Hark! an eager knocking st Nurse Toothaker’s door.  She starts from her drowsy reverie, sets aside the empty tumbler and teaspoon, and lights a lamp at the dim embers of the fire.  “Rap, rap, rap!” again, and she hurries adown the staircase, wondering which of her friends can be at death’s door now, since there is such an earnest messenger at Nurse Toothaker’s.  Again the peal resounds just as her hand is on the lock.  “Be quick, Nurse Toothaker!” cries a man on the doorstep.  “Old General Fane is taken with the gout in his stomach and has sent for you to watch by his death-bed.  Make haste, for there is no time to lose.”—­“Fane!  Edward Fane!  And has he sent for me at last?  I am ready.  I will get on my cloak and begone.  So,” adds the sable-gowned, ashen-visaged, funereal old figure, “Edward Fane remembers his Rosebud.”

Our question is answered.  There is a germ of bliss within her.  Her long-hoarded constancy, her memory of the bliss that was remaining amid the gloom of her after-life like a sweet-smelling flower in a coffin, is a symbol that all may be renewed.  In some happier clime the Rosebud may revive again with all the dewdrops in its bosom.

THE THREEFOLD DESTINY.

A FAERY LEGEND.

I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spirit and mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of familiar life.  In the little tale which follows a subdued tinge of the wild and wonderful is thrown over a sketch of New England personages and scenery, yet, it is hoped, without entirely obliterating the sober hues of nature.  Rather than a story of events claiming to be real, it may be considered as an allegory such as the writers of the last century would have expressed in the shape of an Eastern tale, but to which I have endeavored to give a more lifelike warmth than could be infused into those fanciful productions.

In the twilight of a summer eve a tall dark figure over which long and remote travel had thrown an outlandish aspect was entering a village not in “faery londe,” but within our own familiar boundaries.  The staff on which this traveller leaned had been his companion from the spot where it grew in the jungles of Hindostan; the hat that overshadowed his sombre brow, had shielded him from the suns of Spain; but his cheek had been blackened by the red-hot wind of an Arabian desert and had felt the frozen breath of an Arctic region.  Long sojourning amid wild and dangerous men, he still wore beneath his vest the ataghan which he had once struck into the throat of a Turkish robber.  In every foreign clime he had lost something of his New England characteristics, and perhaps from every people he had unconsciously borrowed a new peculiarity; so that when the world-wanderer again trod the street of his native village it is no wonder that he passed unrecognized, though exciting the gaze and curiosity of all.  Yet, as his arm casually touched that of a young woman who was wending her way to an evening lecture, she started and almost uttered a cry.