might fade and become obliterated, and that the age of complete maturity might be signalized by an entire change in her physical and mental state.  He held these vague hopes as all of us nurse our only half-believed illusions.  Not for the world would he have questioned his sagacious old medical friend as to the probability or possibility of their being true.  We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.

In this life of comparative seclusion to which the father had doomed himself for the sake of his child, he had found time for large and varied reading.  The learned Judge Thornton confessed himself surprised at the extent of Dudley Venner’s information.  Doctor Kittredge found that he was in advance of him in the knowledge of recent physiological discoveries.  He had taken pains to become acquainted with agricultural chemistry; and the neighboring farmers owed him some useful hints about the management of their land.  He renewed his old acquaintance with the classic authors.  He loved to warm his pulses with Homer and calm them down with Horace.  He received all manner of new books and periodicals, and gradually gained an interest in the events of the passing time.  Yet he remained almost a hermit, not absolutely refusing to see his neighbors, nor ever churlish towards them, but on the other hand not cultivating any intimate relations with them.

He had retired from the world a young man, little more than a youth, indeed, with sentiments and aspirations all of them suddenly extinguished.  The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow, the second a single trying duty.  In due time the anguish had lost something of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories had begun to struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even that duty which he had confronted with such an effort had become an endurable habit.

At a period of life when many have been living on the capital of their acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities until their intellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier than they were at twenty, Dudley Venner was stronger in thought and tenderer in soul than in the first freshness of his youth, when he counted but half his present years.  He was now on the verge of that decade which marks the decline of men who have ceased growing in knowledge and strength:  from forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.  At the entrance of this decade his inward nature was richer and deeper than in any earlier period of his life.  If he could only be summoned to action, he was capable of noble service.  If his sympathies could only find an outlet, he was never so capable of love as now; for his natural affections had been gathering in the course of all these years, and the traces of that ineffaceable calamity of his life were softened and partially hidden by new growths of thought and feeling, as the wreck left by a mountain-slide is covered over by the gentle intrusion of the soft-stemmed herbs which will prepare it for the stronger vegetation that will bring it once more into harmony with the peaceful slopes around it.