This I did, and as she started At my warm lip’s touch, From her form the spirit parted, Leaving me thus riven-hearted, Held in Sorrow’s iron clutch, Smiling never, suffering much. In the dark-brown shade I wander— Sadness at my side; Growing of my sorrows fonder, As upon the past I ponder, And upon my erring bride, Who, as I forgave her, died. * * * * * [Illustration: _Engraved Expressly for Graham’s Magazine._ THE ENGRAVER’S DAUGHTER.] * * * * * THE ENGRAVER’S DAUGHTER. BY HARRY SUNDERLAND. [SEE ENGRAVING.] Little Dora Stilling was but six years old when her best friend went to Heaven. She was a beautiful child, and her father, Mark Stilling, an old engraver, loved her with a species of blind idolatry. Stilling was by birth a German, and his reading had not gone much beyond the childish romances peculiar to his country, which had left upon his mind an indelible impression. At twelve years old he was apprenticed to an engraver, and since that time had seen little of the world beyond the room in which his noiseless occupation happened to be. His mind, therefore, remained half asleep, and the dreams that passed through it had little in common with the real life around him. He was an old man when he married, and his wife, who passed with many, who did not know better, as his daughter, died a few years after their only child, Dora, was born. Upon the death of his wife, the heart of Mark Stilling turned toward the sweet child she had left him, with an affection made jealous and intenser by his loss. For her he desired all good in the world’s power to bestow; but as to what was the greatest good he had but vague notions. As he grew older, and his mind drooped toward second childhood, from the ideas and feelings of his earlier years the dust of time was blown away, and all was as distinct and fresh as if the spring-time of life were but yesterday. Images of beautiful maidens, wooed by princes in disguise, floated before his imagination; and then his thoughts would turn to Dora, who grew more and more lovely in his eyes every day. Nothing short of some such consummation for his child, he felt, would ever satisfy him. It was little wonder that the old engraver loved Dora with an absorbing affection; for, opening like a rose, she displayed to his eyes some new feature of loveliness every day, as well in mind as in body. While he sat at his work, tracing out upon the hard, polished steel forms of beauty, Dora was ever present in his mind, more beautiful than any creation of the painter’s pencil he had yet been commissioned to copy.