"You must admit Rachel was no ordinary woman, Anabel."

"I never knew another like her," said Anabel.

"She was too good for me," sighed Augustus.

O, my dear brother, why say so?" ejaculated Anabel.

"I can never cease to mourn poor Rachel; but I feel I must soon follow her; I cannot live without her," moaned Augustus.

"You must make an effort to do so, Augustus, you positively must, it is your duty to live; you must rouse yourself from this heart-rending state. You are not very old, only forty; why, there may yet be a world of happiness in store for you."

None, none," moaned Augustus, "my heart is buried in my Rachel's grave,"

"You must make an effort to get it out from there, dear brother, indeed you must."

"O no, would I were there too." "This is positively wicked, indeed it is. You must not talk so, Rachel would not approve of it."

"Ah! poor, dear Rachel," moaned Augustus, piteously.

"Come now, take something to soothe you, and then go to bed. Good night; don't despair, you will be happy yet."

Augustus answered, "never, never," and he continued repeating, like Poe's dismal raven, "never, never more," until the door closed upon Anabel, and he was left alone with his everlasting grief, and the dismally draped portrait of the lost Rachel looking down grimly from

the wall.

On reaching her room, Anabel threw herself into a chair, and

"I really do believe that, after all, Augustus will die of grief; you have no idea, Myra, how devotedly he was attached to dear Rachel."

"Indeed!" and Myra raised her proud, calm eyes and looked at her.

"He enjoyed such bliss with his poor Rachel, his married life was ‘a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets.'" "When did he make that discovery ?"

"A few hours ago, dear sister; he is perfectly inconsolable, I assure you. I tried my very best at soothing him, but it is of no use, he will not be comforted, he is hopelessly wretched.”

Time is a powerful soother," responded Myra, "leave the work to him, he will do it most effectually, no doubt. As the poet expressed it,

Time, that aged nurse, rocked me to patience.'

"O never, never; why, my dear sister, you don't know how dearly he loved her; he never will get over it, I assure you he will not. How we must have wronged him in supposing he married Rachel for money. O no, it was genuine love that induced him to take for his father-in-law, that vulgar, fat, old plebeian, Peter Smidt, Esq. And he's grown so pious too, I know he will end it by becoming a minister; this terrible grief has turned all his thoughts heavenward."

on nothing but black-edged paper; covered every article that had belonged to dear Rachel with black crape; shut up her chamber, and every time he passed the closed door shuddered as if he saw her pale ghost stalking about; read her printed obituary at night, before retiring, and paid his devotions to her pictured form almost hourly. He kept the last pockethandkerchief she had used carefully folded up in tissue paper among his shaving articles. His sisters began to think that he never would get over it, and as to his marrying again-never, never!

'Don't even hint at such a thing, Anabel," he said with horror, when she ventured to suggest, that perhaps, one day, he might replace the lost Rachel. "I meant years and years off, dear Augustus," she said almost timidly. "Of course, not for twenty years, or perhaps fifteen."

"Hush! hush! I venerate Rachel's memory too deeply. I loved her most devotedly; pray never speak in this heartless strain again, it is very repulsive to my feelings." "I only meant to console you, Augustus."

"You take a most remarkable way of administering consolation, when you know that my sorrow is as deep as the day when I buried Rachel."

"But you must feel so lonely," persisted Anabel.

"Lonely have I not my sisters and Rachel's treasured memory? No, Anabel, I can never marry again; all I ask is a quiet rest beside Rachel's coffined form."

"How shocking! don't, I pray, indulge in such gloomy thoughts." "You ask me to be gay," said the disconsolate widower, "but you ask an impossibility, something utterly impracticable, a state of feeling I can never again reach."

"O, no, Augustus, not gay: that you can never be again, only a little less gloomy. Don't think about dying, and the grave, and tombstones, and all that sort of thing."

"When I die," continued the bereft one, you will see that I am placed beside Rachel; on our tomb you will have engraved, "they were lovely in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided."

"Yes, brother," said Anabel, with a little hysterical sob.

"You will have the last pockethandkerchief Rachel used placed over my face."

"Yes," replied Anabel.

66

My will you will find in the tin case; I have left everything to Myra and yourself."

"O, thank you, dear brother, how considerate in you.”

"My death will be your gain, Anabel," and the bereaved sighed submissively.

"My precious brother, don't suggest such a thing; but you know I have long wished to go to Europe, and your lamented death will give me an opportunity of doing so.

"Go, go, enjoy what I leave you, Anabel; the day will come when, like me, you must lie down in the dust. I have heaped up riches."

"For me to enjoy; how kind in you, brother; good-bye," and Anabel extended her hand.

"What do you mean?" said Augustus, drawing back angrily.

"O, I crave your pardon; I really forgot; I dreamed I had read your will, and was just leaving for Europe."

"I may live many years yet," said Augustus, moodily.

"Certainly, only I thought you were resolved to die. I began to fear you contemplated suicide."

"I am miserable enough for any thing. I believe I will go to the club."

"Pray do; no doubt it will help you to forget Rachel."

