ared now," said the painter; "the thought I
endeavored to suggest has entered your mind, for I read the expression
in your face like an open book. Well, see if I have deceived you--look!"

And as he spoke, the painter removed a green curtain from the frame of a
picture, so arranged that the full light of the middle window fell upon
it.

Estcourt almost cried out with astonishment. Here, before him, as
though ready to start from the canvas, was the woman who had been, his
fate--who had died long years before; there in the full blaze of light,
he saw her who had thrown the shadow upon his existence, which still
clouded it, fresh, softly smiling, alive almost on the speaking and
eloquent canvas. The blue eyes beamed with a tender and subdued
sweetness, the delicate forehead, with its soft brown curls, rose airily
above the perfectly arched brows, the innocent lips were half parted,
and the portrait seemed almost ready to move from its frame, and
descend, a living woman, into the apartment.

[Footnote 71: Conspicuous among the younger writers of Virginia, of which
State he is a native; author of many novels.]

* * * * *

=_312._= ASPECTS OF SUMMER.

The glory of the summer deepened and grew more intense, the foliage
assumed a darker tint of emerald, the sky glowed with a more dazzling
blue, and the songs of the busy harvesters came sad and slow, like the
long, melancholy swell of pensive sighs across the hills and fields,
dying away finally into the "harvest home," which told that the golden
grain would wave no more in the wind until another year. The "harvest
moon" looked down on bare fields now, and June was dead. At last came
August, the month of great white clouds and imperial sunsets, the
crowning hours of the rich summer, soon to fade away into the yellow
autumn, the month of reveries and dreams on the banks of shadowy
streams, or beneath, the old majestic trees of silent forests.

* * * * *

=_Sarah A. Dorsey,[72] about 1835-._=

From "Lucia Dare."

=_313._= SCENERY AND SOCIETY AT NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI.

The village of Natchez, under the hill, was clustered close to the
water's edge; the bluffs rose precipitously, garnished with pine trees,
and locusts, and tufted grasses; the vista here terminated in Brown's
beautiful gardens, gay with flower-beds and closely-clipped hedges. Far
away over the river stretched the broad emerald plain of Louisi