Mortimer ran out on the slender bridge of stone and led Bell back by the hand. After a little while they heard Nanny calling them to come home. The children occupied a small chamber over the front door. A scented vine clomb all about the window, and taught the ruddy sun at morning to throw a subdued light into the room; and it broke the orange stream of sunset. At night the dreamers from their bed could see the stars hanging like fruit among its cloudy leaves. When Bell and Mortimer came up from the sea-beach, the moonlight, breaking through this leafy lattice, made the chamber as that of Abon Ben Adhem--"like a lily in bloom." Nanny brought a lamp, and kissed them good-night. "O, we don't want a lamp all this moon!" cried Bell. The boy sat half undressed at the window. "Bell loves moonlight like a fairy," he said. Bell's robe fell to her knees in snowy folds, and she stood like a _petite_ Venus rising from the froth. Then brother and sister braided their voices in a simple prayer to Our Father in Heaven. They prayed for kind old Nanny, and for one on the wide sea. "When will father come home?" asked Bell, for the hundredth time that day. "It will not be long now. When the boughs of the cherry trees are an inch deep with ice, and the logs crackle in the fire-place--then he will come. Let us go to sleep, and dream of him." And thus, hand in hand, the two went in to Dream-land-- The world of Sleep, The beautiful old World! The dreamy Palestine of pilgrim Thought! The Lotus Garden, where the soul may lie Lost in elysium, while the music moan Of some unearthly river, faintly caught, Seems like the whispering of Angels, blown Upon æolian harp-strings! And we change Into a seeming something that is not! II. _Ah, yes! with joy the April rain Thrills nature's breast; but mine with pain Sigheth: "He will not come again!"_ ALBERT LAIGHTON. II. THE DEAD HOPE. _Time's Changes--Fall-down Castles--Little Bell Waiting--When will Father Come Home?--Little Bell Weary--What the Sea said--Never more._ Longfellow beautifully asks in Hyperion, "What is Time, but the shadow of the hour-hand on a dial-plate?" The flowers of the earth and the hearts of men are dial-plates. The shadows coming and going on them are the hour-hands; when a flower fades, or a heart ceases to beat, it is only a weight run down. The whole universe is but one immense time-piece, throbbing with innumerable wheels, heavy with weights, and wearing itself away! Desire is a restless pendulum, one end linked to the heart, and the other pointing downward! A year had added another link to that chain which stretches through eternity. A year! Battles lost and won: nations in mourning for their dead: ships gone down at sea; and new paths worn to graveyards! O, for the castles that blow down in a year!