“Beulah, do pin my mantle on straight.  I am in such a hurry.  Only think how kind Dr. Hartwell is; he has come to take me out to ride; says I look too pale, and he thinks a ride will benefit me.  That will do, thank you.”

She turned away, but Beulah rose and called out: 

“Come back here and get my velvet mantle.  It is quite cool, and it will be a marvelous piece of management to ride out for your health and come home with a cold.  What! no gloves either!  Upon my word, your thoughts must be traveling over the bridge Shinevad.”

“Sure enough; I had forgotten my gloves; I will get them as I go down.  Good-by.”  With the mantle on her arm she hurried away.

Beulah laid aside her drawing materials and prepared for her customary evening walk.  Her countenance was clouded, her lip unsteady.  Her guardian’s studied coldness and avoidance pained her, but it was not this which saddened her now.  She felt that Clara was staking the happiness of her life on the dim hope that her attachment would be returned.  She pitied the delusion and dreaded the awakening to a true insight into his nature; to a consciousness of the utter uncongeniality which, she fancied, barred all thought of such a union.  As she walked on these reflections gave place to others entirely removed from Clara and her guardian; and, on reaching the grove of pines opposite the asylum, where she had so often wandered in days gone by, she paced slowly up and down the “arched aisles,” as she was wont to term them.  It was a genuine October afternoon, cool and sunny.  The delicious haze of Indian summer wrapped every distant object in its soft, purple veil; the dim vistas of the forest ended in misty depths; the very air, in its dreamy languor, resembled the atmosphere which surrounded

  “The mild-eyed, melancholy lotus-eaters”

of the far East.  Through the openings, pale, golden poplars shook down their dying leaves, and here and there along the ravine crimson maples gleamed against the background of dark green pines.  In every direction bright-colored leaves, painted with “autumnal hectic,” strewed the bier of the declining year.  Beulah sat down on a tuft of moss, and gathered clusters of golden-rod and purple and white asters.  She loved these wild wood-flowers much more than gaudy exotics or rare hothouse plants.  They linked her with the days of her childhood, and now each graceful spray of golden-rod seemed a wand of memory calling up bygone joys, griefs, and fancies.  Ah, what a hallowing glory invests our past, beckoning us back to the haunts of the olden time!  The paths our childish feet trod seem all angel-guarded and thornless; the songs we sang then sweep the harp of memory, making magical melody; the words carelessly spoken now breathe a solemn, mysterious import; and faces that early went down to the tomb smile on us still with unchanged tenderness.  Aye, the past, the long past, is all fairyland.  Where our little