“He is my master; I will not leave him,” said the old man firmly. “You may whip me, you may kill me, but I will never leave him till he is buried. I rocked him in his cradle, I will lay him in his grave. Then sell me, if you like; no matter what becomes of the old man when his master is in the grave.” And turning away with a look of unutterable woe, the old servant cast himself by the death-couch, crying out, “My master! oh, my master!” A few weeks after, the old man was sold and sent away to a far-off plantation, for he was a part of the property which Daniel Clark had left, and according to the old will, the only one ever found, Ross was the executor of the estate, and had a right to sell the poor old man. CHAPTER V. A being of beauty she fell to her dreaming— Thought flitted in gleamings of light through her brain, In the depths of her eye it was constantly gleaming, Still lighting her soul with soft visions again. The will of Daniel Clark was never found, and the vast inheritance that should have been his child’s, became the spoil of those who had crept like vipers along his life-path, poisoning every pure blossom that sprang up to bless him on his way to the grave. His wife was bereft of every thing but her sorrowful memories. His child had not even these. To her, father, mother, all was a dream—an idea that had floated through her infant memory and was gone. Years went by—many years—and then in one of the most splendid mansions of Philadelphia, lay a fair young girl, half arrayed in her morning costume, and but partially aroused from one of those sweet dreams that of late had made her sleep a vision of love. While lifting the wealth of her brown hair between both her small hands in dressing before her mirror that morning, she had been taken with one of those rich gleams of thought that are the poetry of youth, and allowing the tresses to fall over her slight person again, where, in their wonderful and bright abundance, they fell almost to her feet, she had stolen thoughtfully to a couch in her boudoir and cast herself upon the crimson cushions. There, with some loose drapery gathered around her, one fair cheek resting in the palm of her hand, and the white arm half vailed by those loosened tresses, pressed deep in the silken cushions, the young girl fell into a reverie. Perhaps the dream from which she had just been aroused still haunted her mind, but it would have been difficult for Myra herself to have said what were the strange and sweet fancies that floated through her mind at that moment; for her own thoughts were a mystery, her feelings vague as they were pure. These sort of day-dreams, when they come to our first youth, have much of heaven in them; if they could only endure through life always bright, always enveloped in the same rosy mist, “Man might forget to dream of heaven, And yet have the sweet sin forgiven.”