"A mirror and a bath for beauty's youngest daughters;" and that the house, which he at length succeeded in raising and furnishing there, united somewhat the refinement of his past life to the simplicity of his present; for his difficulties, we can only say, he met them and conquered them, and gained from each encounter knowledge and power. For two years, letters were the only medium of intercourse between his mother and himself, but those letters were a history--a history not only of his stirring, outer life, but of that inner life which yet more deeply interested her. Feeling proud herself of the daring spirit, the iron will, the ready invention which these letters displayed, yet prouder of the affectionate heart, the true and generous nature, it is not wonderful that Mrs. Oswald should have often read them, or at least parts of them, to her constant friend and very frequent visitor, Mary Grayson. Nor is it more strange that Mary, thus made to recognize in the most interesting man she had yet known, far more lofty claims to her admiration, should have enshrined him in her young and pure imagination as some "bright, particular star." Two years in the future! How almost interminable seems the prospect to our hopes or our affections!--but let Time turn his perspective glass--let us look at it in the past, and how it shrinks and becomes as a day in the history of our lives! So was it with Philip Oswald's two years of absence, when he found himself, in the earliest dawn of the spring of 1838, once more in New-York. Yet that time had not passed without leaving traces of its passage--traces in the changes affecting those around him--yet deeper traces in himself. He arrived in the afternoon of an earlier day than that on which he had been expected. In the evening Mrs. Oswald persuaded him to assume, for the gratification of her curiosity, the picturesque costume worn by him in his western home. He had just re-entered her room, and she was yet engaged in animated observation of the hunting-shirt, strapped around the waist with a belt of buckskin, the open collar, and loosely knotted cravat, which, as the mother's heart whispered, so well became that tall and manly form, when there was a slight tap at the door, and before she could speak, it opened, and Mary Grayson stood within it. She gazed in silence for a moment on the striking figure before her, and her mind rapidly scanned the changes which time and new modes of life had made in the Philip Oswald of her memory. As she did so, she acknowledged that the embrowned face and hands, the broader and more vigorous proportions, and even the easy freedom of his dress, were more in harmony with the bold and independent aspect which his character had assumed, than the delicacy and elegance by which he had formerly been distinguished. His outer man was now the true index of a noble, free, and energetic spirit--a spirit which, having conquered itself, was victor over