Paris, and had forgotten it till that morning, when, ashamed and sorry for his neglect, he had proceeded at an early hour to the convent. Mary Murray heard him with a pale cheek and quivering lip, and as she took the letter from his hand, murmured, "You came five minutes too late, sir! and to that lost time my brother's happiness and mine have been sacrificed. I am a nun now--as dead to him as if the grave had closed above me!" The young messenger was overwhelmed with regret as vain as it was agonizing. Miss Murray kindly endeavored to console him, but on herself the blow fell heavily. She was never seen to smile from that day; and in less than a year after, the nuns of St. Agnes followed their young sister to the grave. Most fitly might the beautiful epitaph in the church of Santa Croce have been graven beneath the holy sign her tombstone bore: "Ne la plaignez pas! Si vous saviez Combien de peines ce tombeau l'a épargné!" The brother grieved deeply for a while, but the stream of the world bore him onward, and its waters are the true Lethe for ordinary and even extraordinary sorrow. He married, and years afterward returned to England with his wife and family; and then the memory of his sister Mary returned vividly and painfully to his mind, and, as a warning to his children, he told them the story of her enduring affection, and of _the fatal five minutes too late_! VISIT TO A COPPER-MINE.[11] [Footnote 11: From "Rambles beyond Railways," by W. WILKIE COLLINS.] We left the Land's End, feeling that our homeward journey had now begun from that point; and, walking northward, about five miles along the coast, arrived at Botallack, which contains the most extraordinary copper-mine in Cornwall. Having heard that there was some disinclination in Cornwall to allow strangers to go down the mines, we had provided ourselves, through the kindness of a friend, with a proper letter of introduction, in case of emergency. We were told to go to the counting-house to present our credentials; and on our road thither, beheld the buildings and machinery of the mine, literally stretching down the precipitous face of the cliff, from the land at the top, to the sea at the bottom.