shook hands indiscriminately in adieu. | lege. Then having relieved ourselves of We were accompanied to the head of some few cordial speeches, and been the the stairs by a Chinese Harvard student. recipients of most polite and complimentand taken down to the council-chamber, ary ones in return, we made our bow to where refreshments, of too civilized a de- our Chinese host, and separated as a parscription to be interesting, were offered ty, each to go his or her way, and ruminate and declined. But little time was allow- on the strange fate which had brought ed for examining the decorations of this face to face on the soil of the American room, which were brilliant, almost the Union two such diverse civilizations as whole wall space being covered with scar- the Anglo-Saxon and Mongolian. let scrolls hung perpendicularly. Back of a raised platform or table at the end of the room-on which was a pyramid of sugar-peaches, emblems of longevity-was a sacred picture, and here evidently the family feast had taken place two nights before.

Returned to the Consul-General's room, we were again greeted by him, asked how we enjoyed our visit, introduced to the vice-consul, Mr. Hwang Tak Kneu, understood to be a graduate of Amherst Col

By the third day of the new year, social dues having been discharged, the denizens of "Chinatown" were principally occupied in domestic, theatrical, or gambling pleasures; comparatively few were to be seen abroad; most house servants had returned to their American homes, and the streets were mainly given up to Chinese scavengers, who were busy collecting and carrying away the débris of the feasts, and the remnants of exploded bombs and effete fire-crackers.

MRS. FLINT'S MARRIED EXPERIENCE.

ELL, Mindwell, I have counselled a good deal about it. I was happy as the day is long with your father. I don't say but what I cleaved to this world consider❜ble more than was good for my growth in grace.

awful mystery, to be longed for afar off: no more daily bread than the show-bread of the Temple.

They lived, and worked, and suffered, and died, with few exceptions, in an awful sense of flying time, brief probation, an angry God, a certain hell, but a very uncertain heaven. No wonder that they were austere and hard; the wonder was that even natural temperament and mental organization should ever resist this outside pressure, and give play to humor, or fancy, or passion of any sort. Yet in this faithless faith lay elements of wonderful strength; the compelling force of duty

just as far as their narrow views allowed, and true to the outward relations of this life, however they violated their inner principle and meaning. Speculation, defalcation, divorce, were crimes they called by other names than these, and abhorred. Can we say as much for ourselves? However we may sneer at Puritanism, it had its strong virtues, and its outgrowth was honesty, decency, and respect for law: a share of such virtues would be worth much to us now.

He was about the best. But it pleased the Lord to remove him, and it was quite a spell before I could reelly submit; the nateral man rebelled, now I tell you! You can't never tell what it is to lose a companion till you experience it." A faint color, vanishing as rapidly as it | came, almost as if ashamed that it bore witness to the emotion within her, rose to Mindwell Pratt's face as her mother spoke. She was a typical New England woman-made men nobly honest, rigidly upright, pale, serious, with delicate features, grave dark eyes, a tall, slight, undeveloped figure, graceful from mere unconsciousness, awkward and angular otherwise. You could compare her to nothing but some delicate and slender tree of the forest that waves its fragile but hardy branches fresh and green in spring-time, and abides undaunted the worst blast of winter, rooted in the fissures of the rock, fed by the bitterest showers, the melting snows, the furious hail that bends but never breaks it; perfect in its place, fitted utterly to its surroundings. Her mother, the widow Gold, was externally like her; but deep in Mindwell's heart lay a strength of character and acuteness of judgment the elder woman did not possess, and a reticence that forbade her to express sympathy even with her mother's sorrow, further than by that reluctant blush, for sympathy implied an expression of her love for her husband- -a hidden treasure she could not profane by speech, which found its only demonstration in deeds, and was the chief spring of her active and devoted life as wife and mother.

Mrs. Gold had been a happy woman, as she said, while her husband lived, and had not yet ceased to reproach herself for mourning him so bitterly. The religion | of New England at that time was of a stern type; it demanded a spiritual asceticism of its followers, and virtually forbade them to enjoy the blessings of this life by keeping them in horrid and continual dread of the pains of hell forever," as their catechism expresses it. It was their purpose to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling under the curse of the law; the gospel was a profound and

Mrs. Gold was a professor," and it behooved her to submit to the will of God when her husband died. He had been a strong, generous, warm-hearted man; and though undemonstrative as his race, his wife had been loved and cherished as the very blossom of his life. She was a sweet, fair girl when Ethan Gold married her, clinging and dependent by nature, though education had made her a hard worker; but her fragile beauty and soft temper had attracted the strength and fervor of the man, and their short life together had been exceptionally happy. Then fever struck him down in his full prime, and their only child, a girl of six, could but just remember all her life that she once had a father whose very memory was sacred.

