Waterbury Democrat., 1901-01-25
SOLD BY ALL DRUGGISTS.

morning she awoke to face the awful problem of how to earn her daily bread. It was then, when she had ex- hausted every other possibility, that she thought of doing something to justify her reputation as "Iiterary.' Fortunately, ct the very moment, a magazine was offering a handsome prize for the best short story sent it within a certain time. and in q flash of inspiration she saw herself win ming it and on the high road to for tune.
 To resolve to write a story and to write it are two quite different mat ters. For days Miss Aurelia threshed over in her mind plots and counter plots. She grew wan and hollow-eyed worrying over the sorrows of heroines who refused to materialize on paper. Try as she might she could not breathe the breath of life into the figures she conJured up in fancy. In the meantime debts pressed upon her and her need
 was growing desperate. Then it was she did a thing she could never have
 believed herself capable, of doing-a thing that seemed to her as much des-
 ecration as opening q grave and rob- ping the dead. She looked into her own heart, and then she wrote.
 For years and years before when Miss Aurelia was a, girl of IT there had been 8 tragedy in her life, but she
 had borne her pain so bravely and made so little outcry that nobody but her self, and her father, and one other, had ever known it. That other was Tom Grayson, the overseer'S son. Miss Aurelia's mother had died when she
 was born, and she had grown up on the big plant tioIl> with few other play mates but the big, strong, handsome. passionate boy, whose hand, to her, was as light and tenuer as a woman's, and whose voice took on cadences of gen.
 tleness when it spoke her name. Out
 of these childish associations, out of
 common memories. and dreams
 dreamed together love had sprung .as
 naturally and as inevitably as a rose out of the heart of the spring, and
 when the boy lover had opened his arms
 and called her to them, she had laid
 her head upon his breast as confident ly and simply as bird flies to the shei- ter of it's nest. Hand in hand they had
 gone to her father, and then
 In an instant their paradise lay shat tered about them. The old, bitter caste spirit, the naughty pride of the aris- tocrat famed up in the old man in sud- den wrath. He taunted the boy with his humble origin, fayed him with scorn for trying to steal a silly girls l love in order to raise himself, and the boy, goaded to madness, flung himself | out of the room with a curse.
 "Tom, Tem,' she had cried, q shall never love anyone but you. Come back, come back" but he was too
 young and too hurt to heed any pain but his own, and he never even glanced back at her pathetic little figure.
 The next morning he was gone, and to the girl it was as if the tomb had
 swallowed him up. She ate out her | heart in fruitless longing and anxiety but no word came, and she did not 1 know whether he remembered. or l whether he had forgotten. until after l her fathers death. Then in going over 1 some papers she found a letter ad | dressed to herself. It was from Tom l telling of how he had battled with fate
 to make place worthy of even her in | the world, of his success, and begging | her if the old love still lived in he. heart to send him one word or token
 It was dated three years before. and
 Miss Aurelia, reading it with trembling | hands, knew that twice had her father
 closed the door in the face of her happi. | ness.
 It was this story of her life that she
 wrote, and because she dipped her per in her own blood. and blistered the pa | per with her tears, and told the thing 1 that was, just as she knew it, the story was sweet as love, and beautiful as
 hope, and touched every heart with it: