From that hour Madeline was utterly and entirely changed. Whatever were her feelings she shared them with none, but shrunk alike from question and sympathy. Those dying reproaches, unjust as she felt them to be, were yet engraven in ineffacable characters upon her heart, and with a feeling akin to the mistaken austerity which punishes the body for the sins of the soul, she resolved to make her future life a penance for her involuntary error. Lonely and desolate, she took up her abode in a place well suited to her embittered and almost misanthropic feelings. For more than ten years the gray cottage was her abode, and the labors of the seamstress furnished her scanty subsistence. During all that period not a creature was ever admitted beyond the threshold of her door, and all curiosity about her had quite subsided long before the termination of her lonely career. At length she was missed from her usual lowly seat in church. A second Sabbath came, and still the black and veiled form of the recluse was not seen. Common humanity demanded some inquiry into her fate, and after several vain attempts to procure admission into the cottage, the door was forced. Upon a truss of straw, in one corner of the desolate chamber, lay the emaciated form of the unfortunate Madeline, stiff, and cold, and ghastly, as if days had passed since the spirit had escaped from its clay tenement. She died as she had lived, lonely, and unknown, for it was not until years had elapsed that I heard the story of the brother and the sister from the lips of one who had known them in early days; while other incidental circumstances enabled me to identify Madeline Graham with the tall “_weird woman_” who had so terrified my childish fancy. The erring brother sleeps beneath the shadow of the sanctuary, in ground still consecrated by holy usage, but all trace of the hapless sister has vanished from the earth. The village graveyard is now a populous highway, bordered by tall houses and traversed by busy feet, while the green hillock which once marked the burial place of Madeline Graham has long since been crushed beneath the weight of pavements, echoing to the noisy tread of many a thoughtless wayfarer. Alas, for human love! and, alas, for human error! How dreary and desolate would seem many a scene of unmerited suffering did we not know that there is a brighter world, where all tears shall be wiped from all eyes, and where there shall be no sorrow nor sighing through an eternity of happiness! * * * * * TO AN INFANT IN THE CRADLE. BY REV. GEORGE B. CHEEVER.