ore the presence of Death, shaming the day he died by a late
repentance,--

"I have been deceived. But I deceived others. Who will forgive that? It
is so hard for me to forgive! You have fought your fight like a hero,
loyal to the core, but I"----

Nevertheless, her kiss was on his dying lips. _She_ forgave him. Must
he, then, go out from her presence into everlasting darkness?

WET-WEATHER WORK.

BY A FARMER.

V.

It is a pelting November rain. No leaves are left upon the branches but
a few yellow flutterers on the tips of the willows and poplars, and the
bleached company that will be clinging to the beeches and the white oaks
for a month to come. All others are whipped away by the night-winds into
the angles of old walls, or are packed under low-limbed shrubberies,
there to swelter and keep warm the rootlets of the newly planted
weigelias and spruces, until the snows and February suns and April mists
and May heats shall have transmuted them into fat and unctuous mould. A
close, pelting, unceasing rain, trying all the leaks of the mossy roof,
testing all the newly laid drains, pressing the fountain at my door to
an exuberant gush,--a rain that makes outside work an impossibility; and
as I sit turning over the leaves of an old book of engravings, wondering
what drift my rainy-day's task shall take, I come upon a pleasant view
of Dovedale in Derbyshire, a little exaggerated, perhaps, in the
luxuriance of its trees and the depth of its shadows, but recalling
vividly the cloudy April morning on which, fifteen years agone, I left
the inn of the "Green Man and Black Head," in the pretty town of
Ashbourne, and strolled away by the same road on which Mr. Charles
Cotton opens his discourse of fishing with Master "Viator," and plunged
down the steep valley-side near to Thorpe, and wandered for three miles
and more, under towering crags, and on soft, spongy bits of meadow,
beside the blithe river where Walton had cast, in other days, a gray
palmer-fly, past the hospitable hall of the worshipful Mr. Cotton, and
the wreck of the old fishing-house, over whose lintel was graven in the
stone the interlaced initials of "Piscator, Junior," and his great
master of the rod. As the rain began to patter on the sedges and the
pools, I climbed out of the valley, on the northward or Derbyshire side,
and striding away through the heather, which belongs to the rolling
heights of this region, I presently found myself upon the great