Fifteen years of mourning, at first deeply, then steadily, at last habitually, and rather as a form than a feeling, passed away.

Ethan had left his wife with "means," so that poverty did not vex her; and now Mindwell was a grown woman, and married to Samuel Pratt, a well-to-do young farmer of Colebrook-a hearty, jovial young fellow, whose fun and animal spirits would bubble over in spite of reprov

ing eyes and tongues, and who came into | ed with all the commonplaces she could Mindwell's restrained and reserved life think of—about her "room being better like a burst of sunshine. Are the wild than her company," "love runs down, blossoms grateful to the sun that draws not up," and the like-till she was really them with powerful attraction from the pining, when just at this moment an adcold sod, mirer came upon the scene, and made known the reason of his appearance in a business-like way.

"Where they together,
All the cold weather,
Keep house alone"?

"Deacon Flint's in the keepin'-room, Perhaps their odor and color are for him mother, wishful to see you, " said Mindwho brings them to light and delight of well one day, about five years after her life. Mindwell's great fear was that she marriage. Deacon Flint was an old acmade an idol of her husband; yet he cer-quaintance, known to Mrs. Gold ever since tainly had not an idea that she did. she was a girl in Bassett. When she married and moved to Denslow the acquaint

nine miles lay between them; but she had then her family cares, and Ethan Gold and Amasa Flint were as unlikely to be friends as a Newfoundland dog and a weasel. Since she had come to Colebrook to live with her daughter, she was a little further still from her Bassett friends, and therefore it was a long time since she had seen the deacon. Meanwhile he had lost his wife-a silent and sickly woman, who crept about and worried through her daily duties for years, spent and fainting when the last supper dish was washed, and aching at early dawn when she had to get up to milk. She did not complain; her duty lay there, in her home, and she did it as long as she could; then she died. This is a common record among our barren hills, which count by thousands their

Martyrs by the pang without the palm."

If the good soul had stopped to analyze the relation between them, his conscious-ance had been partly dropped, though only ness would have been found, when formulated, to be that his wife bore with him as saints do with rather amusing sinners, while he worshipped her as even the most humorous of sinners do sometimes secretly worship saints. But what the wife did not acknowledge or the husband perceive became in a few years painfully perceptible to the mother's feminine and maternal instinct. Mindwell treated her with all possible respect and kindness, but she was no longer her first object. There is a strange hunger in the average female heart to be the one and only love of some other heart, which lies at the root of fearful tragedies and long agonies of unspoken pain--a God-given instinct, no doubt, to make the monopoly of marriage dear and desirable, but, like all other instincts, fatal if it be not fulfilled or followed. Utterly wanting in men, who grasp the pluralities of passion as well as of office, this instinct niches itself deepest in the gentlest of women, and was the ruling yet unrecognized motive in the widow Gold's character. If Mindwell had not had children, perhaps her mother would have been more necessary to her and more dear, but two babies had followed on her marriage within three years, and her mother-love was a true passion. This the grandmother perceived with a tender jealousy fast growing acute. She loved the little girls, as grandmothers do, with unreasoning and lavish fondness. If there had been a maiden aunt in the family-out. Now I don't calc'late to spill no salt, that unconsidered maid-of-all-work whose love is felt to be intrusive, while yet the demands on it are insatiable-the widow Gold would have had at least one sympathetic breast to appeal to; but as it was, she became more and more uneasy and unhappy, and began to make herself wretch

It was a year after her death when Deacon Flint made his first visit to Widow Gold. He was tired of paying Aunt Polly Morse seventy-five cents a week to do housework, though she spun and wove, and made and mended, as faithfully as his wife had done, confiding only to one trusty ear her opinion of her employer.

"He's a professor, ye know, Isr'el, and I make no doubt but what he's a good man, but he is dreadful near-seems as if he reelly begrutched me my vittles sometimes; and there ain't a grain o' salt in that house spilt without his findin' of it

nor nothin' else, to waste it; but, land's sakes! I can't see like a fly, so's to scare up every mite of sugar that's left onto the edges of the paper he fetches it hum in. I wish to gracious he'd get somebody else. I'd ruther do chores for Mirandy Huff than for the deacon.”