[Illustration: TEN YEARS LATER.] With these thoughts I confidently knocked at the door. "Is Miss ---- at home?" I inquired of the--servant, I supposed, who opened the door. Just then three or four dirty-looking little children ran screaming after the woman, calling out, "Marm, marm!" "Hush, children, hush!" said the female, and, turning again to me, said,-- "Whom did you inquire for?" pushing back one of the red-headed urchins. "Miss Mary ----, ma'am," I answered. "She once lived at Blue Hill." She gave a sickly-looking smile. She looked sick before; her cheeks all fallen in; her skimmed-milk colored eyes had a weary, anxious expression; and her thin, bony hands, resting on the door-latch, looked like a consumptive's, as she said,-- "When did you know her?" "O, but a few years ago, ma'am. Is she here? Does she live in _this house_?" I eagerly inquired. "Well," she replied, with another more sepulchral smile, "I was once Miss Mary ----. I married Mr. ---- ----, over ten years ago. My baby, here,"--presenting the second in size of the children to my view, a reddish-brown haired girl, quite unlike any one I had ever seen before, and wiping its nose with her calico apron,--"she is named for me, Mary ----. Won't you come in, sir?" No, I thought I would not stop. I didn't stop till I reached the hotel, where I had begged the stage-driver to wait for me but a half hour before, while I called upon the lovely Miss Mary ----. "O, sunny dreams of childhood, How soon they pass away! Like flowers within the wild wood, They perish and decay." A HANDY DOCTOR. A young physician was supposed to be "keepin' company" with a young lady. The matronly friend of the latter, having praised the young man from all points of view, returned one day from the death-bed of a friend, at which the physician had been present. She eulogized the living fully as much as the dead man, and finally turning to the girl, as if she had reached the _ne plus ultra_ of enthusiasm, she said, "Jane, he's the handsomest man I ever see fixin' round a corpse." A DOCTOR'S STORY. The writer is acquainted with a young physician, who read medicine with an old doctor, named Gitchel, or Twichel, of Portland, and commenced practice in his native village,--a great mistake for any practitioner to make,--and where he met with consequences natural to even a prophet, opposition and scandal. By some mistake, or, as his opponents charged, mal-practice, he lost a patient. Being, a few days later, in a shop in the next village, he was secretly informed that the "hounds of the law were after him--even at the next door, that very moment." Terrified beyond necessity, he caught up his medicine chest, and, climbing out of the back window, fled to the woods. In the village, at home, he had courted a lovely young girl, with whom he had exchanged vows. She knew the talk that was going on respecting the young doctor, but she believed it not, or, believing, clung the firmer to her pledges.