so pretentious. And oh, I want to be sure that I can look up to a man, and that he is wise. Such a man never assumes to be. Is he my dear teacher? and".

By this time he was so near her vine lattice she could have touched his hand, had she leaned forth. She drew suddenly back. Her heart gave a great leap as if it were coming out.

"What if he saw me!" she said; "it would not seem modest, my peering out. But I am so glad, so happy to see him. Be still, my heart; you are worse than the old lump in my throat, for I cannot swallow you or hold you down. I am so glad, so glad!”

Athel Dane had passed to the front of the house, where she knew her father reclined by the open door and her mother sat reading to him. She heard the sweet, sudden greetings, the exclamations, the tones of inquiry and delight, which mark every friendly meeting; and at last in deep, rich tones she heard: "Where is our little Vida?'

66

Presently her mother opened the door of the room in which she sat, and said, " Come, my darling; your teacher wants you.”

In another moment Athel Dane, looking up, saw in the front door of the log-house, standing a head taller than the mother by her side, a majestic maiden in white, her waist bound with a Roman girdle, her amber hair caught at the back of her head in shining coils, her eyes the eyes that had filled his soul so long to the exclusion of all others. Each seemed to pause and to gaze mutely upon the other. The child Vida had gone.

The woman Vida stood in her place. There is a sudden shock of joy as paralyzing as the most smiting grief. There is a look that is recognition, revelation, acquaintance, love. In this as in the instant of death, Athel Dane seemed to see concentrated all his past, and all his future. As he moved on with outstretched hand, he knew that he took into his the hand of her for whose coming all his life and all his being had waited.

As he rode back through the Tarnstone woods at sunset, he threw up a transfigured face and said: "Friendship is friendship. Love is love. Each in itself is God's good and perfect gift."

Those who visit Tarnstone Pinnacle may see on the side of its Tarn a commodious house. A broad veranda runs around it, commanding a view in four directions. On one side you look out upon waters of the Tarn, as tremulously blue as ever, and up to the great Pinnacle green above it. On the other you gaze away to the Tarnstone woods, to the meadow, to the sparkling spring, and to a marble monument whose surmounting cross takes daily the sun's first rays and holds his last. Before you, you look across fields of clover and of waving grain to grassy hollows, to bordering woods, and to the mountains beyond, pushing their purple points up to the clouds.

Eve

This is the summer home of Athel and Vida Dane, of their children, and of Agnes their mother. lyn Dare still flourishes in the log-house beside the Pinnacle. She is rich enough to afford a bigger and better one, not built of logs; but she declares that she "would not take it for a gift," and some way Agnes in her heart of hearts is glad that she would not. Her room in it remains unchanged, and there are few summer days when she is at the Pinnacle that she does not enter it, to think her own thoughts alone within its closed door.

The monument beside the woods bears the name CYRIL KING.

and the little mound beside it marks the spot which received the transplanted dust of his boy. Cyril King's last days were his best days. He lived six peaceful years after his return from Europe. Years which shut him away, it is true, from actual participation in the world's affairs, but left him sufficiently free from acute suffering to seek and to find a peace that the world never gives, and to enjoy the pure delights of a perfect home. When he looked upon the radiant face of the happy Vida, and then at the serene face by his side, in whose loving eyes still lingered the shade of sorrow gone by, and sometimes sighed as he looked, he knew best.

It

A deep friendship grew between him and Athel Dane. Each found suggestion and help in the comprehensive yet opposite mind of the other. But it was granted to Athel Dane, whose moral nature had so much the ampler growth, to turn the eyes of his friend from the gloom of retrospection to the quick, close vision of the future. His past was a tomb. held his failures, his powers, his sins, his repentance. His present held forgiveness, love, help, inspiration; his future, waiting close, held reparation, growth, fruition. If I'd only known you in any sort of season, Dane." he said in his man-of-the-world way, “and had got all this mystery of living and dying, and living again, in a sort of way adjusted duly in my mind by talking it all over with a fellow like you, I might have taken a fairer and higher start, and have been a better man. But I grew up a heathen, didn't I, Aggie?"

"You grew up with almost no chance, Cyril dear, it is sad to say."

Athel Dane's eyes rested upon her face with a reverential tenderness touched with inquiry.

"I know what you are wondering over, Dane. It's how a man with such a wife who loved him, and whom he loved, could have got so far astray?"

"Yes. That is just what I am wondering over.” "And you would keep on wondering to the day of doom. You theological chaps, somehow, all seem to have been wrapped up in cotton wool all your days to keep you from soiling. As a class you have a touchme-if-you-dare look. And you feel so almighty fine, I should think you'd be just the ones to snub your wives. You don't, but it's because you've learned better. But you do know that nine men out of ten when they marry feel themselves to be such terribly fine fellows, and invested with such power and authority, they would rather lose their souls than to condescend to be shown by their wives how to save them. As for me, I doubt if I had any at that time. Aggie was religious, and I thought she ought to be because she was a woman. She might just as well have undertaken to convert a turkey gobbler as me. When

I recall how I strutted, and spread myself, and lorded it over her, my only wonder is that she endured me at all. If she had hated me I would have got no more than my deserts." "Why, Cyril!

