study, though she could not bring herself to sympathize in his anxiety to leave all in a state of the greatest practicable beauty. If a gale had torn up the shrubs, or the hot sun of this summer day had parched the grass and withered the flowers, she did not think she could have been sorry. But it was very well that her husband had left his study open for the further operations necessary there. This room had remained the very last in its entireness. The time was now come when she must have asked her husband to quit his chair and desk, and let his books be dislodged. She would make haste to complete the work of spoliation, and she hoped he would make a long task of watering the flower-court. He was not likely to do that when he had once perceived that she and one of her damsels were lifting heavy loads of books, while another was taking care of the baby. He hastened to give their final draught to his favourite carnations, placed a chair for Esther on the grass just outside the window, where she might sit with the infant, and, while resting herself, talk to him as he finished her laborious task. Mrs. Reede did not remember to have ever started so incessantly at the sound of guns; and the air-music of the window-harp that she had seen in the pavilions of great men’s gardens had never come so mournfully over her spirit as the snatches of harmony that the wind now brought from the river to make her infant hold up his tiny finger while his sister said “hark!” She was, for once, nervous. It might be seen in her flushed face and her startled movements; and the poor baby felt it in the absence of the usual ease with which he was held and played with. A sharp sudden cry from him called the attention of the doctor from his task. In a moment, mamma’s grief was more tumultuous than the infant’s. “O, my child! my child! I have hurt my child! my own little baby!” cried she, weeping bitterly, and of course redoubling the panic of the little one. “My dear love,” said her husband, trying to prove to her that the baby had only been frightened by a jerk; “my dear love, you alarm yourself much more than the child. See!” and he held up in the evening sunlight the brass plate on which his study lamp stood. Its glittering at once arrested the infant’s terrors: but not so soon could the tears of the mother be stopped. “My love, there must be some deeper cause than this trifling accident,” said he, sitting down on the low window sill beside her chair. “Is it that you have pent up your grief all day, and that it will have way?”