"These are not subjects for regret, Amy," said I, when she poured out her heart to me, as she had been in the habit of doing in her childish days; "with youth and health, they are but stimulants to exertion." Mr. Lennox went to India, but only for a year, and, sorely against her will, Amy was left behind. As she could not accompany him, she wished to return home with me, for a year's schooling, as she playfully expressed it, and, in spite of Mrs. R.'s remonstrances, I carried her off. What a busy year we had of it! We cooked; we cut out linen (the village schoolmistress was for a time a cipher in that department); we tried experiments in domestic economy; we made calculations; then we read light books and heavy books, history and philosophy, poetry and romance, I being obliged to exercise great ingenuity to avoid an immoderate proportion of educational works, a department of literature to which Amy, in common with many young mothers, manifested a decided preference. Thus occupied, the days and weeks glided swiftly away, but not without leaving traces of their passage. Amy's intellectual and moral growth in this twelvemonth was as rapid as was her boy's increase in physical proportions. She felt it herself, and, with her increased self-respect, increased her love and admiration of the husband, for whose sake she had been stimulated to self-government and self-tuition. Small had been the joy of her wedding-day, compared to the rapture with which, at the end of the year, she threw herself into his arms; and slight had been his disappointment after the honeymoon, to the delightful surprise which he felt every day on the discovery of some new improvement, or the promise of some fresh excellence in his lovely wife. "Yes, yes," I thought, as I watched them walking in the garden, and talking over their future plans, with that look of perfect confidence which tells so much; "those hearts are united now--they will soon grow so close that nothing earthly will avail to separate them." I wiped my spectacles--they had often been dimmed the last day or two--and taking little Herbert's hand, we, too, sallied forth for a confidential _tête-à-tête_ among the daisies.