unread, or half read, for days,
awaiting a convenient season, but they were there.

Anne's letters were long, they were pleasant, they were never
exciting--the very kind to keep; like friends who last a lifetime, but
who never give us one quickened pulse. Alone in his room, or stretched
on the grass under a tree, reading them, Rast felt himself strongly
carried back to his old life on the island, and he did not resist the
feeling. His plans for the future were as yet vague, but Anne was always
a part of his dream.

But this youth lived so vigorously and fully and happily in the present
that there was not much time for the future and for dreams. He seldom
thought. What other people thought, he felt.

CHAPTER VI.

"Into the Silent Land!
Ah! who shall lead us thither?
Clouds in the evening sky more darkly gather,
And shattered wrecks lie thicker on the strand.
Who leads us with a gentle hand
Thither, O thither,
Into the Silent Land?

"O Land, O Land,
For all the broken-hearted,
The mildest herald by our fate allotted
Beckons, and with inverted torch doth stand
To lead us with a gentle hand
To the land of the great Departed--
Into the Silent Land!"

--LONGFELLOW. _From the German._

Early in September William Douglas failed suddenly. From taciturnity he
sank into silence, from quiet into lethargy. He rose in the morning, but
after that effort he became like a breathing statue, and sat all day in
his arm-chair without stirring or noticing anything. If they brought him
food he ate it, but he did not speak or answer their questions by motion
or gesture. The fort surgeon was puzzled; it was evidently not
paralysis. He was a new-comer on the island, and he asked many questions
as to the past. Anne sincerely, Miss Lois resolutely, denied that there
had ever been any trouble with the brain; Dr. Gaston drummed on the
table, and answered sharply that all men of intellect were more or less
mad. But the towns-people smiled, and tapped their foreheads
significantly; and the new surgeon had noticed in the course of his
experience that, with time for observation, the towns-people are
generally right. So he gave a few medicines, ordered a generous diet,
and looking about him for some friend of the family who could be
trusted, selected at last Pere Michaux. For Miss Lois would not treat
him even civ