Perhaps of all that happened to her in her after-life there was no shock so terrible as this first disenchantment. She had a large family, plunging into all the roughnesses of life, its nursery prose and bread-and-butter, without any interval of repose, without money enough or leisure enough to put any glow of prettiness upon the rude circumstances, the band of children--noisy boys who made an end of all her attempts at neatness, and gobbled their food and tore their clothes, and were dirty and disorderly as any cottage brood. She struggled on among them as best she could, always watching every new baby wistfully to see if perhaps a something like herself, a child who would be her very own and speak her language and understand her meaning might be born to her. But alas! they were Joscelyns every one, big-limbed creatures with light blue eyes, and great red cheeks, who stared at her cynically out of their very cradles, and seemed to demand what she was making a fuss about when she sang them to sleep. Poor woman, she was always hopeful; every new child that came was, she thought, at last the one for whom she had been pining. Even now she had a lingering notion that Harry, her youngest boy, was that child--and far more than a notion, a hopeful certainty that little Liddy at school, the youngest of all, was exactly what she herself had been at the same age. These two, were in fact the least like Joscelyns of all her children. Harry was a broad-shouldered young fellow indeed, but he was less tall, and less powerful than his brothers; he had taken a little more to books; and there were traces in him of something less matter-of-fact than the stolid, steady nature of Will and Tom, and Benjamin and Hartley, all now established in occupations, and some of them in houses of their own. Will and Tom were married; they had both descended a single step lower down than the position of their father, marrying, one of them, the daughter of a farmer, and the other, the only child of a famous “vet,” who gave her what was understood to be “a tidy bit of money,” and to whose business the young man hoped to succeed. It was a coming down in the world to his mother. But how could she help it? With so many boys to provide for, the Joscelyn pride had to be put in their pocket. Hartley was in Colorado, Ben in New Zealand, all struggling along in much the same kind of occupation which their father pursued at home. As for Harry he had been rather delicate, a circumstance of which his mother was almost proud, as showing his affinity to her side of the house. And he was in an office in Liverpool, an occupation more fit for a delicate youth than the rough sheep-farming and horse-selling of the Fells. It was time now that something should be decided about his career. Was he to have a little money to invest, to get him a small share in the concern? He had been clerk long enough, Harry thought--long enough for