heart follows you, and I guess that you know it. Here is no imperfect love on his part were you his wife, could you learn to give him so much that your life might become peaceful and satisfied?"

"You do, indeed, test me!" Lucy murmured. "How can I know? What answer can I make? I have shrunk from thinking of that, and I cannot feel that my duty lies there. Yet, if it were so, if I were already bound, irrevocably, surely all my present faith must be false if happiness in some form did not come at last!"

"I believe it would, to you!" cried Mrs. Hopeton. "Why not to me? Do you think I have ever looked for love in my husband? It seems, now, that I have been content to know that he was proud of me. If I seek, perhaps I may find more than I have dreamed of; and if I find, if indeed and truly I find,I shall never more lack self-possession and will!"

and to avoid what might lead to a new one. He did not guess, as he approached the house, that his wife had long been watching at the front window, in an anxious, excited state, and that she only slipped back to the sofa and covered her head just before he reached the door.

For a day or two she was silent, and perhaps a little sullen; but the payment of the most pressing bills, the progress of the new embellishments, and the necessity of retaining her affectionate playfulness in the presence of the workmen, brought back her customary manner. Now and then a sharp, indirect allusion showed that she had not forgotten, and had not Joseph closed his teeth firmly upon his tongue, the household atmosphere might have been again disturbed.

Not many days elapsed before a very brief note from Mr. Blessing announced that the fifth instalment would be needed. He wrote in great haste, he said, and would explain everything by a later

mail.

Joseph was hardly surprised now. He showed the note to Julia, merely saying: "I have not the money, and if I had, he could scarcely expect me to pay it without knowing the necessity. My best plan will be to go to the city at once."

"I think so, too," she answered. "You will be far better satisfied when you have seen pa, and he can also help you to raise the money temporarily, if it is really inevitable. He knows all the capitalists."

"I shall do another thing, Julia. I shall sell enough of the stock to pay the instalment; nay, I shall sell it all, if I can do so without loss."

"Are you" she began fiercely, but, checking herself, merely added, "see pa first, that's all I stipulate."

Mr. Blessing had not returned from the Custom-House when Joseph reached the city. He had no mind to sit in the dark parlor and wait; so he plunged boldly into the labyrinth of clerks, porters, inspectors, and tide-waiters. Everybody knew Blessing, but nobody

could tell where he was to be found. Finally some one, more obliging than the rest, said: "Try the Wharf-Rat!" The Wharf-Rat proved to be a "saloon" in a narrow alley behind the Custom-House. On opening the door a Venetian screen prevented the persons at the bar from being immediately seen, but Joseph recognized his fatherin-law's voice, saying, "Straight, if you please! " Mr. Blessing was leaning against one end of the bar, with a glass in his hand, engaged with an individual of not very prepossessing appearance. He remarked to the latter, almost in a whisper (though the words reached Joseph's ears), "You understand, the collector can't be seen every day; it takes time, and more or less capital. The doorkeeper and others expect to be feed."

As Joseph approached, he turned towards him with an angry, suspicious look, which was not changed into one of welcome so soon that a flash of uncomfortable surprise did not intervene. But the welcome once there, it deepened and mellowed, and became so warm and rich that only a cold, contracted nature could have refused to bathe in its effulgence.

"Why!" he cried, with extended hands, “I should as soon have expected to see daisies growing in this sawdust, or to find these spittoons smelling like hyacinths! Mr. Tweed, one of our rising politicians, Mr. Asten, my son-in-law ! Asten, of Asten Hall, I might almost say, for I hear that your mansion is assuming quite a palatial aspect. Another glass, if you please your throat must be full of dust, Joseph,-pulvis faucibus hæsit, if I might be allowed to change the classic phrase."

Joseph tried to decline, but was forced to compromise on a moderate glass of ale; while Mr. Blessing, whose glass was empty, poured something into it from a black bottle, nodded to Mr. Tweed, and saying, "Always straight!" drank it off.

"You would not suppose," he then said to Joseph, "that this little room,

dark as it is and not agreeably fragrant, has often witnessed the arrangement of political manœuvres which have decided the City, and through the City the State. I have seen together at that table, at midnight, Senator Slocum, and the Honorables Whitstone, Hacks, and Larruper. Why, the First Auditor of the Treasury was here no later than last week! I frequently transact some of the confidential business of the Custom-House within these precincts, as at present."

"Shall I wait for you outside?" Joseph asked.

