66 nough wrote back that Achsa was with her, and neither of them ever said a word about the escapade; and there Ascha stayed till she grew so pale, and thin, and tired, that her reluctant aunt sent for them to take her home if they wanted her alive. So, when the Bonnibel came in next year, Achsa was at home. She knew the ship was signalled; she knew it was making fast; she had watched for it with a fever in her face; and now she waited, sitting at the little woodbined window, under which the great white day-lilies blossomed and blew out their sweetness. She waited a long while; Earl Warwick did not come. Was he wrathful with her silent absence the year before? Could he really have doubted her, her love, her faith, her sincerity? Had he tired of her? Had he changed? Had he brooded over his apparent wrong during all the long voyages out and back, till he came to hate her? She waited, and watched, and wondered, and wearied-heart-broken at last. She dared not send or write, for fear lest with larger experience, he had ceased to care for her; and her pride was as much as her modesty. And one day she was ill, and the doctor came, and a wasting fever shut her away from Earl as effectually as Aunt Goodenough's farm had done. I expect you to return afterwards, and stay with me till the ship comes in again. You may as well always stay here when he's off on his voyages," said Aunt Goodenough, coaxingly. You are so like my Achsa!" Achsa kissed the kind hand that had fallen down listlessly as the dew gathered freshly in Aunt, Goodenough's eyes that now were looking far away. But she was going to steal no money. She went to bed that night with the birds, and at three o'clock in the morning she was up and on her feet, on her feet, and on her home.. ward way to the little port, feeling it quite safe so near as that to morning and the early farm-house stir. The night passed; star after star of all the wide mist of stars vanished in the gray; the gray melted into the flames of dawn; the sun rose; the gladly impudent chorus of the happy birds ceased; the business of the day had begun, and she still went trudging on. Now and then, as the morning advanced, she rested, but, tired as she was, sprang to her impatient feet again with the stinging thought of Earl; now and then she had a lift of a mile or two; but she walked the greater part of the day. Her feet were blistered, but still she limped on; the last part of the way, though, she had a longer lift than the others had been, in a wagon belonging to a party who were camping out upon the beach, the drivers thought they had pick-year dragged along; and Achsa dragged ed up a queer little body, with her silence, her eager haste, and, once in a while, her gush of tears as she saw the sun westering, and felt the evening wind rising and blowing in her face; and, at last, they set her down, as she directed, at her father's gate. She did not go in; she ran along the shore to the wharves, which were on the other side of the point of land a half mile away; ran, as well as she could, to the one where the Bonnibel was moored when in her place. The spot was empty,-just dipping down. the distant sea a sail was glimmering. "Is it the Bonnibel you are looking at?" a sailor, lounging against the capstan, asked. "There she goes, now. She's had a fine start-there's always a wind for her sails; she's a lucky one, the Bonnibel !" The Bonnibel sailed again, and another herself through all its endless days and nights; just a spark of hope was left alive in her breast, to keep her alive with it. She felt that Earl, ignorant of facts, had a right to his indignation; she trusted that when he came she should have the chance to set it right. Pride should not stand between them any longer. She hadn't any pride, the poor little spiritless thing; she longed to see him, to look in his eyes, tobe held in his arms again, as he held her once, that single instant under the apple trees, longed till the longing was an agony with which she waked and walked at night. She spoke of him to no one at home, for they had played her false, and could have no sympathy with anything she wished. And that year the lucky Bonnibel lost They wrote to Aunt Goodenough to her luck, and was cast away; and it was know if Achsa was with her; they were not three winters before Earl, taken off the absolutely sure that they had seen her at wreck by a whaler bound for the South home, only an angry apparition, a fierce Pacific, came home again. But home and angry little apparition that had glared he came at last. One Sunday morning, upon them one instant in silence, and then when they were all in church, one sweet had vanished a little foot-sore, heart-sore Sunday morning, full of sunshine and the phantom of Achsa! But Aunt Goode-breath of the