air. As I crossed the little lawn, the wails from the
kitchens reached me. Now that the invalid could no longer be disturbed by
their lamentations, the unsophisticated negroes gave vent to their
feelings without reserve. I heard their outcries long after every other
sound from the house was lost on my ear.

I held my way along the road, with no other view but to escape from the
scene I had just quitted, and entered the very little wood which might be
said to have been the last object of the external world that had attracted
my sister's attention. Here everything reminded me of the past; of the
days of childhood and youth; of the manner in which the four Clawbonny
children had lived together, and roamed these very thickets, in confidence
and love. I sat in that wood an hour; a strange, unearthly hour it seemed
to me! I saw Grace's angel countenance imprinted on the leaves, heard her
low but gay laugh, as she was wont to let it be heard in the hours of
happiness, and the tones of her gentle voice sounded in my ears almost as
familiarly as in life. Rupert and Lucy were there too. I saw them, heard
them, and tried to enter into their innocent merriment, as I had done of
old; but fearful glimpses of the sad truth would interpose, in time to
break the charm.

When I left that little wood, it was to seek a larger cover, and fields
farther removed from the house. It was dark before I thought of returning;
all that time was passed in a species of mystical hallucination, in which
the mind was lost in scenes foreign to those actually present. I saw
Grace's sweet image everywhere; I heard her voice at every turn. Now she
was the infant I was permitted to drag in her little wagon, the earliest
of all my impressions of that beloved sister; then, she was following me
as I trundled my hoop; next came her little lessons in morals, and
warnings against doing wrong, or some grave but gentle reproof for errors
actually committed; after which, I saw her in the pride of young
womanhood, lovely and fitted to be loved, the sharer of my confidence, and
one capable of entering into all my plans of life. How often that day did
the murmuring of a brook or the humming of a bee become blended in my
imagination with the song, the laugh, the call, or the prayers of that
beloved sister whose spirit had ascended to heaven, and who was no more to
mingle in my concerns or those of life!

At one time I had determined to pass the night abroad, and commune