Connecticut western news., 1881-01-12
AT FIFTY.

Yes, fifty IS great age-people seem to think it is; half-century. I have felt it as looked back upon the years l have felt it as looked before me in the glass; I have felt it in the society of Belle and her mates have felt it when people treated me with the cool polite ness due their own self-respect, and, that done, have fled to the charms of little Belle and Alice, that only yester- day remember in the cradles and if had any common sense should not have felt it with the regret did.
 But hated all along to be growing toward fifty. I hated to see that could not sit out doors of an evening without little shawl :; that could not take the old rambles and rides of my youth un- less fatigued; that instead of thrilling freshly in every nerve to the beauty of sunset and scenery as I used to do, I quiyered only in remembering how I used to thrill.
 And then, too, dreaded to be old, thinking if some day-some day-Mas- kelyn should see me, and pass by with out knowing me, or, if knowing me. knowing only to suffer mortal shock at the sight never thinking that Maskelyn also was growing old. An perhaps I should have dreaded it all the more if I had thought the years were setting lines ln the smooth olive of that face, were dimming the fire of those great eyes, were whitening the darkness of the locks that fell across that brow of his, were impairing the music of that voice. I never did think it. To me he had @ sort of immortality. And now now I am fifty years old, as I was yes- terday but it is not bitter any more, as it was yesterday, with that old bitter ness of vanished strength and interest :: for I love life. I feel the blood bound ing warmly ln my veins death seems further away than ever-it is only bit ter now because have nothing but this old face, this old heart, these used-up fifty years, to give Maskelyn. It is bit ter, too, lest people should smile at Maskelyn-
 was sitting in the porch, thinking of my years, that day. After all, it seemed but the day before that I had sat there with the delicious odor of the honeysuekles blowing all about me in the dusk, and Maskelyn sat at my side, and the very air we breathed famed to and fro in the fragrance full of the dark sweet mystery of love. It seemed as if all the world had been made just to come to blossom in that evening, stars and winds and vaults of heaven, the evening that he first said in words that he loved me, although our lives had grown together so for years that we had each known the thought of the other without speaking, and knew that there were no others on earth that could ever come as close to either of us as the other did.
 But this crowned the whole with cer- tainty, and we looked in each others faces Tn the gleams of the starlight as fl we were the only two people on the planet. Alas, we were not!
 For Maskelyn was still very young ana the traveller for commercial house. he had his way to make. It was the morning after that night in the dark and the dew and the honeysuckle odo1 that he left the ring on my finger, and went off on one of his journeys, He was to go down the river to New Orleans before he returned; and he took the steamer Beauxtemps at St. Louis-and It was thirty years before I heard from nm how 1t all happened. But the world IS full of tongues, and heard it. all the same, on the four winds that blow nc one knows wbither.
 There had taken passage on that fatal steamer a wealthy planter of Louisiana, with his wife, an invalid French lady, and their young daughter Adele. She was lovely little thing, this Adele. and she sang like bird. Maskelyn heard her singing one evening, and, passion. ately fond of music, he soon made he1 acquaintance, and was singing with her She was as child-like, too, as she was young and pretty; she had soon con nded to him all her affairs, and he, secure Tn his plighted love, and never dreaming of mlsconstruction or trouble, became her hourly associate, and took pleasure Tn her innocent companionship.
 One afternoon they sat in their ac customed seat. reading, as it chanced, from the same book. In their occupa. tion and their talk they had taken no notice of the excitement of the people