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rents, her mother within a few months. Mrs. Meldrum had known them, disapproved of them, considerably avoided them: she had watched the girl, off and on, from her early childhood. Flora, just twenty, was extraordinarily alone in the world--so alone that she had no natural chaperon, no one to stay with but a mercenary stranger, Mrs. Hammond Synge, the sister-in-law of one of the young men I had just seen. She had lots of friends, but none of them nice: she kept picking up impossible people. The

rade winds by the oppositeside of the court. But Susy did not seem inclined to linger therelong that morning, in spite of Mrs. Peyton's evident desire for amaternal tete-a-tete. The nervous preoccupation and capriciousennui of an indulged child showed in her pretty but discontentedface, and knit her curved eyebrows, and Peyton saw a look of painpass over his wife's face as the young girl suddenly and half-laughingly broke away and fluttered off towards the old garden.Mrs. Peyton looked up and

r, or folded in a blue handkerchief, and laid them, with fingers more or less worn and stubby from hard service, before the consul for his signature. Once, in the case of a very young Madchen, that signature was blotted by the sweep of a flaxen braid upon it as the child turned to go; but generally there was a grave, serious business instinct and sense of responsibility in these girls of ordinary peasant origin which, equally with their sisters of France, were unknown to the English or American

try, and one of them had somehow come into the possession of John Thacher's grandfather when grafted fruit was a thing to be treasured and jealously guarded. It had been told that when the elder Thacher had given away cuttings he had always stolen to the orchards in the night afterward and ruined them. However, when the family had grown more generous in later years it had seemed to be without avail, for, on their neighbors' trees or their own, the English apples had proved worthless. Whether it

ling depth of thesefeelings be written--with these I prayed, as if they were the keys of aninstrument, of an organ, with which I swelled forth the note of my soul,redoubling my own voice by their power. The great sun burning with light;the strong earth, dear earth; the warm sky; the pure air; the thought ofocean; the inexpressible beauty of all filledme with a rapture, an ecstasy, and inflatus. With this inflatus, too, Iprayed. Next to myself I came and recalled myself, my bodily existence.