Anon, a spring sunset came on. The lurid disc of the sun wheeled slowly down to the western horizon. Pile on pile of clouds, heaped up in gorgeous magnificence, varying from red to purple, and from purple to gold, gathered fantastically in the sky--now like a molten ocean with uplifting rocks, and then like toppling steeps whose summits reached the stars. Gradually the day went down behind the everlasting hills, and the brilliant hues insensibly died away through all the variations of the many-tinted rainbow, until only a faint golden mellowness suffused the western sky, slowly fading into a deep azure as it approached the zenith. At length twilight, twin sister to the cold, gray dawn, shrouded the heavens in misty dimness. Universal silence seemed to pervade the whole face of nature. The voice of the feathered songsters was hushed in the grove, and the breeze, which all day long had refreshed the deep woods with its joyous ministrations, lulled into stillness, as if its kind office were now completed. Then the brighter stars came out, one by one, and assumed their sapphire thrones in the vaulted cerulean, and the round, bright front of the full moon floated over the eastern mountains, whose dark umbrage glowed with the silver glories of the thronging night--the night whose morrow had but its dawn for David White, the condemned felon. Ten long, weary months had come and passed away with their pomp and mutation, finding and leaving him within a prison's walls; and now, the lapse of a few short, rapid hours would behold a tenement in ruins, and a soul set free. Another day-break, and he would know the untried and unimaginable realities of a shoreless eternity, from whose everlasting portals men have so often shrunk back appalled. Oh, what a bewildering rush of thoughts crowded upon his mind. He stood by the prison-window, through whose iron bars came trooping the silent moonbeams, lighting up his countenance, ghastly and contracted with anguish, then flashing along the darkness, rested upon the floor in mellow radiance. At the farthermost verge of the western horizon, just where the gray outlines of the mountains stood forth like shadows against the deep blue of the sky, huge masses of clouds piled themselves up into strange and fantastic forms, indistinct and dark, from whose bright centre, ever and anon, leaped the fierce lightning, like the tongues of a thousand adders forked in flame, and boomed the loud thunder as the din of a far-off battle. While he gazed, old memories thronged from the past; the fount of tears sent up its gushing libations, and he buried his face in his hands, and strove to pray. Oh, how sorrow, and suffering, and solitude, and the certainty of a near death bow the strong spirit! It may have become darkened by fierce and unruly passions; grown callous and crime-stained amidst the roll of years, and almost destitute of a single virtuous impulse, yet, for a time, under such circumstances, a softness will gather about the