The inmates of the peaceful cottage look with gloomy eyes one upon the other; they become dissatisfied and distracted among themselves, and discord takes the place of harmony.

Secret influences are at work, poisons thrown out by the sphere of the guest.  A worse fate befalls them than befell the sailors who were invaded by the insidious Plague.

I have seen in nature a fair face clouded suddenly—­made gloomy and unlovely—­by the unspoken thought of another.  Thought is contagious—­some varieties of it poisonous!  I have seen the countenance of an innocent child transformed into ugliness by a poisonous thought.  I have seen those who have looked upon her receive that thought and become likewise infected.

I have seen also to this picture another and a brighter side.  I have seen secret influences drawing individuals together, sustaining and upholding them; as the long line filaments of wool clasp each other and draw together the separate particles, so have I seen individuals united.  Thus was the first Napoleon united to Josephine.  A secret influence as potent as the plague passed from one to the other; but it breathed health and not poison.

Napoleon, with his powerful will, disrupted these magnetic relations; he tore apart the unseen filaments that bound them; and, the sustaining influence gone, he fell—­a mighty wreck—­on the bleak shore of St. Helena.

What man or woman can comprehend the secret influences that surround the soul.  Keep guard; and when the blood stagnates within, when secret shudders, and gloomy thoughts, and inharmonious feelings arise, be sure that some poison-breathing foe is at hand.

Set the door ajar, and resolutely turn your face from the secret influence that would destroy you.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE.

(CURRER BELL.)

AGNES REEF.—­A TALE.

CHAPTER I.

I was brought up and educated by my bachelor uncle.  He was a reticent, moody man, and with his aged housekeeper and myself, led a solitary and unsocial life in the old rambling house which had been his father’s before him.

I was but a child of six years when destiny placed me under his charge, and with him I remained eleven years; a scared, repressed little thing, revelling in strange fancies in the spidery attic rooms, and looking down through the dusty cobwebbed windows upon the life and movement below, unconscious that I formed a part of that active humanity.

Thus I lived until I entered my seventeenth year.  For the last two years my mind had been expanding and growing discontented with my lot.  The moroseness of my uncle, the sullenness of his housekeeper, the gloom and dinginess of the bare rooms had grown insupportable to me.  These alone I might have endured, but added to them were other sources of disquiet, not the least of which being hints from the housekeeper that it was time I began to do something for myself.  Youth, pride, and ambition stirred within me, and I actively set about looking, for a situation.