"I _do_ think thereon in the dark hour; ay, thereon and thereupon again; and death is also beautiful, and the parting in Christ," murmured to himself the old man, as he tried to take Gottreich's hand, which he had not strength to press. It was but the usual nervous snatching of the fingers of the dying. He continued to think that his son was still speaking to him, and said, more and more distinctly and emphatically, "O thou blessed God!" until all the other luminaries of life were extinguished, and in his soul there stood nothing but the one sun,--God! At length he raised himself, and, stretching out his arm forcibly, exclaimed: "There are three fair rainbows over the evening sun; I must go after the sun, and pass through with him!" He then fell back, and all was over. At that moment the sun went down, and there glimmered at his setting a broad rainbow in the east. "He is gone!" said Gottreich to Justa, in a voice choked with grief; "but he is gone from us unto his God, in the midst of great, pious, and unmingled joy; then weep no more, Justa!" At that moment his own hitherto restrained tears found a vent, and he pressed the dead hand against his face. It grew dark, and a warm rain distilled gently over the earth. The children left his motionless form alone, and wept more tranquilly for that sun of their love, which, with its pure light, had withdrawn from the clouds and tempests of the world to another dawn. THE NEW-YEAR'S NIGHT OF AN UNHAPPY MAN. An old man stood in the New-Year's night at the window, and gazed with a look of restless despair upon the immutable, ever-blooming heaven, and out over the still pure white earth whereupon there was now no one so joyless and sleepless as he. For his grave stood near to him. It was covered only with the snow of age, not with the green of youth; and he brought with him thither out of his whole rich life nothing but errors and sins and sickness; a ruined body, a desolated soul, a breast full of poison, an old age full of remorse. The fair days of his youth wandered about him now like ghosts, and they bore him back again to that clear morning when his father first placed him at the cross-road of life, the right hand leading by the sunny ways of virtue into a wide, peaceful land, full of light and of harvests; the left, down into the mole-ways of vice towards a black cavern, full of down-dropping poison, full of darting serpents and dark sultry damps. Ah! the serpents hung about his breast, and the poison-drops upon his tongue, and he knew now where he was. Knowing not what he did, and with unspeakable grief, he cried out to Heaven: "Give me my youth once more! O father, place me again upon the cross-road, that I may choose otherwise!"