Overhanging willows darkened the edges of the pond; and, in the centre, one tall, venerable cypress, lonely as some palm in the desert, rose like a gray shaft tufted with a fine fringe of fresh green; and occasional clusters of broad, shining leaves, spread themselves on the surface of the water, cradling large, snowy lilies, whose gold-powdered stamens trembled ceaselessly. Now and then a trout leaped up, as if for a breath of May air, and fell back into the circle that widened until it touched either bank; and not far from a cow who stood knee-deep in water, browsing on a wild rose that clambered over the willows to peep at its pink image in the pond, a proud pair of gray geese convoyed a brood of yellow younglings that dived and breasted the ripples with evident glee. With her arms clasped around her knees, Salome sat watching the blue tendrils of smoke that rose from a clump of elms beyond the mill and curled lazily upward until they lost themselves in air; and, though the arching elm boughs hid mossy roof and chimney, she nevertheless felt that she was looking on the old house where she was born, and where ten dreary years of sorrow and humiliation had embittered and perverted her nature. Those elms had seen her mother die, had heard her father's drunken revelry, and bent their aged heads to listen on that wild wintry night, when in blood-curdling curses his soul rent itself from the degraded tenement of clay. Apparently peace brooded over earth, sky, and water; but to that lonely figure under the riven beech, every object within the range of vision babbled horrible tales of the early years, and memory pointed to a corner of the lumber-shed adjoining the mill where she had often secreted herself to avoid her father's brutality,--always keeping her head in the moonshine, because she dreaded the darkness inside, which childish fancy filled with ghostly groups. She hated the place as she hated the past, and this was the second time she had visited it since the day that consigned her to the poor-house; for it was impossible for her to look at the pond without recollecting one dark passage in her life, known only to God and herself. To-day she recalled, with startling vividness a dusky, starlit June evening, when, maddened by an unmerited and unusually severe punishment inflicted by her father, she had resolved to drown herself, and find peace in the mud at the bottom of the mill-pond. Placing her infant sister on the grass, she had kissed her good-by, and selecting the deepest portion of the water, had climbed out on a willow branch and prepared for the final plunge. Putting her fingers in her ears that she might not hear the bubbling of the murderous water, she shut her eyes and sprang into the pond; but her long hair caught the willow twigs, and, half strangled and quite willing to live, she scrambled up into the low limbs that seemed so anxious to rescue her from a watery grave; and, dripping and trembling, crept