No one ever knew what Edith suffered, for no one suspected her long-cherished attachment. Her step became languid, her cheek sunken, her eye unnaturally bright, and when at length, a hacking cough fastened itself upon her lungs, every body said that Edith Pemberton was falling into a consumption. Some attributed it to a cold taken when nursing her sister through a dangerous illness,—others thought she had worn out her health among her numerous nephews and nieces. But the worm lay at the root of the tree and though the storm and the wind might work its final overthrow, the true cause of its fall was the gnawing of the secret destroyer. Gradually and quietly and silently she faded from among the living. Friends gathered round her couch of suffering and the consolations of the Book of all truth smoothed her passage to the tomb. With a world of sorrow and care sinking from her view, and an eternal life of happiness opening upon her dying eyes, she closed her useful and blameless life. On the very day fixed upon for his marriage with a young and fashionable heiress, Edward Ellis received a summons to attend, as pall bearer, the funeral of Edith Pemberton. Of course he could not decline, and as he beheld the earth flung upon the coffin which concealed the faded form of her whom he had once loved, the heart of the selfish and worldly man was touched with pity and remorse. But he turned from Edith’s grave to his own bridal and in the festivities of that gay scene soon forgot her who, after a life spent in the service of others, had fallen a victim to that chronic heart-break which destroys many a victim never numbered in the records of mortality. Gentle reader, I have told you a simple story, but one so like the truth, that you will be tempted to conjecture that the real heroine has been actually known to you. Will not the circle of your own acquaintance furnish an Edith Pemberton?—a gentle, lovely and loveable woman, who leads a life of quiet benevolence, and whose obscure and peaceful existence is marked by deeds of kindness, even as the windings of a summer brook are traced by the freshness of the verdure and flowers that adorn its banks? Have you never met with one of those persons on whose gravestone might be inscribed the beautiful and touching lines of the poet Delille? “Joyless I lived yet joy to others gave!” And when you have listened to the bitter jest, the keen sarcasm and the thoughtless ridicule which the young and gay are apt to utter against “_the old maid_,” has it never occurred to you that each of these solitary and useful beings may have her own true tale of young and disappointed affection? * * * * * TO AN ANTIQUE VASE. BY N. C. BROOKS.