Once she hoped to improve his peculiar dialect somewhat by imparting to him a greater knowledge of books than he already possessed, and Ben, willing to gratify her, waded industriously through the many volumes she recommended him to read, among which was “Watts on the Mind.” But vain were all his efforts to grasp a single idea, and he returned it to Alice, saying that “he presumed it was a very excitin’ story to some, but blamed if he could make out a word of sense from beginnin’ to finis.” “‘Taint much use tryin’ to make a scholar of me,” said he, winking slyly at Marian, who was present. “It’s hard enough teachin’ old dogs new tricks, and if I’s to read all there is in the Squire’s library, I shouldn’t be no better off.” Marian thought so, too, and she dropped a few well-timed hints to Alice, who gradually relaxed her efforts to teach one who, had he been educated, would certainly not have been the simple-hearted, unselfish man we now know as Ben Burt. Away to the northward among the New England hills there is a forsaken grave, where the inebriated Rudolph sleeps. His thirst for revenge is over and the forlorn girl who, in her mother’s kitchen washes the dinner dishes for college students just as she used to when Frederic Raymond was a boarder there, has nothing to dread from him. Mrs. Huntington’s house on the river has been sold to cancel the mortgage, and in the city of Elms she has returned to her old vocation, and Isabel, with her broken nose and ugly scar has scarcely a hope, that among her mother’s boarders there will ever one be found weak enough to offer her his hand. An humbled, and it is to be hoped, a better woman, she derives her greatest comfort from the letters which sometimes come to her from Marian, and which usually contain a more substantial token of regard than mere words convey. One word now of William Gordon and our story is done. Ben had claimed the privilege of writing the news to him, and he did it in his characteristic way, first touching upon the note which, he said, was safe in his wallet and sure of being paid, then launching out into glowing descriptions of Marian’s happiness with Frederic. This letter was a long time in finding Will, and the answer did not reach Redstone Hall until the family had returned from their summer residence at Riverside. Then it came to them one warm November day, just as the sun was setting, and its mellow rays fell upon the group assembled upon the piazza. Frederic, to whom it was directed, broke the seal and read the sincere congratulations which his early friend had sent to him from over the sea,—read, too, that ‘mid the vine-clad hills of Bingen, in a cottage looking out upon the Rhine, there was a fair-haired German girl, with eyes like Marian Grey, and that when Will came next to America he would not be alone.