sweet-brier, and when the air was so still that you heard the hum of bees like a remembrance of the long bellnotes swimming on the ear, the barque to which he had been transferred dropped anchor in the harbor, and he, with others, came ashore. They were full of sailors' frolic over home and liberty; and just as they were, they sauntered into the porch of the little church, and looked at the congregation and listened to the music, and, perhaps, Earl Warwick looked at Achsa,— they could see the singers from that porch, -and he may have wondered how he ever could have felt that mad whirl of love and rage which he suffered when he came home from his first voyage, and found her gone, for such a worn and faded thing as she; for Achsa's bloom was lost, her face was thin, she wore a look of pain that attracted no lovers. If the anger had not still burned within him, that worn and faded look would have touched his heart to a yearning tenderness; but it did burn. Yet her voice was clear as ever. He shut his and listened, as she sang, to the delicious notes of the old-fashioned hymn, with all its rises and falls and tuneful changes: eyes He heard the tremor that shook the voice, as suddenly the singer saw him as one risen from the dead; and then the music seemed to flutter, the voice ceased, and the chorister and old Nicholas came bringing her down in their arms; Abby Morse, who sang counter in those days, following, with palm-leaf and salts, behind. Achsa had fainted, and as they bore her past him standing in the porch, Abby Morse giving him a swift, indignant look, he saw her white and pinched, the beauty vanished, the bright smile fled; and he felt as though they were just carrying out to the grave some one who had died for him long, long ago. He married Mr. Jerson's daughter a couple of months afterwards; and when he sailed again, for they could not hinder that, and had to favor it,—he was the mate of one of the vessels in which Mr. Jerson was interested, and presently he was master, and, for all that could be seen, the world was going well with him. And Achsa went into the country,—she had not thought she should come to that, but now it seemed a refuge,-went there to spend the rest of her days with her Aunt Goodenough—dull days and dismal, with nothing to expect or hope; her father dead; her mother at Sister Waite's;-Sister Waite sharing the fate of many better things, of things that, at any rate, have once been sweet, and growing sourer as she grew older;-with the friends of her youth forgetting her; with the impossibility of abandoning herself to anything sufficiently to attract new friends, or to think much of them, if by chance they were attracted; with but few poorer than herself in the wide-spread country parish to enlist her sympathies; with nothing but Aunt Goodenough and her ailments to care for, the minister and the sewing circle to divert her, the hatching of the chickens, the shearing of the lambs, the warping of the loom, to be interested in. She did her best. She waited on Aunt Goodenough by inches. She read to her the Sunday papers, and volume after volume of church history, and polemics, and biographies of preternatural little saints, that the sweet old soul thought it right to have read, though she always went to sleep with the reading; she chatted with. her about such flavorless gossip as there was; sang her off into dreams at evening in her chair, picked up her stitches, threaded her needles, kept the house in order; made pickles, preserves, ketchups, the currant and elderberry wines, distilled extracts, tied up herbs, and nursed Aunt Goodenough when her long winter illness came. Sometimes, in summer, she went into the fields and picked the sweet wood-strawberries; sometimes she joined the cow-boy when he drove the cattle home; sometimes she took so wild an excursion as to go and sit in the woods, and let the silence steal about her like a new sense; sometimes, in winter, she slipped out in a soft snowstorm on the early edge of the evening, and walked a mile, thinking of storms upon the sea, and ships whose sails were sheathed, whose ropes were stiff with ice. Thus one year followed another, too much alike to be remembered separately. And she was happy-in a dreary sort of way; that is, she was not altogether unhappy. Marvels came into her life too-the mills did away with her spinning-wheel, and her loom, and when she went down to see them, as she did with the doctor who was going that way, her Aunt Goodenough would not believe a word she told her, and advised a dose of thoroughwort to clear her head; and, though Achsa took by stealth her little ride on the railroad that had stretched its wicked web over a goodly piece of Aunt Goodenough's farm, yet Aunt Goodenough never could be tempted to follow