_Sailor._ They now are harmless; Suffered to ripen, they are poisonous. Let them die blooming, while they are innoxious. Would he had perished as these simple flowers, Ere his bloom faded, yielding deadly seed. _Stranger._ I’ve sought you, sir, to solace your old age. _Sailor._ God bless my child! We’re in the circle still. Good begets evil often—evil good. The grandsire and the grandson close the chain— Alone—forlorn! Yet both have done their duty. The world goes round and round, ’till hidden things Stalk forth as spectres from the rotten grave. All, all is plain! These circles drive me mad! * * * * * A ROMANCE OF TRUE LOVE: WITH FIDDLE ACCOMPANIMENT. BY MRS. CAROLINE H. BUTLER. Perched, like a large gray owl with folded wings, upon the summit of the very highest hill within a day’s journey from “our village,” but within half a mile of the old meeting-house, stands a narrow stone dwelling, with a narrow, pointed roof, narrow windows, or loop-holes, as they might be more properly termed, and one narrow door; the whole inclosed within a narrow yard, from which two slender poplars point their “tall columns to the skies.” One would scarcely imagine from so unpromising an aspect that a heart-history could be gleaned from “lifting” that narrow roof. I must confess, too, that there is certainly very little romance in the appearance of the inmate whom it shelters—so gaunt and cadaverous—nearly as tall as the poplars, and with arms like the evolving sails of a windmill. Yet, as by searching there is gold to be found even amid the most rocky and unpromising defiles of California, so is there sterling mettle hid beneath the rough exterior of Apollos Dalrymple, and this having found I will disclose. When I say that Apollos is the sole tenant of this owl-like habitation, I need not add that he belongs to the bachelor fraternity—but in justice to him I will say that he was not made a bachelor from any contempt or irreverence of the fair sex, but from “sweet love’s teen” having “loved not wisely, but too well.” It is now many years since Apollos thus retired from the world. His hair is nearly silver white, and old age sits upon his shoulders, yet still he washes and mends his clothes, with his long, bony fingers knits his stockings, and cooks his own food from the little plat of vegetables behind the house—for Apollos is a Grahamite, as well as a Gray-eremite. I must retrace some twenty years in the life of Apollos, for the first record of the heart-history I have promised—I will even go still further back, and introduce him a “puling infant in the nurse’s arms.”