"I think it will not be necessary. I have stated the facts, Mr. Tweed, and if you accept them, the figures can be arranged between us at any time. It is a simple case of algebra: by taking x, you work out the unknown quantity."

With a hearty laugh at his own smartness, he shook the "rising politician's" hand, and left the Wharf-Rat with Joseph.

operation has

Shall we say still better

'Paraguay' instead, or 'Reading,' which is a very common stock? Well, then, I guess you have come to see me in relation to the Reading?"

Joseph, as briefly as possible, stated the embarrassment he suffered, on account of the continued calls for payment, the difficulty of raising money for the fifth instalment, and bluntly expressed his doubts of the success of the speculation. Mr. Blessing heard him patiently to the end, and then, having collected himself, answered :—

"I understand, most perfectly, your feeling in the matter. Further, I do not deny that in respect to the time of realizing from the Am — Reading, I should say I have also been disappointed. It has cost me no little trouble to keep my own shares intact, and my stake is so much greater than

yours, for it is my all! I am ready to unite with the Chowder, at once indeed, as one of the directors, I mentioned it at our last meeting, but the proposition, I regret to say, was not favorably entertained. We are dependent, in a great measure, on Kanuck, who is on the spot superintending the Reading; he has been telegraphed to come on, and promises to do so as soon as the funds now called for are forthcoming. My faith, I hardly need intimate, is firm."

"My only resource, then," said Joseph, "will be to sell a portion of my stock, I suppose?"

"There is one drawback to that course, and I am afraid you may not quite understand my explanation. The

Reading has not been introduced in the market, and its real value could not be demonstrated without betraying the secret lever by which we intend hoisting it to a fancy height. We could only dispose of a portion of it to capitalists whom we choose to take into our confidence. The same reason would be valid against hypothecation."

"Have you paid this last instalment ?” Joseph suddenly asked.

If

"N-no; not wholly; but I anticipate a temporary accommodation. Mr. Spelter deprives me of Clementina, as I hear (through third parties) is daily becoming more probable, my family expenses will be so diminished that I shall have an ample margin; indeed, I shall feel like a large paper copy, with my leaves uncut!"

He rubbed his hands gleefully; but Joseph was too much disheartened to reply.

"This might be done," Mr. Blessing continued. "It is not certain that all the stockholders have yet paid. I will look over the books, and if such be the case, your delay would not be a sporadic delinquency. If otherwise, I will endeavor to gain the consent of my fellow-directors to the introduction of a new capitalist, to whom a small portion of your interest may be transferred. I trust you perceive the relevancy of this caution. We do not mean that our

flower shall always blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the oleaginous air; we only wish to guard against its being 'untimely ripped' (as Shakespeare says) from its parent stalk. I can well imagine how incomprehensible all this may appear to you. In all probability much of your conversation at home, relative to crops and the like, would be to me an unknown dialect. But I should not, therefore, doubt your intelligence and judgment in such matters."

Joseph began to grow impatient. "Do I understand you to say, Mr. Blessing," he asked, “that the call for the fifth instalment can be met by the sale of a part of my stock?"

"In an ordinary case it might not under the peculiar circumstances of our operation be possible. But I trust I do not exaggerate my own influence when I say that it is within my power to arrange it. If you will confide it to my hands, you understand, of course, that a slight formality is necessary, -a power of attorney?"

Joseph, in his haste and excitement, had not considered this, or any other legal point: Mr. Blessing was right.

"Then, supposing the shares to be worth only their par value," he said, "the power need not apply to more than one tenth of my stock?"

Mr. Blessing came into collision with a gentleman passing him. Mutual wrath was aroused, followed by mutual apologies. "Let us turn into the other street," he said to Joseph; “really, our lives are hardly safe in this crowd; it is nearly three o'clock, and the banks will soon be closed."

"It would be prudent to allow a margin," he resumed, after their course had been changed: "the money market is very tight, and if a necessity were suspected, most capitalists are unprincipled enough to exact according to the urgency of the need. I do

wings which upheld him, their plumage shrivelled into dust, and he fell an immense distance before his feet touched a bit of reality.

The power of attorney was given. Joseph declined Mr. Blessing's invitation to dine with him at the Universal Hotel, the Blessing table being "possibly a little lean to one accustomed to the bountiful profusion of the country," on the plea that he must return by the evening train; but such a weariness and disgust came over him that he halted at the Farmers' Tavern, and took a room for the night. He slept until long into the morning, and then, cheered in spirit through the fresh vigor of all his physical functions, started homewards.

Bayard Taylor.

