to make his only one, his jewel, a match which princes might envy, she became painfully conscious of her father’s worldliness and debasing servitude to the hard earth. She saw that he lay prone, chained, bound down with clamps of iron, of silver, and of gold, and never raised his eyes to the upper light, or questioned of the day when he should be called to give an account of his stewardship. Then she would weep, and kiss her father, and talk of her mother who had passed away, and of another life, and hope that they might all meet in that better world; and the miser would stroke down her glossy hair with his trembling hands, and press her forehead to his lips, and call her a foolish girl, who troubled herself about matters with which she had nothing to do; and bade her go and dream of the glory to which he had raised her, and count her suitors, and be brave. “More, more,” was the miser’s unceasing cry; “all, all—I want all,” was the prayer which he put up, not to the Giver of all Good, but to his own will, which habit had enslaved, until use made servitude a happiness. And he worked on, ever gaining, ever adding, abstemious, pinching, self-denying, liberal only to his daughter, whom he could never see too richly clad, too sumptuously served—a costly toy to be stared at and admired. “She is my diamond,” he would say, “which I have chosen to plant in a rich setting.” SECTION XII. But the daughter grew, day by day, more thoughtful, denied herself more frequently to her followers, and was more and more often to be found sitting with her father, alone, at the little table, winning him from his labor. Mr. Cornelius was too much engrossed with the world, with money-getting, to observe the beginning and progress of the change in his daughter’s manner, amusements, and way of life; and he soon learned to work on, with his child at his side, half unconscious of her presence, and yet alive to the pleasurable feeling that there was something near him which he much loved. I was not so blind. As month after month rolled away, I saw the shadow of a great melancholy creep slowly over her face, and deepen, and deepen, until it had imparted that exquisite softness to her beauty which is the surest symptom of decay. We see it in the flower; time gives it to all the works of man; and genius shows it, as the flame trembles, flickers, leaps upward, and goes out. The heart was sick; the spirit grew toward heaven. I had occasion, one evening, to be with Mr. Cornelius until a late hour, conversing about some matters in the courts which he had entrusted to my care; we had talked much, and the last watch was drawing to a close, when the door quietly opened, and his daughter entered, holding in one hand a light stool, and in the other a book. “The gentleman will excuse us for a moment,” she said, addressing her father; then turning to me, she received me with her usual cordiality. “I have adopted a practice, of