her example, and always maintained, when she saw the engine come snorting, and puffing, and shrieking along, that it was the old serpent in person. The old serpent had, somehow, a great deal to do with the innocent creature. The power did not exist that could persuade her to use a friction-match, she felt its brimstone-tipped end to be a part of the machinery of the infernal fires; and when she heard of gas, -this turning a stopcock, and flame leaping out of the wall,-and when she heard of the telegraph wire, she declared the thousand years of Satan had expired, and he was loose upon the earth. Of course they could work wonders,-who couldn't? —with hell-fire, said the good lady; and as Achsa read the papers with the burden of weekly increasing achievement, and weekly increasing crime, she half believed what her aunt said. Tom Waite, of whom she was getting fond. Thus week followed week; week followed week and year followed year. Ten years passed, twenty years, thirty years. Forty years passed, and Achsa was sixty years old and over; she was sixty-two when her Aunt Goodenough died at ninety. Sitting in her straight chair in the chimneycorner, her aunt had called Achsa to her one night, and, as she kneeled at her side, had turned her face to the fire and peered into it curiously. "Are you really my Achsa?" she said. "I thought she was a rosy-faced young girl. No indeed; you are not my Achsa at all-what could have made me think so? You are only an old woman!" And Achsa felt in her shaking, aching heart that she was no longer anything to anybody! She was no longer anything to Aunt Goodenough-for the kind. soul passed away that night in her sleep, and left poor Achsa doubly desolate. Yet, on the whole, Achsa's life, after the shock of its youth, had been a gentle one, without work, or exposure, or want; only the one want, written in her face. That face was but slightly wrinkled-a sweet face still; the shadowy hair, though so thin it needed its bit of sheltering muslin, had scarcely changed color yet, and the eyes, though sunken, were soft and clear; yet no one would have supposed her a day younger than she was, only all would have thought her age was something very love As the years went on, and when her mother had died, she attached herself closer to her aunt; she dared not think of losing her, it would leave her so utterly alone-it was all she had to love. Yet often, when Aunt Goodenough was asleep, and the wind was rising or the rain falling, she would remember it as she used to hear it in her little room at home where the rain fell on the roof, would remember the risingly. wind down where it met the waves and lashed them on the shore; and then life seemed a desert that she could not cross: she wondered why she had been born, the world was so full of misery she wondered why any one was born, and then she cried a little, aimlessly, and without positively conscious cause, but in a low-spirited way to keep company with the rain and the leaden sky that was like her gray and leaden life. At such times, if it were morning, there appeared no reason why she should rise, and all day she longed for forgetfulness, and she said to herself she had better be dead than alive. But the mood would pass, and the colorless content would come again: and sometimes there was a new missionary field open, for which she could sew, or knit endless stockings, in her old aunt's name; and there were the evening prayer-meetings, and there were visits, in his school vacations, from her young grand-nephew, young VOL. VIII.-7 Her Aunt Goodenough had left her her property, and perhaps it was in view of that fact that, when everything was settled and the sting of death a little soothed, her | Sister Waite had invited her to her native place, where, since her mother's burial, she had not set her foot. But Achsa had kindly declined the invitation; she was full of longing to see the place, but not through Sister Waite's glasses; and with her heart beating up as wildly as a girl's, she went to a house where she found she could be sheltered for a month, while she noted the changes everywhere but on the ever changeless sea. Her heart was sore every moment of her stay; she thought she had outlived all her youthful enthusiasms and follies; but the color of the sunrise tide, the rainbows in the foam, the sails far out against the sky, all filled her with the old pain of her youth, and she wished she had not come, and resolved to go away. Yet the fascination of the place was fateful; and while she staid she could not keep her footsteps from the beach. She was sitting there one evening before sunset, at the close of her first week, writing with her sunshade's point in the sand, when a hand stretched before her and took the sunshade away and began to write, and