To the day of his death he never disclosed the secret of his early love. When the frosts of three-score winters had whitened his locks, the solitary old man withdrew to his lonely room, and there, amid those inanimate objects which had been his solace through so many weary years, he yielded up his gentle spirit to the God who gave it. He was found one morning lying in the quiet sleep of death—his arms crossed upon his breast, his bible on the table at his bedside, and his features settled in such sweet repose that none looked upon them without feeling that Death had indeed dealt mercifully with the righteous. His will was found in his cabinet, and Mary Walton was made the sole heiress of his little fortune; although no reason was assigned for this exclusive preference. Perhaps the little casket which was discovered in a secret recess of the same cabinet disclosed somewhat of the truth to her conscious heart. It contained a lock of golden hair, marked: “_given me by Mary on her twelfth birthday_,” together with a withered bouquet, which, from the silken band around it, Mary remembered to have given him the night preceding her betrothal, and a penciled sketch in which she had no difficulty to recognize her own girlish beauty. Reader, does my tale seem tame and trite? it is the history of a blighted heart; and if the secrets of that strange world of mystery were more frequently revealed, many such a tale of simple pathos would enlist the sympathies of the glad and gay. The picture of that self-forgetting being, subduing his love, at first, from the very humility of true affection, and, afterwards, crushing it within his heart lest its living presence should mar the happiness of his beloved, is to me one of ineffable tenderness. That he was mistaken in his views of her happiness does not destroy the beauty of his self-devotion; and what shall we say of the moral courage which could relinquish all claims to _posthumous_ sympathy, by bearing his secret to the grave, lest a shadow from the past should fall upon her present peacefulness? * * * * * THE RETURN OF YOUTH. BY WILLIAM C. BRYANT. My friend, thou sorrowest for thy golden prime, For thy fair youthful years too swift of flight; Thou musest, with wet eyes, upon the time Of cheerful hopes that filled the world with light, Years when thy heart was bold, thy hand was strong, And prompt thy tongue the generous thought to speak, And willing faith was thine, and scorn of wrong Summoned the sudden crimson to thy cheek.