And could n't she ride? See her three fields off, and you'd know the ground just by the stride of her horse. Such a hand she had! But who was like Alice? Ah! there was the boundless prairie, to his thoughts, on which he might ramble forever; and on that wide swelling savannah, roaming and straying, we shall now leave him, and turn our glance elsewhere. The morning service of the meeting-house over, Dr. Stewart proposed to walk home with Mrs. Butler. The exposition about Ahab had neither been as full or as able as he had intended, but it was not his fault,--at least, only in part his fault; the sum of which consisted in the fact that he had broken through a good rule, which up to that hour had never met with infraction,--he had opened a post-letter on the Sabbath-morn. “This comes,” said he, plaintively, “of letting the sinfu' things of this warld mingle wi' the holier and higher ones of the warld to come. Corruption is aye stronger than life; and now I maun tell you the whole of it.” If we do not strictly follow the good minister, and tell what he had to say in his own words, it is to spare our reader some time on a matter which may not possess the amount of interest to him it had for the person who narrated it. The matter was this: there came that morning a letter from Mrs. M'Gruder to Dr. Stewart,--a letter that almost overwhelmed him. The compensation to humility of station is generally this, that the interests of the humble man are so lowly, so unpretending, and so little obtrusive that they seldom or never provoke the attention of his more fortunate neighbors. As with the rivulet that can neither float a barque nor turn a mill-wheel none meddles, so with the course of these lowly lives few concern themselves, and they ripple along unheeded. Many and many a time had the old minister hugged this thought to his heart,--many and many a time had he felt that there were cares and troubles in this life so proud and so haughty that they disdained the thatched cabin and the humble roof-tree, but loved to push their way through crowds of courtiers up marble stairs and along gilded corridors. It was then with a perfect shock that he came to learn that even they, in all their lowliness, could claim no exemption from common calamity. The letter began by stating that the writer, before putting pen to paper, had waited till Miss Stewart should have reached her home, so that no anxieties as to her health should be added to the pain the communication might cause. After this louring commencement the epistle went on to state that the satisfaction which Dolly had at first given by her general good temper and strict attention to her duties, “compensating in a great measure for the defects in her own education and want of aptitude as a teacher,” soon ceased to be experienced, as it was found that she was subject to constant intervals of great depression, and even whole days, when she seemed scarcely equal to her duties. The cause was not very long a secret.