st too late?
"Yes, I did. I kep' it for thee, Derrick. I always knowed thee'd
come,"--in a lower voice. "There's that dress, too. I'd like thee to've
seen me in that; but"----
"Take her hands in yours," whispered Mary.
"Is it thee, my son?"--with a smile. After a long pause,--"I kep' it,
an' I kep' true love for thee, Derrick. God brought thee back for 't, I
think. It be the best, after all. He'll bring thee to me for 't at th'
last, my boy,--my boy!"
As the faint voice lingered and died upon the words, the morning sun
shone out in clear, calm glory over the still figures on the beach. The
others had crept away, and left the three alone with God and His great
angel, in whose vast presence there is no life save Love, no future save
Love's wide eternity.
MY STUDENT LIFE AT HOFWYL.
There flourished, in the heart of the Swiss Republic, during some twenty
or twenty-five years, commencing about the year 1810, an educational
institution, in the nature of a private college, which, though it
attracted much public attention at the time, being noticed with
commendation, as I remember, in a report made by the Count Capo d'Istria
to the Emperor Alexander of Russia, yet has never, I think, been
appreciated at its full deserts, nor generally recognized for the
admirable institution it was,--unparalleled, in the character of the
spirit which pervaded it, and in many of the practical results obtained,
by any establishment for learning that has ever come under my
observation.
I was educated there, from the age of sixteen or seventeen to twenty.
Passing into its tranquil scenes from the quiet of home and the hands of
a private tutor, with the sunny hopes and high ideal and scanty
experience of youth, much that I found there appeared to me at the time
but natural and in the ordinary course of things, which now, by the
light of a life's teachings, and by comparison with the realities as I
have found them, seems to me, as I look back, rather in the nature of a
dream of fancy, tinged with the glamour of optimism, than like the
things one really meets with in the work-a-day world. I say this, after
making what I think due allowance for the Claude-Lorraine tints in which
youth is wont to invest its early recollections.
It was one of several public institutions for education founded by the
benevolent enterprise of a very remarkable man. EMANUEL VON FELLENBERG
was born of a patrician family of Bern. His father had been a
|