calmly, after royal fashion, and hearing good report of Hannah Blair, proceeded to make her acquaintance and visit her. She too was a rational woman; feeling she had long set aside as a weak indulgence of the flesh; all these long and lonely years had taught her a lesson more than one.

a garden, such a loom and wheel, such spotless linen, such shiny mahogany; there was never a hole in her husband's garments or a button off his shirt; the one 5 thing that troubled her was that her husband, good, honest, tender man, had during their first year of married life fallen thoroughly in love with her; it was not in his genial nature to live in the house a

She had learned too that a nature as strong, as dominant, as full of power and pride as hers must have some outlet or 10 year with even a cat and not love it. Hanburn itself out, and here was a prospect offered that appealed to her native instincts, save and except that one so long trodden under foot. She accepted Mr. Maxwell; listened to his desire for a short 15 engagement favorably; took down the stores prepared for a past occasion from the chests in the garret, washed and bleached them with her own hands; and purchased once more her bridal attire, 20 somewhat graver, much more costly than before a plum-colored satin dress, a white merino shawl, a hat of chip with rich white ribbons. Moll Thunder, who served as chorus to this homely tragedy, was at 25 hand with her quaint shrewd comment, as she brought Mrs. Blair her yearly tribute of hickory nuts the week before the wedding.

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'He! He! She look pretty much fine; 30 same as cedar tree out dere, all red vine all ober; nobody tink him ole cedar been lightnin'-struck las' year. He! he! Hain't got no heart in him- pretty much holler.' One bright October day Hannah was 35 married. Parson Day's successor formed the ceremony in the afternoon, and the happy couple went home to Newfield in a gig directly. Never was a calmer bride, a more matter-of-fact wedding. 40 Sentiment was at a discount in the Blair family; if David felt anything at parting with his only child, he repressed its expression; and since that day her mother never could forget, Hannah had wrought 45 in poor Mrs. Blair's mind a sort of terror toward her that actually made her absence a relief, and the company of the little 'bound girl' she had taken to bring up a pleasant substitute for Hannah's stern, 50 quiet activity. Everybody was suited: it was almost a pleasure to Mrs. Maxwell to rule over her sunny farm-house and become a model to all back-sliding housekeepers about her. Her butter always 55 'came,' her bread never soured, her hens laid and set, her chickens hatched, in the most exemplary manner; nobody had such

nah was a handsome woman and his wife: what could one expect? But she did not expect it; she was bored and put out by his demonstrations; almost felt a cold contempt for the love he lavished on her, icy and irresponsive as she was, though all the time ostentatiously submissive. Josiah felt after a time that he had made a mistake; but he had the sense to adapt himself to it, and to be content, like many another idolator, with worship instead of response. Not even the little daughter born in the second year of their marriage thawed the heart so long frost-sealed in Hannah's breast; she had once worshiped a false god, and endured the penalty; henceforward she would be warned. Baby was baptized Dorothy, after her father's dead mother, and by every one but Hannah that quaint style was softened into Dolly. Never was a child better brought up, everybody said — a rosy, sturdy, saucy little creature, doing credit to fresh air and plain food; a very romp in the barn and fields with her father, whom she loved with all her warm, wayward heart; but alas! a child whose strong impulses, ardent feeling, violent temper, and stormy will were never to know the softening, tempering sweetness of real mother love. She knew none of those tender hours of caressing and confidence that even a very little child enjoys in the warmth of any mother heart, if not its own mother's; no loving arms clasped her to a mother's bosom to soothe her babygriefs, to rest her childish weariness. There were even times when Hannah Maxwell seemed to resent her existence; to repel her affection, though her duty kept her inexorably just to the child. Dolly was never punished for what she had not done, but always for nearly everything she did do, and services were exacted from her that made her childhood a painful memory to all her later life. Was there butter or eggs wanted from Wingfield on any emergency? at five years old