AN

A

JOURNEY due South in the midst of winter can hardly be otherwise than pleasant. It is a concentrated spring-time, and the traveller traverses with dream-like rapidity the whole series of changes by which the Northern year struggles out of its bondage of ice and snow. To be one day in the midst of snow deep enough to take away any lingering doubt of the arguments in proof of a glacial period, to pass on the next through a country where one sees first the dry fields, with the wrecks of winter on their colder slopes, and then the faint hue of green in the sunny spots; to wake the third morning in an air of heavenly softness, and in a land which seems all flowers, affords, indeed, almost intoxicating pleasure. Were it not for the languor produced by the unaccustomed warmth, a languor which takes away all physical vigor, but leaves the indolent mind intensely sensitive to all physical delights, one would resolve to repeat again and again this enchanting journey, that he might live the best of

many years in these repeated springtimes.

To the observant traveller each mile gives something noteworthy, but there is little that justifies extended description in what meets his eye in a run from Boston to Charleston. The most interesting points are those which he passes in traversing the old war-paths of Virginia. It is remarkable how rapidly all the physical evidences of the war have passed and are passing away. This change is particularly surprising to any one who was familiar with the condition of the country during the years of the war. Over the most of that almost continuous battle - field, along the railway from Washington to Richmond, any one a little inattentive could now pass without perceiving that it had been swept by war as never a region had been swept before.

Near Fredericksburg the railroad passes close to the scene of the worst part of the great battle. Here and there are the low earthworks almost worn down by the rain and frost of the

few winters which they have withstood. The long escarpment of the plateau against which our army broke is bare and furrowed; and the deep-red soil seems stained with the blood which will not wash away. Here the traveller sees for the first time a military cemetery, with its spectral parade of uniformed tombstones arranged in martial order, the last and most distressing manifestation of American fondness for post-mortem show. Far more fitting would it have been to leave the ashes of these fallen braves in the ground baptized by their blood, where they were hearsed by their surviving comrades, than to have imposed on them this Egyptian perpetuity. The only physical result of the war in Virginia which remains at all noteworthy is the destruction of the forests. A camp is a great consumer of timber; and the five years in which this region was warred over served to sweep away a large part of the trees. The country around Petersburg retains more of the scars of war than any other part of Virginia. That the ugly gashes of the earth have not healed under the kindly ministerings of frost and rain is chiefly due to the fact that the African citizens of the neighborhood have used them as iron and lead mines ever since the war, and to this day they are always engaged like industrious crows in pecking away for these spoils of the battlefield. There is a certain hazard in this work which, maybe, serves as stimulus to them, for many of the percussion shells retain to this day their explosive properties. It seems indeed strange that these missiles should retain their deadly force so long. Six years ago the drollest man in the nation could not have imagined that at the end of the decade, before the powder had been damped in the unexploded shells or the percussion-caps lost their fire, Jefferson Davis would be keeping an insurance office in Memphis and Joseph Johnson a similar shop at Savannah, and that the great captain who stood so long at bay in Virginia would be master of a school maintained in part by

is an almost theatrical fitness in the disposition manifested by the leaders of the great Rebellion to go into the insurance business. This occupation seems to suit very well to men who had suffered the most from vicissitudes of fortune.

In Virginia, although there is little sign of thrift and every evidence of poverty among the cultivators of the soil, there is evidently a good heart in the land, which secures a noble future to the agriculture of the State. But when we cross the State line we enter the most hopeless-looking region this side of the Alkali Desert. The Atlantic swamp belt is destined to exercise a great negative influence in the development of the country. A sea of sand which in any less favorable climate would be a desert, with much of its surface so little elevated above the sea that it is scarcely better than a swamp, and studded with marshy islands, it seems capable of producing little except miasma. With our frightful increase in population, it must soon swarm with the people for which the mosquitoes have been waiting for centuries; and in time this inundated Sahara will doubtless prove as fertile as the lower valley of the Po,- - a region it resembles in some regards; but it sickens one to think of the generations during which it must bear an unhappy population, living like cranes until they are rich enough to dike the streams and end their amphibious existence. Let us hope and pray that some lucky geological accident may give this region a lift of fifty feet or so, or that the ocean may take back its imperfect work, and not return it until the task is worthier of its workmanship.

The traveller soon loses interest in the prospect which shows him a monotonous woodland, only varying when the black water of the swamp is replaced by the occasional strip of white sand, with here and there the rude buildings of a tar-factory. He is sure to find in the car some more interesting and less monotonous material for