you miss her in a thousand endearing attentions—in a thousand gentle ministrations every moment of your life. You miss her in countless comforts, and nameless refinements of comfort, of which she, till lost, was the quiet, unsuspecting origin. And now you find out the cause by missing the effect!” “‘How blessings brighten as they take their flight!’” said General Garnet, in a low, ironical tone, filling up the pause made by Magnus. But, without observing the sneer, Dr. Hardcastle replied, gravely and sweetly: “Yes! ‘We know not that an angel had been with us till we saw the glory of her vanishing wing!’ In your deep heart, was it not thus with you, General Garnet? Is it not so in a modified way with many of us? Oh, the loved and lost! we may have misapprehended, undervalued, misused them in life; but let the inexorable hand of Death be laid upon them, and how changed are all our feelings toward them! How remorsefully we appreciate their worth; how despairingly we love them. What would we not sacrifice to restore motion, warmth, consciousness to that still, cold heart, so we might press it beating to our bosom; to restore light to those folded eyes, so we might gaze into them all the remorse, all the love we feel, but cannot speak; to restore life to the dead, that we might see them again at our fireside or table is the old, familiar dress, with the old, familiar look; that we might be a saint or a slave to them thenceforth for ever! Take a closer case; take that of your Alice. Could now the doors of that vault where you laid her fly open and yield up its beautiful dead—or, to leave the supernatural and impossible out of the question, could Alice be found to have been laid there during a fit of epilepsy, as has sometimes been the case with others, and could she now be restored to you living, loving, would you not rejoice as you never rejoiced before—would you not love and value her as you never loved or valued her before—would you not do anything on earth to render her renewed life happy?” Magnus paused again to see the effect of this hint of the truth, thinking, also, that in the event of General Garnet remaining obdurate, he had possibly verged too nearly upon a disclosure. But the stern, immovable countenance of the latter betrayed no emotion, either of suspicion or of relenting. It positively gave no clew to his thoughts or feelings. Magnus hoped the best, yet withdrew from the precipice of a dangerous confidence by saying: