Connecticut western news., 1889-08-07
VOL. XIX.

with my feet. Surely, I thought, there must be some Assure like those in which that ill-omened weed had found place for its root!
 "There was none. My fingers be- came sore in busying themselves with the harsh and inhospitable stones. My feet slipped from the smooth and slimy masonry beneath the water; and sever al times my face came in rude contact with the wall, where my foothold gave way on the instant that I seemed to have found some diminutive rocky cleat upon which could stay myself.
 "Sir, did you ever see rat drowned in a half-flled hogshead,-how he swims round, and round, and round; and after vainly trying the sides again and again with his paws, fixes his eyes upon the upper rim as if he would look himself out of a watery prison?
 s'I thought of the miserable vermin, thought of him as watched thus his dying agonies, when cruel urchin of eight or ten. Boys are horribly cruel, sir; boys, women, and savages. All childlike things are cruel-cruel from want of thought, from perverse in- genuity.
 l thought then, I say, of the rat drowning in a half-filled cask of water, and lifting his gaze out of the vessel as he grew desperate, and I flung my self on my back, and, floating thus, fixed my eyes upon the moon.
 "The moon is we'll enough in her way, however you may look at her; but her appearance is, to say the least of it, peculiar to man floating on his back in the centre of a stone tank, with dead wall of some fifteen or twenty feet rising squarely on every side of him!" (The young man smiled bitterly as he said this, and shuddered once or twice before he went on musingly.) F@
 "The last time had noted the plan ct with any emotion she was on the wane. Mary was with me; I had brought her out here one morning to look at the view from the top of the Reservoir. She said little of the scene, but as we talked of our old childish loves, I saw that it's fresh features were incorporating themselves with tender memories of the past, and I was con- tent.
 "There was rich golden haze upon the landscape, and as my own spirits rose amid the voluptuous atmosphere, she pointed to the waning planet, dis cernible like faint gash in the welkin, and wondered how long it would be before the leaves would fall. Strange girl! did she mean to rebuke my joy ous mood, as if we had no right to be happy while Nature, whitening ill her pomp, and the sickly moon wasting ill the blaze of noontide, were there to remind us of 'the gone-forever'?
 |" sThey will all renew themselves, dear Mary,' said l, sand there is one that will ever keep tryst alike with thee and nature through all seasons, if thou wilt but be true to one of us, and re- main as now child of nature.'
 GA tear sprang to her eye, and then searching her pocket for her card-case she remembered an engagement to be
 present at Miss Lawson's opening ot
 fall bonnets at two o'clock!
 'sAnd yet, dear, wild, wayward
 Mary, 1 thought of her now. Yor
 have probably outlived this sort o1
 thing, sir; but I, looking at the moon
 as floated there upturned to her vel
 low light, though of the loved being whose tears I knew would flow wher
 she heard of my singular fate, at once so grotesque, yet melancholy to awful ness.
 ssAnd how often we have talked, to' of that Carian shepherd who spent hi , damp nights upon the hills, gazing a
 dc upon the lustrous planet! Win F will revel with her amid those old su , perstitions! Who, from our own un , legcnded woods, will evoke their ye l undetected haunting spirits? Wh, peer with her in prying scrutiny int
 natures laws, and challenge the whis , pers of poetry from the voiceless throa I of matter? Who laugh merrily owe l the stupid guess-work of pedants, ths , never mingled with the infinitude o nature, through love exhaustless an all-embracing, as we have? Poor girl
 she will be companionless.
 "Alas! companionless forever-sav : in the exciting stages of some bris ] filtration. She will live hereafter b t feeding other hearts with loves lol
 she has learned from me, and thel d Pygmalion-like, grow fond of tf e images she has herself endowed wit l. semblance of divinity. How anxior e she will be lest the coroner shall hay e discovered any of her notes in m e pocket!
 if "I felt chilly as this last refectio O crossed my mind, partly at thought ( d the coroner, partly at the idea ( st Mary being unwillingly compelled d wear mourning for me, in case of sut
 disclosure of our engagement. It