Twenty years went by, and the grave came to be little thought of, when a townsman, on going up one evening to the burying-ground, saw a lady in deep mourning sitting weeping beside it, and a tall handsome gentleman in middle life, the same individual who had been so much affected at the funeral, standing, as if waiting for her, a little apart. They were brother and sister. The storms of twenty seasons had passed over the little mossy hillock. The deep snows had pressed upon it in winter; the dead vegetation of succeeding summers and autumns had accumulated around it, and it had gradually flattened to nearly the level of the soil. It had become an old grave; but the grief, that for the first time was now venting itself over it, had remained fresh as at first. There are cases, though rare, in which sorrow does not yield to time. A mother loses her child just as its mind has begun to open, and it has learned to lay hold of her heart by those singularly endearing signs of infantine affection and regard, which show us how the sympathies of our nature, which serve to bind us to the species, are awakened to perform their labour of love with even the first dawn of intelligence. Little missed by any one else, or at least soon to be forgotten, it passes away; but there is one who seems destined to remember it all the more vividly just because it _has_ passed. To her, death serves as a sort of _mordant_ to fix the otherwise flying colours in which its portraiture had been drawn on her heart. Time is working out around her his thousand thousand metamorphoses. The young are growing up to maturity, the old dropping into their graves; but the infant of her affections ever remains an infant--her charge in middle life, when all her other children have left her and gone out into the world, and, amid the weakness of decay and decrepitude, the child of her old age. There arises, however, a more enduring sorrow than even that of the mother, when, in the midst of hopes all but gratified, and wishes on the eve of fulfilment, the ties of the softer passion are rudely dissevered by death. Feelings, evanescent in their nature, and restricted to one class of circumstances and one stage of life, are uneradicably fixed through the event in the mind of the survivor. Youth first passes away, then the term of robust and active life, and last of all, the cold and melancholy winter of old age; but through every succeeding change, until the final close, the bereaved lover remains a lover still. Death has fixed the engrossing passion in its tenderest attitude by a sort of petrifying process; and we are reminded by the fact of those delicate leaves and florets of former creations, which a common fate would have consigned to the usual decay, but which were converted, when they died by some sudden catastrophe, into a solid marble that endures for ever. The lady who wept this evening beside the “officer’s grave,” was indulging in a hopeless, enduring passion of the