r? Yet they despaired not, their hearts
failed them not. The majestic splendour of the night, as it deepened in
its solemn calm; as the shadows of the windless trees fell larger and
sharper upon the silvery earth; as the skies grew mellower and more
luminous in the strengthening starlight, inspired them with the serenity
of faith,--for night, to the earnest soul, opens the Bible of the
universe, and on the leaves of Heaven is written, "God is everywhere."

Their hands were clasped each in each, their pale faces were upturned;
they spoke not, neither were they conscious that they prayed, but their
silence was thought, and the thought was worship.

Amidst the grief and solitude of the pure, there comes, at times, a
strange and rapt serenity,--a sleep-awake,--over which the instinct
of life beyond the grave glides like a noiseless dream; and ever that
heaven that the soul yearns for is coloured by the fancies of the fond
human heart, each fashioning the above from the desires unsatisfied
below.

"There," thought the musing maiden, "cruelty and strife shall cease;
there, vanish the harsh differences of life; there, those whom we have
loved and lost are found, and through the Son, who tasted of mortal
sorrow, we are raised to the home of the Eternal Father!"

"And there," thought the aspiring sage, "the mind, dungeoned and chained
below, rushes free into the realms of space; there, from every mystery
falls the veil; there, the Omniscient smiles on those who, through the
darkness of life, have fed that lamp, the soul; there, Thought, but the
seed on earth, bursts into the flower and ripens to the fruit!"

And on the several hope of both maid and sage the eyes of the angel
stars smiled with a common promise.

At last, insensibly, and while still musing, so that slumber but
continued the revery into visions, father and daughter slept.

The night passed away; the dawn came slow and gray; the antlers of the
deer stirred above the fern; the song of the nightingale was hushed; and
just as the morning star waned back, while the reddening east announced
the sun, and labour and trouble resumed their realm of day, a fierce
band halted before those sleeping forms.

These men had been Lancastrian soldiers, and, reduced to plunder for a
living, had, under Sir Geoffrey Gates, formed the most stalwart part of
the wild, disorderly force whom Hilyard and Coniers had led to Olney.
They had heard of the new outbreak, headed by their anc