then threw it down impatiently. "It's a long long time, Achsa, since you and I were on this beach together," said a voice that sent a shiver thrilling through her; and she knew, before she turned and looked, that it was Earl,-knew it after that long, aching look, though the face was weatherbeaten, and the hair was gray. "A long time, Earl," she said in trembling tones. "And you have never married, I hear," he said. Oh, no!" she answered, drawing in her breath with an unconscious sigh. "And I am all alone again," he said. Then she rose, and they walked quietly home together saying little, saying little, as if there were a possibility yet of saying too much, talking only of the commonplaces of their lives, as though there were no past between them. "I never supposed that I could speak with Earl Warwick again and be so calm," she thought that night. "The tides are all gone out!" And she fell on her knees beside her bed, and cried as we think only the young can cry. But the next evening she was on the beach again, when Earl Warwick came to meet her. "I am an old fool," she said to herself; but for all that, she went forward. He gave her his arm, for he was the stronger still, and they strolled along, once in a while speaking of their far remote childhood, but not of the years between, as they watched the red August sun go down. "Our sun is sinking almost as swiftly," he said. "But it has shone brightly for you, I hope," she answered. 66 Not so!" he said with a sudden bitterness, very different from the idle tone in which he had been speaking, "Luck forsook me when you did, Achsa. I lost ship after ship; my home was a misery; I am old, as you see me, before my time; and though now that I have done with it the sea fills me with a horror, I cannot keep away from its shores!" "You are not old, Earl," she said. To her he wore an ever-enduring youth, and she seemed to see the lover of her girlhood under this sad mask. "An old hulk thrown on the sand! Luck forsook me when you did, Achsa," he repeated. "I never forsook you, Earl," she said sorrowfully. And speaking, she drew from her breast the little cord she always wore, and he saw suspended on it the plain gold ring that once he gave her, and that had rubbed itself thin against her heart. He took it and looked at it questioningly, and as he looked Achsa told him in a dozen words the truth she had never had the chance to speak before. "We have been cheated out of forty years of happiness," he said. "Out of home and children and blessed memories. Achsa-is it too late to take what we may have before us yet?" She hesitated,-not with the remotest idea that folks might laugh at her, or call her foolish names; but because, even now in his gray hair, he looked so young and strong to her, it seemed too selfish to let him waste himself on one so old as she. And yet, to pick up the dropped thread and weave some bright new lines into the fabric of her life before the senses dulled; to be together for a score of years perhaps still; to have him and happiness once more; to have him to love, to comfort, to worship, to warm her empty heart; to have the blessing of caring for, and solacing his old age! And who in the world was there she loved so well, so well as Earl after all these pitiful years! Is there ever a time when the cherished dream loses its charm? Are we ever so old that we cannot enjoy possession of the long-deferred boon? Before she dared look up, he had slipped the ring upon her finger, and they were sitting side by side and hand in hand upon the beach, and the future seemed to stretch beyond them like the lane of moonlight upon the water, a path of glory into heaven. 66 We are so old, we have lost so much, we need not wait another day," said Earl. "Will you marry me at once, Achsa? I bought your father's house long ago, and there we can go back together for the rest of our lives, the day-lilies are blooming under the woodbined window yet." Young Tom Waite, just home in the long vacation of his second college year, met them coming from the minister's that night; they stopped and told him what had happened, and he bent and kissed his aunt's face where a white clear light was beaming, as if shed from a halo, and the THE BRICKLAYERS. 'Ho, to the top of the towering wall! "To the scaffolding, boys, now merrily climb; Music with labor and art combine;- But lay to the line, boys; lay to the line!" Cheery as crickets all the day long,- Piling the red blocks tier upon tier ; Climbing and climbing still nearer the sun; Prouder than kings of the work they have done! Till men are but children and pigmies below; Music with labor and art combine;- But lay to the line, boys; lay to the line!" Builders of cities and builders of homes- But lay to the line, boys; lay to the line!" |