‘Caleb, my dear friend, I will be as quiet as your heart can wish now, for mine is at rest. Don’t stare so. Come here, and sit down again, whilst I explain to this young lady all that you have been to me, and tell you all that I trust she will very soon be to me.’ ‘Oh, we’re to have a missus arter all, then!’ cried the old sailor meaningly. ‘Why, I thought you told me just now, my boy, that you warn’t a-goin’ to be spliced!’ ‘Ah, Caleb, the storm has sent me a wife as it brought you a son. Had it not been for that awful hurricane, and the peril in which it placed this precious life, I am not quite sure if we should ever have been so happy as we are this evening. Never mind my wounded arm and the gash upon my cheek; Miss Herbert says she shall like it all the better for a scar. The wound in my heart is healed, Caleb, and life looks very fair for us all henceforward. And yet you could not believe “Old Contrairy,”’ he added playfully, that ‘Whatever is, is best.’ THE END. [Illustration] ‘SENT TO HIS DEATH!’ I came down to breakfast one morning last autumn, and found a letter on the table from my old friend Bessie Maclean. Bessie and I were girls at school together, and continued our intimacy after we left, until we married and went to different parts of the country. Marriage is a terrible breaker up of old ties; not only by reason of the separation which generally ensues, but because of the new duties it entails. We had both married the men of our hearts, however, and in comfortable circumstances; and so far all was well. But little by little our correspondence, which at first had been so voluminous and detailed, became scanty and irregular. Bessie had half-a-dozen children to occupy her time and attention; and I—I had my dear husband to fill up the measure of my life, and felt myself a wicked and ungrateful woman if I even wished for more. But—there is always a ‘but’ in the happiest worldly existence, is there not?—Dick and I had no children; and the disappointment had sometimes caused me to shed bitter tears. In secret though; I had never told my husband one-half I felt upon the subject.