own.

Watching her as she lay, the good doctor saw her eyes wander tenderly round the little room that had been the sanctum of her middle age. Mary was one of those women who grow to love chairs, and tables, and walls. Besides, that room had memories of its William and Clara had come there in the only revisit they were ever likely to give to their native land, and as Clara had proudly introduced her two children, William, standing on the hearth-rug, had pointed kindly to the rows of little portraits on the wall, with the quotation, "Thou hast many more children than she which hath an husband."

"You may go in whenever you like," said the doctor, to recall the thoughts that he saw were overbusy ; once a change is to be made, the sooner it is over the better."

Thank you, I dare say I shall go next week," answered Mary Dallas; "and thank you again, sir, and all my other good friends, whose kindness has found me such a happy home for the rest of my days."

Alas, it was only a place in the Hospital for Incurables!

Six years after! How long are six years when they are passed lying on a couch,—just sometimes carried, couch and all, to another room or to the garden terrace!

There is a sound of weeping in the corridor. One little nurse cannot restrain her sobs, as she tells another that

"Miss Dallas went off last night. Seeing how pleas

ant and cheerful she'd always borne her pain, it was strange to see how glad she was to go when it came to the end. It didn't seem anything awesome to her; one would have thought she'd gone that way ten times before, she was that trustful and sure."

'She'll be missed dreadful," responded the other. "She was the only one who ever went in twice to see that old Mrs. Lomas, who certain can't excuse her illtemper by her affliction, for the cross look had grown on her face long before her trouble came. But Miss Dallas always had her chair stopped at her door, and would sit hours with her till she actually sweetened her up a bit."

Yes," said Mary's nurse; "and she's wrote on a bit of that Mrs. Lomas is to have her canary, and paper all her books are to go into the house-library, and I'm to have her clothes, and there is some little ornament or other named as a keepsake for each of those young men and women that came to see her regular, — her old orphan scholars. If your great rich men left their hundreds of thousands as just and as kind as she's left her bits of things, the world would be better sorted, I'm thinking. And now I must send to the post. She wrote this letter three days ago, directly the doctor told her what she must expect, and she gave it to me, and told me to send it off directly it was all over. The young lady whose grandma I nursed, before I got the berth in this hospital, had n't a happier face when she gave me her wedding cards done up ready to be posted directly after her marriage. It's addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Lambert, Chestnut Place, Brooklyn, New York.'

That's the people she always wrote to. There'll be sorrow there, I expect, when they get this."

Good by, Mary Dallas, good by. They come in and look at you, with that sweetly surprised smile on your worn face. Old crippled women are carried in on their chairs to see you for the last time, and they sob with the fervor of youth that they cannot be lifted up to kiss your cold cheek over the coffin edge. Some of your orphans come; your kind physician comes. They say to each other that you were a good, true, Christian

woman.

Good by, once more, sweet Mary Dallas, with the wondering smile on your parted lips. Did you find more than even your bright faith expected? And did not the King answer and say unto you, “Inasmuch as ye have done kindness unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me"?

9*

HE Berceau de Dieu was a little village in the valley of the Seine. As a lark drops its nest

amongst the grasses, so a few peasant people had dropped their little farms and cottages amidst the great green woods on the winding river. It was a pretty place, with one steep, stony street, shady with poplars and with elms; quaint houses, about whose thatch a cloud of white and gray pigeons fluttered all day long; a little aged chapel with a conical red roof; and great barns covered with ivy and thick creepers, red and purple, and lichens that were yellow in the sun. All around it were the broad, flowering meadows, with the sleek cattle of Normandy fattening in them, and the sweet dim forests where the young men and maidens went on every holy day and feast-day in the summer-time to seek for wood-anemones, and lilies of the pools, and the wild campanula, and the fresh dog-rose, and all the boughs and grasses that made their house-doors like garden bowers, and seemed to take the cushat's note and the linnet's song into their little temple of God.

The Berceau de Dieu was very old indeed. Men said that the hamlet had been there in the day of the Virgin of Orléans; and a stone cross of the twelfth century still stood by the great pond of water at the bottom of the street under the chestnut-tree, where the villagers gathered to gossip at sunset when their work was done. It had no city near it, and no town nearer than four leagues. It was in the green care of a pastoral district, thickly wooded and intersected with orchards. Its prod-. uce of wheat, and oats, and cheese, and fruit, and eggs was more than sufficient for its simple prosperity. Its people were hardy, kindly, laborious, happy; living round the little gray chapel in amity and good-fellowship. Nothing troubled it. War and rumors of war, revolutions and counter-revolutions, empires and insurrections, military and political questions, these all were for it things unknown and unheard of, — mighty winds that arose and blew and swept the lands around it, but never came near enough to harm it, lying there, as it did, in its loneliness like any lark's nest. Even in the great days of the Revolution it had been quiet. It had had a lord whom it loved in the old castle on the hill at whose feet it nestled; it had never tried to harm him, and it had wept bitterly when he had fallen at Jemappes, and left no heir, and the château had crumbled into ivy-hung ruins. The thunder-heats of that dread time had scarcely scorched it. It had seen a few of its best youth march away to the chant of the Marseillaise to fight on the plains of Champagne; and it had been visited by some patriots in bonnets rouges and soldiers in blue uniforms, who had given it tricolored cockades and bade it wear