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Dolly would be mounted on the steady old horse that Josiah had owned fifteen years, and with saddle-bags swinging on either side, sent over to her grandfather's at Wingfield to bring home the supplies long and lonely road of five full-measured miles for the tiny creature to traverse; and one could scarce believe the story did it not come direct to these pages from her own lips. In vain was Josiah's remon- to strance; for by this time Hannah was fully the head of the house, and the first principle of her rule was silent obedience. All her husband could do was to indulge and spoil Dolly in private, persistently and 15 bravely. Alas for her, there was one day in the week, when even father could not interfere to help his darling. Sunday was a sound of terror in her ears: first the grim and silent breakfast, where nobody dared 20 smile, and where even a fixed routine of food, not in itself enticing, became at last tasteless by mere habit: codfish-cakes and tea; of these, 'as of all carnal pleasure, cometh satiety at the last,' according to the monk in Hypatia'; then, fixed in a high stiff-backed chair, the pretty little vagrant must be still and read her Bible till it was time to ride to church- till she was taken down and arrayed in spotless-o ness and starch, and set bodkinwise into the gig between her silent mother and subdued father. Once at meeting, began the weariest routine of all. Through all the long services, her little fat legs swinging from the high seat, Dolly was expected to sit perfectly quiet; not a motion was allowed, not a whisper permitted; she dared not turn her head to watch a profane butterfly or a jolly, bumble-bee wandering about that great roof or tall window. Of course she did do it instinctively, recovering herself with a start of terror, and a glance at her mother's cold blue eyes, always fixed on 45 Parson Buck, but always aware of all going on beside her, as Dolly knew too well. At noon, after a hurried lunch of gingerbread and cheese, the child was taken to the nearest house, there to sit through 50 the noon prayer-meeting, her weary legs swinging this time off the edge of the high bed and her wearier ears dinned with long prayers. Then, as soon as the bell tolled, off to the meeting-house to undergo an- 55 other long sermon, till, worn out mentally and physically, the last hour of the service became a struggle with sleep painful in

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the extreme, as well in present resistance as in certainty of results; for as soon as poor Dolly reached home, after another silent drive, she was invariably taken into the spare bedroom and soundly whipped for being restless in meeting. And, adding insult to injury, after dinner, enjoyed with the eager appetite of a healthy child used to three meals on a week-day, she was required to repeat that theological torture, the Assembly's Catechism, from end to end. But in spite of all this, partly because Sunday came only once a week, partly because of her father's genial nature and devoted affection for his girl, which grew deeper and stronger constantly, Dolly did not miss of her life as many a morbid character might have in her place. She grew up a rosy, sunny, practical young woman, with a dominant temper toward everybody but her mother. Plump, healthy, and pretty, her cheeriness and usefulness would have made her popular had she been a poor man's daughter; and by this time Josiah Maxwell was the richest man in town, so Dolly had plenty of lovers, and in due time married a fine young fellow, and settled down at home with her parents, who were almost as much pleased with Mr. Henderson as was their daughter. But all this time Mrs. Maxwell preserved the calm austerity of her manner, even to her child. She did her duty by Dolly. She prepared for her marriage with liberal hand and unerring judgment, but no caress, no sympathetic word, no slightest expression of affection soothed the girl's agitated heart or offered her support in this tender yet exciting crisis of her life.

Hannah Maxwell made her life a matter of business it had been nothing else to her for years; it was an old habit at sixty; and she was well over that age when one day Dolly, rocking her first baby to sleep, was startled to see her mother, who sat in her upright chair reading the county paper, fall quietly to the floor and lie there. Baby was left to fret while her mother ran to the old lady and lifted her spare thin shape to the sofa; but she did not need to do more, for Mrs. Maxwell's eyes opened and her hand clasped tight on Dolly's.

'Do not call any one,' she whispered faintly, and leaning on her daughter's shoulder, her whole body shook with agonized sobs. At last that heart of

granite had broken in her breast; lightning-struck so long ago, now it crumbled. With her head still on Dolly's kind arm, she told her then and there the whole story of her one love, her solitary passion, and its fatal ending. She still kept to herself the contents of that anonymous letter, only declaring that she knew, and the writer must have been aware she would know, from the handwriting as well as the 10 circumstances detailed, who wrote it, and that the information it conveyed of certain lapses from virtue on the part of Charles Mayhew must be genuine.

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'Oh, Dolly,' groaned the smitten woman, 15 'when he stood under my window and called me, I was wrung to my heart's core. The pains of hell got hold upon me. was upon the floor, with my arms wound about the bed rail and my teeth shut like 20 a vice, lest I should listen to the voice of nature, and going to the window to answer him, behold his face. Had I seen him I must have gone down and done what I thought a sin; so I steeled myself 25 to resist, although I thought flesh would fail in the end; but it did not. I conquered then and after. Oh, how long it

has been! I meant to do right, Dolly, but to-day, when I saw in the paper that he died last week in a barn over Goshen way, a lonely drunken pauper - Dolly, my 5 heart came out of its grave and smote me. Had I been a meeker woman, having mercy instead of judgment, I might have helped him to right ways. I might have saved him I loved him so.'

The last words struck upon her hearer with the force of a blow, so burning, so eager, so intense was the emphasis: 'I loved him so!'

Ah, who could ever know the depths out of which that regretful utterance sprang!

'Dear mother, dear mother,' sobbed Dolly, altogether overcome by this sudden revelation of gulfs she had never dreamed of a heart which, long repressed, convulsively burst at last, and revealed its bleeding arteries. Dear, good mother, don't feel so — - don't! You meant right. Try to forgive yourself. If you made a mistake then, try to forget it now. Try to believe it was all for the best - do dear.'

