If you don't claim her as your wife," whispered the brother, "you may
find it difficult to marry again."

"Do you think I shall want to marry again?" responded the widower with an
icy stare.

He was aware that he had lost a shame and a torment, and not aware that
she might have been an honor and a joy, if only he had been able to love.

J. W. DE FOREST.

"How Mother Did It."

The year 1839--that is, the year in which I was born--is of no manner of
importance to myself or anybody else. The year 1859--that is, the year in
which I began to _live_ (Charlie and I got married that year)--is of
considerable importance to myself and to somebody else. The two decades
forming the interim between those years constitute my Dark Age, in which I
teethed and measled and whooping-coughed, and went to school, and wore my
hair in two long pig-tails, and loved molasses candy, and regarded a
school-room as purgatory, a ball-room as heaven--when I sang and danced
and grew as the birds and grasshoppers and flowers sing and dance and
grow, because they having nothing else to do.

Then came my Golden Age. That means, then came Charlie into my life, when
I felt for the first time that there was music in the birds' voices and
perfume in the flowers--that there was light in the heavens above and on
the earth beneath, for God was in heaven and Charlie was on earth--when I,
who had all along been hardly more than a human grasshopper, became the
happiest of happy women--so much happier, I thought, than I deserved. For
who was I, and what great thing had I ever done, that I should be crowned
with such a crown of glory as--Charlie? why should I, insignificant I, be
so blest among women as to be taken to wife by Charlie?

I was insanely sentimental enough to rather resent the fact that Charlie
was prosaically well off: his circums