It has been said that there are times when the stoniest hearts are softened; when the sternest natures are made mild, and when the most abandoned are like little children. That moment had now come for David White. It was strange, passing strange. He had committed crime upon crime, yet scarcely felt a moment's remorse; for years he had acted toward his mother as if his whole soul were naught but selfishness; but when he came to leave that mother, that old homestead, and all the bright and beautiful objects around it, a softness breathed over his iron-nature, and the fount of tears sent up its gushing libations. I have often thought that such feelings must be akin to those mysterious, indefinable, and gloomy forebodings--those dim and indescribable fears and shrinkings within self, that sometimes come over our spirits like a creeping, icy thrill--in the midst of a giddy round of pleasure, or, as we stand by the grave's brink to see our friends entombed, and yet which no earthly or human cause is able to explain. He was beholding everything for the last time, and he looked around him as the dying man upon his nearest friends, when he feels the cold hand of death pressed heavily upon his brow, and the silver chords of his spirit's harp gathering to their utmost tension, and snapping, one by one, like reeds before the blast. There was the home which had sheltered him in his helplessness, glowing in a shower of soft moonlight, and seeming more beautiful than he ever saw it before. There the only true love this wide world of cold and bitter heartlessness can know, beamed on his infant eyes; and there he had spent the only happy moments in all his boyhood existence. In that little room he had first learned to pray, and there, first forgotten the duty. There his mother had watched over him night after night, when he had a burning fever, and the grave had half-opened its terrible portals for his entrance. And now he was going to abandon that mother who had loved and cherished him so fondly--leave her all alone, a joyless, childless widow, and for what cause? He choked down the emotion that rose to his mind, and turned hurriedly in another direction. Not more than twenty paces from him, a stream went dancing and bubbling across the road like a track of liquid silver--the stream that was fed by the cool spring at home; and he remembered how he had gazed in transport, many years agone, at the bright-hued insects floating in the meek, golden-colored sunshine, now sinking their velvet feet into the moist sand upon the water's brink, and sipping tiny draughts; or, resting upon the edges of the blue and crimson flowers that looked up like gems from the verdant grass, opening and shutting their unruffled fans, woven of gold and sunlight. He turned away from the scene sick at heart, but still another object presented itself to view, awakening old memories. A little farther on yonder in the green meadow, through which murmured the mill-stream, and by the