y was gray,
When the poor little baby wandered away.

The sun went down with crimson crown
Behind the clouds and the tree-tops brown:
The cold road stared with a colder frown
When the poor little feet went wandering down.

Her mother lived up in the shining sky,
Thought poor little baby, wondering why,
As hours and days and weeks went by,
She never came down at her baby's cry.

If the crimson wave in the west led true,
The skyward road she surely knew:
She heeded not that the sharp winds blew,
Or her cold little feet sore tired grew.

She hummed some broken baby song,
And talked to herself as she trudged along:
She feared no failure, recked no wrong,
But she thought that the way was lone and long.

Tired and cold, she lingered to rest
Under a snow-drift's treacherous crest:
She cuddled herself in a tiny nest,
White and cold as her mother's breast.

They found her there on the snowy ground,
Her silky hair with snowflakes crowned.
She made no sign, she breathed no sound,
But the skyward road she had surely found.

CLARA G. DOLLIVER.

THREE FEATHERS.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF "A PRINCESS OF THULE."

CHAPTER XXIII.

SOME OLD SONGS.

"Are you dreaming again, child?" said Mrs. Rosewarne to her daughter.
"You are not a fit companion for a sick woman, who is herself dull
enough. Why do you always look so sad when you look at the sea, Wenna?"

The wan-faced, beautiful-eyed woman lay on a sofa, a book beside her.
She had been chatting in a bright, rapid, desultory fashion about the
book and a dozen other things--amusing herself really by a continual
stream of playful talk--until she perceived that the girl's fancies were
far away. Then she stopped suddenly, with this expression of petulant
but good-natured disappointment.

"Oh, I beg your pardon, mother," said Wenna, who was seated at an open
window fronting the bay. "What did you say? Why does the sea make one
sad? I don't know. One feels less at home here than out on the rocks at
Eglosilyan: perhaps that is it. Or the place is so beautiful that it
almost makes you cry. I don't know."

And indeed Penzance Bay on this still, clear morning was beautiful
enough to attract wistful eyes and call up vague and distant fancies.
The cloudless sky was intensely dark in its blue: one had a notion that
the unseen sun was overhead and shining vertically down. The still plain
of water--so clear that the shingle could be seen through it a long w