"It's all true, Aggie. If you only had a touch of the flame in you that your daughter inherits from her sire, you would have had an ever so much easier time."

20

"Since last night. It's you always, that vexes me, papa, never Athel, nor mamma."

"That's because we are too much alike. You are an exception to the rest of mankind in my opinion, Dane," Cyril went on. "By nature a man instinctively dislikes his mother-in-law. I don't know whether it was by grace, or what, but I've always had a suspicion that you were more than half in love with yours. I was awfully jealous of you for a long time," and Cyril King laughed aloud at the thought.

What do you think about it, Vida?" asked Athel Dane.

"I think you cared altogether for mamma for a long, long time, when I was a little girl."

"You are right. I care no less for her now. Yet I am in love with you."

"I should be miserable if you were not," said the young wife," and I should be miserable if you did not love mamma."

"Amen," said Cyril King. "You don't feel the slightest misgiving about it, Dane?" after a moment's silence, his mind coming back to the subject on which it continually dwelt, "not the slightest misgiving but that even a fellow like me will have a chance, some chance, to restore his wasted powers, to atone for his misspent days, to grow into a creature holier and happier through the mercy of God, in the Hereafter?"

His final call came gently and in sleep. They laid his body where he wished, beside the graves of Linda and little Cyril; and in the inclosed space, green and garnished with the tenderest flowers, there is abundant room for the beloved who in God's good time

NEW BOOKS.

TO BE ISSUED IMMEDIATELY BY

HURD AND HOUGHTON, NEW YORK;

The Riverside Press, Cambridge.

I.

HIS TWO WIVES.

By MARY CLEMMER AMES. Author of "A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary," Outlines of Men, Women, and Things," etc., etc. In one volume, 12mo.

Mrs. Ames's novel, which the readers of "Every Saturday "have been reading, is now ready in book form and will unquestionably at once take its place as the writer's most noticeable work. She has given full play to her powers as a story-teller and a keen observer of men and things, and the intense scenes of the book will live in the memory.

II.

A REBEL'S RECOLLECTIONS.

By GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON. Author of "A Man of Honor." In one volume, 16mo. Cloth, $1.50.

Mr. Eggleston shows himself to have been a most genial Rebel, and a witty chronicler of some of the phases of the war. He writes of the prominent men connected with the Rebellion from personal acquaintance, and his book will prove one of the most taking contributions to the literature of the war.

will follow after. Athel Dane is no longer the rector of Dufferin. He has gone forth to wider labors, yet in the summer Sabbaths he often officiates in the great stone church on the street where his earlier ministry is held in proud and loving remembrance.

Often in the halcyon mornings, a gayly painted boat, laden with a happy family, may be seen gliding through the sparkling ripples of the Tarn to the open room of rock below the Pinnacle. Sometimes it is rowed by a stalwart man,-with a fine, powerful face; sometimes by a woman young, deep-chested, golden-haired, lifeinspiring as the Olympian Hera. Glad children sit at her feet, and before her her mother, upon whose face her large open eyes rest often, with a look of loving and ineffable content. Upon that mother's dark locks the evening gray is falling. Thought, sorrow, love, faith, inspiration, are the exquisite limners that have touched her features and suffused her eyes with a beauty inexpressible, the beauty beyond beauty, the outraying of the immortal spirit, which can never be caught and imprisoned in speech.

The world hears less of Agnes than it once did. At times her thought, like a strain of high, pure music, penetrates its discords, lifting them for the moment into harmony. But she who is elected to feed the holy lamp upon the inmost shrine must ever minister less and less in the outer court. To live is better than to speak. To love in its pure significance is the consummation of being.

Agnes made the "meanness of opportunity "serve her, lifting it and her selthood together to higher heights. She made sorrow a servitor upon growth and upon holiness. Now with peace unspeakable she draws nearer to the final gate that we call death, and sometimes dread, forgetting that it can cast its shadow upon us but for a moment, as we pass through it, outward, from life unto life.

is expected to furnish Papers on Medical Science. The four departments of Literature, Music, Art, and Education will be filled monthly by vigorous editorial articles and reviews. The Leading Contributors of The Atlantic write for no other Magazine;

and the managers propose to keep it where it has always stood, at the head of American literature.

The JANUARY number will have Poems by Longfellow (on Charles Sumner), Aldrich (a Christmas Poem), Stoddard, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; articles by Bayard Taylor (Life in Weimar), Robert Dale Owen (Recent Spiritual Phenomena), the beginning of Henry James Jr.'s Novel Roderick Hudson), the first of Mr. Sanborn's Papers on John Brown, and a Story by "Mark Twain."

TERMS: Single or specimen numbers, 35 cents. Yearly subscription $4.00.

Remittances by mail should be sent by a money-order, draft, or registered letter to H. O. HOUGHTON & Co., Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass.

The Atlantic will be sent free of postage to all Subscribers for 1875-
PUBLISHED BY HI. O. HOUGHTON & CO., BOSTON,

(The Riverside Press, Cambridge,)

HURD AND HOUGHTON, 13 ASTOR PLACE, NEW YORK.