For a moment I had forgotten the tempest in my ecstacy. But suddenly I was aroused from my rapture by a succession of loud and reiterated peals, bursting nearer and nearer overhead, and I looked up now in real alarm, wishing that we had kept the forest road, exposed as we would have been to the rain, rather than subject ourselves to the dangers of our present position. I determined even yet to fly from our peril, and taking Agnes by the waist, urged her trembling steps onward. We had but escaped from beneath the oak when a blinding flash of lightning zig-zagged from one horizon to the other, and instantaneously a peal of thunder, which rings in my ears even yet, burst right over us, and went crackling and echoing down the sky, as if a thousand chariots were driving furiously over its adamantine pavement. But this I scarcely noticed at the time, though it filled my memory afterward, for the flash of lightning seeming to dart from every quarter of the heaven, and unite right over us, shot directly downward, and in the next instant the oak under which we had been standing, riven in twain, stood a scarred and blackened wreck, against the frowning sky. I felt my senses reeling: I thought all was over. When I recovered my senses I found myself standing, with Agnes in my arms, while the thunder was still rolling down the firmament. My first thought was of the dear girl beside me, for I thought her form was unusually heavy. She was apparently perfectly lifeless. Oh! the agony of that moment! Could she have been struck by the lightning? Wild with fear I exclaimed, “Agnes! look up—dear one, you are not hurt?” At length she moved. She had only fainted, and the rain revived her, so that in a few minutes I had the inexpressible delight of feeling her clasp my hand in return for my ardent emotion. But it was long before she was able to return home, and when we did so we arrived thoroughly drenched through. But every thing was forgotten in gratitude for our escape, and joy at knowing that we were beloved. And Agnes is now my wife, and I hear her footstep, still to me like music, approaching. I must close my sketch or the dear one will burn it, for she has no notion, she says, of figuring in a magazine. April, 1841. * * * * * THE JOYS OF FORMER YEARS HAVE FLED. BY G. A. RAYBOLD. The joys of former years have fled, Like meteors through the midnight skies; The brief but brilliant light they shed, Serves but to blind our anxious eyes: So flee the joy of early days, And perish like the meteor’s blaze. The joys of former years decay Like summer flow’rs we linger o’er, While, one by one, they fade away, And fall to earth to bloom no more; Touch’d by the chilling hand of Time, Thus fail the joys of manhood’s prime.