sounds.  Mr. Stillinghast paused on a knoll, and looked around him.  There lay the rolling country, with its undulations of hill and vale, all interspersed, and adorned with picturesque cottages and elegant villas.  Towards the east, up rose the splendid city, with up-hill and down-hill streets; its marble monuments, commemorative of great men and great deeds; its magnificent domes, raised in honor of the Most High God; its lofty towers, its princely mansions; while far beyond, stretching to the verge of the horizon, slumbered the quiet and beautiful bay, sparkling like a sea of ultramarine and diamonds, over whose waters hundreds of sails were hovering like white sea-fowl.

Towards the north-western boundary of the city, he saw the dark, massive founderies and manufactories, which, from their palatial-looking walls, sent out the never-ceasing clang of labor, and the tireless song of steam, to which thousands of stout arms and brawny sinews kept time.  And far beyond these, out on the quiet hills, the scene terminated in a Marble City,[1] where, beneath trees of centuries growth, its inhabitants slumber silently through the long, cold night of death, until the revivifying beams of the resurrection day shall dawn on the earth-mantle that wraps their clay.  But over all shone the glad beauty of the day.  It poured down its effulgence alike on the city of the dead and the city of the living!  Mr. Stillinghast had not looked on the like for years, long, dusty, dreary years; and he felt a tingling in his heart—­a presence of banished memories, an expansion of soul, which softened and silenced him, while gradually it lifted from his countenance the harsh, ugly mask he usually wore.

“Here we are,” said the man, pointing to old Mabel’s cottage; “this is the place.”

Then it occurred to Mr. Stillinghast, for the first time, that he had come there without any particular object in view—­he had obeyed an impulse which he did not pause to analyze, and now, somewhat embarrassed he stood still, uncertain what to do.

“You may return,” he said to the man, to whom he gave a dollar; “this will pay you for the time you have lost.”  The man thanked him, and went his way, rejoicing in the reward of such pleasant and easy labor.

“Why not go in?” he murmured, “I am here on a fool’s errand, after all.  But why not enter?  If this old beggar is so destitute, I can leave her something to buy a loaf; but what business is it of mine?  A plague on it all!  What do I here—­why are you here, Mark Stillinghast?” Then he opened the door very softly, and, as he did so, he heard these words repeated in a clear, sweet voice,—­“For what shall it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and lose his own soul!” then he saw May seated beside the old negro, reading from some pious, instructive book, of Christian doctrine.  And those words came ringing down into his soul like the blast of ten thousand trumpets!  He staggered