Such a letter!—­filled with the spirit of his love, breathing in every word the tender, passionate devotion of an earlier day, and yet so sad.  Tears dropped down through her smiles of joy and blurred the lines she read at first, but smiles and tears alike ceased as she read on.  He had written many, many times, but he knew she had not got his letters.  He had been a prisoner—­not only prisoner of war, but afterward prisoner to a man whose will was iron.  It could hardly be explained.  This man had not only saved his life, but he had also rescued him from the horrors of a Southern prison—­would God he had let him die!—­and they had been living together in a ranch in a far off Mexican valley.

Then the letter went on: 

“In my heart I am unchanged; my love for you is ever the same; yet I am no longer the Robert Shirley whom you knew.  That has come upon me which will separate me from you for ever:  I cannot ask you now to be my wife.  You are free.  It is through no fault of mine.  It is my burden, the price of life, and I must bear it.  God bless you and give you all happiness!

“ROBERT SHIRLEY:” 

When she had read it all she bowed her head and wept again, and the face that had grown more and more beautiful with the years of waiting was radiant.  Who can fathom the depths of a woman’s love?  Who can follow the subtle workings of a woman’s thought?  Who can comprehend a woman’s boundless faith?  Her course was clear.  If misfortune had befallen him, if he were maimed, disfigured, crazed, even if he were loathsome to her eyes, she loved him, and she must see him:  she would see him and speak to him, and love him still, even if she could not be his wife.  What would she have done if she could have guessed the truth?  As it was, she wrote upon her card, “If you love me, come to me,” and sent it to him.  And in answer to the summons he stood before her—­not disfigured, not maimed, not crazed, not loathsome in any way, yet irrevocably separated from her for Dr. Fournier’s experiment had succeeded, and Robert Shirley was a mulatto!

CORNELIUS DEWEES.

A VISIT TO THE KING OF AURORA.

(FROM THE GERMAN OF THEODORE KIRSCHOFF.)

On the Oregon and California Railroad, twenty-eight miles south of the city of Portland in Oregon, lies the German colony of Aurora, a communist settlement under the direction of Doctor William Keil.  In September, 1871, I made a second journey from San Francisco to Oregon, on which occasion I found both time and opportunity to carry out a long-cherished desire to visit this colony, already famous throughout all Oregon, and to make the acquaintance of the still more famous doctor, the so-called “king of Aurora.”  During the years in which I had formerly resided in Oregon, and especially on this last journey thither, I had frequently heard this settlement and its autocrat spoken of, and had been told the strangest stories