The Galaxy, January, 1875.

FITZ JAMES O'BRIEN (1828–1862)

The biography of O'Brien is of short story texture, as if it were one of his own creations,mysterious, swift, dramatic. He was twenty-four when he suddenly appeared in New York, an Irishman who had been educated in Dublin University and then had squandered a liberal patrimony in London; he was thirty-four when he died in one of the earlier skirmishes of the war. The ten years of his Bohemian life in New York City, years of excited literary plans, Celtic in their magnificence, of happy-go-lucky literary adventure with congenial souls, of floods of poetry poured into the newspapers and magazines, need not be dwelt upon. He would be remembered only as a picturesque episode but for two or three of his short stories that are now seen to have marked distinct steps in the evolution of that important literary form. He added to Poe's art fervor and convincingness and dramatic power. The tales are all in the Poe land of the horrible and the highly imaginative, but they are humanized. They are romantic in spirit but realistic in detail. The story What was It' is laid in a New York boarding house; The Wondersmith' has within it biting pictures of the city slums. From O'Brien it was but a step to the more human fictional art of the seventies.

imperfect forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural state of excitement.

Seeing me so interested in this rude instrument, my cousin explained to me all that he knew about the principles of the microscope, related to me a few of the wonders which had been accomplished through its agency, and ended by promising to send me one regularly constructed, 10 immediately on his return to the city. I counted the days, the hours, the minutes, that intervened between that promise and his departure.

Meantime I was not idle. Every trans- 15 parent substance that bore the remotest semblance to a lens I eagerly seized upon and employed in vain attempts to realize that instrument, the theory of whose construction I as yet only vaguely compre- 20 hended. All panes of glass containing those oblate spheroidal knots familiarly known as bull's-eyes' were ruthlessly destroyed, in the hope of obtaining lenses of marvelous power. I even went so far as 25 to extract the crystalline humor from the eyes of fishes and animals, and endeavored to press it into the microscopic service. I plead guilty to having stolen the glasses from my Aunt Agatha's spectacles, with 30 a dim idea of grinding them into lenses of wondrous magnifying properties.— in which attempt it is scarcely necessary to say that I totally failed.

At last the promised instrument came. 35 It was of that order known as Field's simple microscope, and had cost perhaps about fifteen dollars. As far as educational purposes went, a better apparatus could not have been selected. Accom- 40 panying it was a small treatise on the microscope, its history, uses, and discoveries. I comprehended then for the first time the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.' The dull veil of ordinary exist-45 ence that hung across the world seemed suddenly to roll away, and to lay bare a land of enchantments. I felt towards my companions as the seer might feel towards the ordinary masses of men. I held 50 conversations with Nature in a tongue which they could not understand. I was in daily communication with living wonders, such as they never imagined in their wildest visions. I penetrated beyond 55 the external portal of things, and roamed through the sanctuaries. Where they beheld only a drop of rain slowly rolling

down the window-glass, I saw a universe of beings animated with all the passions common to physical life, and convulsing their minute sphere with struggles as fierce 5 and protracted as those of men. In the common spots of mold, which my mother, good housekeeper that she was, fiercely scooped away from her jam pots, there abode for me, under the name of mildew, enchanted gardens, filled with dells and avenues of the densest foliage and most astonishing verdure, while from the fantastic boughs of these microscopic forests hung strange fruits glittering with green and silver and gold.

It was no scientific thirst that at this time filled my mind. It was the pure enjoyment of a poet to whom a world of wonders has been disclosed. I talked of my solitary pleasures to none. Alone with my microscope, I dimmed my sight, day after day and night after night poring over the marvels which it unfolded to me. I was like one who, having discovered the ancient Eden still existing in all its primitive glory, should resolve to enjoy it in solitude, and never betray to mortal the secret of its locality. The rod of my life was bent at this moment. I destined myself to be a microscopist.

Of course, like every novice, I fancied myself a discoverer. I was ignorant at the time of the thousands of acute intellects engaged in the same pursuit as myself, and with the advantage of instruments a thousand times more powerful than mine. The names of Leeuwenhoek, Williamson, Spencer, Ehrenberg, Schultz, Dujardin, Schact, and Schleiden were then entirely unknown to me, or if known, I was ignorant of their patient and wonderful researches. In every fresh specimen of Cryptogamia which I placed beneath my instrument I believed that I discovered wonders of which the world was as yet ignorant. I remember well the thrill of delight and admiration that shot through me the first time that I discovered the common wheel animalcule (Rotifera vulgaris) expanding and contracting its flexible spokes, and seemingly rotating through the water. Alas! as I grew older, and obtained some works treating of my favorite study, I found that I was only on the threshold of a science to the investigation of which some of the greatest men of the age were devoting their lives and intellects.