d in this fragile blossom--the first
that had blessed our union.

The little Constance slumbered by Mabel's side, and a slip from that
bunch of white roses, the last my sister had gathered, shadows the
marbles that guard both of those now-distant, yet not neglected graves.
Thus death at last entered our happy household!

A great shadow fell over me, which I vainly strove to dispel with all
the effort of my reason and my will. Physicians, remembering my mother's
inscrutable melancholy--a part of that mysterious malady that consumed
her life--whispered their warnings in my husband's ears, and he
resolved, with that energy which belongs to men of his nature, to lay
the axe at once to the root of this evil in the only way that presented
itself to his mind--as possible of accomplishment.

At first I resisted faintly the coincidence of his will, which he knew
was sure to come sooner or later; and to the very last it was agony
unspeakable to me, to think that my father's house should pass into the
hands of strangers, and that the place that knew me should know me no
more!

Very resolutely and calmly did Wardour endure and stem my opposition.
Swift and strong as the current of my will flowed naturally, he was ever
its master, as the stone dam can stay and lull the fiercest rivers. He
persisted, knowing well what was at stake, and to my surprise Dr:
Pemberton and Mr. Gerald Stansbury cooperated with his decision. Nor did
Mr. Lodore oppose it, though losing thereby one of his most liberal
parishioners.

A great struggle was going on in my heart just then--that I think
would have perished in darkness, had I not found myself free and
emancipated from all fetters of custom and observance by our change of
residence.

From the shallow streams of conventional Christianity, moving with tardy
current, and full of shoals and sandbanks, I was drifting down, slowly
but surely, with that great ocean of deep and unsounded religion, to
which all profound natures, that have suffered, do, I believe--if left
to themselves--inevitably tend.

In this new land of promise--the golden California--lying like a bride
by the side of her bridegroom--the great Pacific Ocean--and shut away
by deserts and mountains, from all old conventional cliques and
prejudices of our Eastern cities, my soul took wing. What poetry was in
me found its outlet; what religious capacity God had endued me with,
went forth from the clash of cymbals and the sound of the