ed into ugliness by a poisonous thought. I have seen those
who have looked upon her receive that thought and become likewise
infected.

I have seen also to this picture another and a brighter side. I have seen
secret influences drawing individuals together, sustaining and upholding
them; as the long line filaments of wool clasp each other and draw
together the separate particles, so have I seen individuals united. Thus
was the first Napoleon united to Josephine. A secret influence as potent
as the plague passed from one to the other; but it breathed health and
not poison.

Napoleon, with his powerful will, disrupted these magnetic relations; he
tore apart the unseen filaments that bound them; and, the sustaining
influence gone, he fell--a mighty wreck--on the bleak shore of St.
Helena.

What man or woman can comprehend the secret influences that surround the
soul. Keep guard; and when the blood stagnates within, when secret
shudders, and gloomy thoughts, and inharmonious feelings arise, be sure
that some poison-breathing foe is at hand.

Set the door ajar, and resolutely turn your face from the secret
influence that would destroy you.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE.

(CURRER BELL.)

_AGNES REEF.--A TALE_.

CHAPTER I.

I was brought up and educated by my bachelor uncle. He was a reticent,
moody man, and with his aged housekeeper and myself, led a solitary and
unsocial life in the old rambling house which had been his father's
before him.

I was but a child of six years when destiny placed me under his charge,
and with him I remained eleven years; a scared, repressed little thing,
revelling in strange fancies in the spidery attic rooms, and looking down
through the dusty cobwebbed windows upon the life and movement below,
unconscious that I formed a part of that active humanity.

Thus I lived until I entered my seventeenth year. For the last two years
my mind had been expanding and growing discontented with my lot. The
moroseness of my uncle, the sullenness of his housekeeper, the gloom and
dinginess of the bare rooms had grown insupportable to me. These alone I
might have endured, but added to them were other sources of disquiet, not
the least of which being hints from the housekeeper that it was time I
began to do something for myself. Youth, pride, and ambition stirred
within me, and I actively set about looking, for a situation.

I had not long to wait; in one of the weekly papers, of which my uncle
took m