"I do not wish to forget her; 'the heart that has truly loved never forgets.'"

"O, no, Augustus, not exactly forget her, only soften your giant grief that is wearing away your very life."

Augustus stood a moment and contemplated the fair face of the deceased Rachel; then, as if overcome by the remembrance of the past, he snatched up the deeply craped hat that stood on the table, and wended his way to the club, too much afflicted to stay quietly at home.

"Hush! hush! not another word on this sad subject."

Three months passed slowly and sadly; Rachel was in her grave, and its long shadow fell gloomily upon Augustus's heart and hearth. A weeping willow had been planted over the dreary mound, and waved its long branches solemnly in the breeze. A few fragrant violets grew out of poor Rachel's head, that is, the head of her grave, and at her feet a white rose bush flourished in charming luxuriance. It was a dainty little spot, poor Rachel's grave, and here Augustus paid a visit every time he spied the church-yard gates open; here he stood on Sunday to think of Rachel, perhaps, or to gaze more conve

niently at the girlish beauty of Miss Villers, as she tripped through the church-yard into the side-door of the church. This last idea was promulgated by those proverbially spiteful creatures the old maids of the church, who, having lost all their youth, envy the young, and who are as crazy to get married at forty as they were at twenty, and who tear to shreds the characters of their more fortunate sisters, who win in the world's lottery that prize, a husband. So said Augustus, when Anabel told him of sundry remarks that had been made concerninghim.

"But it was not an old maid that slandered you, Augustus, it was a married lady. Mrs. Montjoy says she has watched you in church: and you look out of the window with one tearful eye on Rachel's grave, whilst the other is smilingly exploring the pretty face of Miss Villers. She even says she saw you on last Sunday gather a boquet from Rachel's grave, and present it to Miss Villers as she was going into church, who, placing it to her Grecian nose, thanked you with her sweetest smile, little dreaming it smelt of mortality.' Poor, dear Rachel, I don't know how she would relish furnishing boquets for her rival. I don't say this Agustus, Mrs. Montjoy said it; don't frown so angrily; of course I don't believe a word of it. I know how devotedly attached you were to dear Rachel, and how you planted her grave, and even took the watering-pot in your hands and watered the plants to make them grow, and how you treasured up in tissue paper the last handkerchief she used, and how you put her bonnet on a table, and had a little railing built around it to keep profane hands away, and how touchingly you draped her picture in crape; O, no, I know you will never,

never marry again." Agustus was silent; was it ominous?

Four months and two weeks—then a tall tomb-stone reared its lofty head amid its sister tombs, in the church-yard. It was a charming device a stone figurebending over a stone urn, which urn was supposed to contain the ashes of the departed Rachel.

"What is this, my dear?" asked Mr. Montjoy, as he stood before the gleaming marble. "Is this figure the bereaved husband?"

"O no, my love, by no means," said Mrs. Montjoy, "are you not man enough to know that this is the deceased Rachel herself, weeping over her own ashes? It is most touchingly appropriate we wives feel it to be so, I assure you; for if ever creatures had cause to weep for their own deaths, we are the ones. Scarcely is the turf heaped above our cold clay when the first mourner at our funeral straightway goes and forgets what manner of woman we were. Mary slips very quietly into Jane's place, and Ruth sits as comfortably in the corner of the pew as if six months before Ann had not sat there before her."

"My dear, your remarks astonish me; if you died, I assure you most solemnly, I would weep for you forever."

"Yes, so you would," said Mrs. Montjoy, calmly; "but how long, think you, is a widower's forever? Only until he gets another wife." "O, Sara, how little faith you have in man's love."

"I have great faith in it so long as its lasts; but when a woman is underground her chances are small."

"My dear, I protest I would not marry were I so unfortunate as to bury you."

"No protestations, my love, I do not require them of you; do as you

please when I am gone; I'll promise you not to haunt your new wife. There comes Miss Villers to see the tomb; how do you like it? my dear."

"O, it's a love," cried the young lady enthusiastically. "I hope when I die my husband will treat me to just such a tomb-stone as this."

"No doubt," responded Mrs. Montjoy, "he will treat you to this very one; two of you can easily get under it." The young lady frowned and walked away.

Six months and two weeks, and Augustus and his sisters sat in solemn conclave. The great grief was over, the stormy billows had subsided, the clouds had passed away. "The funeral meats were about to"furnish a wedding feast." Augustus was going to be married. "Married!" Anabel clasped her hands in inarticulate horror, whilst Myra looked calmly upon the comforted widower.

"Did I say I would never marry again?" asked Augustus, angry at these mute demonstrations of surprise.

Did you not say so, dear brother?"

"Never, never, you utterly misconceived my meaning. I wish to compliment Rachel's memory, which I deeply revere, and I cannot better do so than by marrying again."

"Six months and two weeks," murmured Anabel.

"Can a man mourn forever?" asked Augustus indignantly.

"Can a man mourn at all?" asked Myra, speaking for the first time.

"O, my dear sister," sighed Anabel, as the wedding cortege drove from the church door on the following Thursday, and the face of Miss Villers peeped out of the window of the bridal coach, "it is the will in