worlds than this? Will the ignoramus at once be made a scholar, the dullard a philosopher, the blackguard a gentleman, the sinner a saint, the liar truthful,- by the simple process of elimination from this husk of flesh? Make me at once altogether other than what I am, and you annihilate me, and there is no immortality of the soul.”

"But what has the ghost contributed to our knowledge during these fourteen years, since he appeared at Rochester? Of all he has brought us, we may say, with Shakespeare, 'There needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us that.""

"I'll tell you what the ghost has contributed, not at Rochester merely, but everywhere, through the ages. He has contributed himself. You say, cui bono? And I might say of ten thousand mysteries about us, cui bono? The lightning strikes the church-steeple, cui bono? An idiot is born into the

a condition of

A good or a And yet grave

world, cui bono? It is absurd to demand as rational faith, that we should prove a cui bono. use may exist, and we be unable to see it. men are continually thrusting into the faces of the investigators of these phenomena this preposterous cui bono?”

Enough, my dear Mr. Kenrick!" exclaimed Laura.

But he was not to be stopped. He rose and paced the room, and continued: "The cui bono of phenomena must of course be found in the mind that regards them. 'I can't find you both arguments and brains,' said Dr. Johnson to a noodle who thought Milton trashy. One man sees an apple fall, and straightway thinks of the price of cider. Newton sees it, and its suggests gravitation. One man sees a table rise in the air, and cries: It can't be a spirit; 't is too undignified for a spirit!' Mountford sees it, and the immortality of the soul is thenceforth to him a fact as positive as any fact of science."

Your story, dear Mr. Kenrick, your story!" urged Laura. "My story is ended. The ghost has come and vanished." "Is that all?" whined Laura. "Aren't we, then, to have a story?"

"In mercy give us some music, Miss Brown," said Onslow. "Play Yankee Doodle, with variations," interposed Kenrick. "Not unless you'd have the windows smashed in," pleaded Onslow; and, giving his arm, he waited on Clara to the piano.

"She dashed into a medley of brilliant airs from operas, uniting them by extemporized links of melody to break the abruptness of the transitions. The young men were both connoisseurs; and they interchanged looks of gratified astonishment.

"And now for a song!" exclaimed Laura.

Clara paused a moment, and sat looking with clasped hands at the keys. Then, after a delicate prelude, she gave that song of Pestal, already quoted.* She gave it with her whole soul, as if a personal wrong were adding intensity to the defiance of her tones.

Kenrick, wrought to a state of sympathy which he could not disguise, had taken a seat where he could watch her features while she sang. When she had finished, she covered her face with her hands, then, finding her emotion uncontrollable, rose and passed out of the room.

"What do you think of that, Charles?" asked Onslow.

"It was terrible," said Kenrick. "I wanted to kill a slaveholder while she sang."

"But she has the powers of a prima donna," said Onslow, turning to Laura.

Yes, one would think she had practised for the stage."

Clara now returned with a countenance placid and smiling. "How long do you stay in New Orleans, Miss Brown?" inquired Onslow.

"How long, Laura?" asked Clara.

"A week or two."

"We shall have another opportunity, I hope, of hearing you sing."

"I hope so."

"I have an appointment now at the armory. Charles, are you ready to walk?"

66

No, thank you. I prefer to remain."

Onslow left, and, immediately afterwards, Laura's mother being seized with a timely hemorrhage, Laura was called off to attend to her. Kenrick was alone with Clara. Charming opportunity! He drew from her still another and another He conversed with her on her studies, - on the books

song.

* See Chapter XII. page 112.

she had read, the pictures she had seen. He was roused by her intelligence and wit. He spoke of slavery. Deep as was his own detestation of it, she helped him to make it deeper. What delightful harmony of views! Kenrick felt that his time had come. The hours slipped by like minutes, yet there he sat chained by a fascination so new, so strange, so delightful, he marvelled that life had in it so much of untasted joy.

Kenrick was not accustomed to be critical in details. He looked at general effects. But the most trifling point in Clara's accoutrements was now a thing to be marked and remembered. The little sleeve-button dropped from the band round her throat. Kenrick picked it up,- examined it,— saw, in characters so fine as to be hardly legible, the letters C. A. B. upon it. ("B. stands for Brown," thought he.) And then, as Clara put out her hand to receive it, he noticed the bracelet she wore. "What beautiful hair!" he said. He looked up at Clara's to trace a resemblance. But his glance stopped midway at her eyes. "Blue and gray!" he mur

mured.

"Yes, can you read them?" asked Clara.

"What do you mean?

66

'Only a dream I had. There's a letter on them somebody is to open and read."

“O, that I were a Daniel to interpret!" said Kenrick.

At last Miss Tremaine returned. Her mother had been dangerously ill. It was an hour after midnight. Sincerely astounded at finding it so late, Kenrick took his leave. Heart and brain were full. "Thou art the wine whose drunkenness is all I can desire, O love!"

And how was it with Clara? Alas, the contrariety of the affections! Clara simply thought Kenrick a very agreeable young man handsome, but not so handsome as Onslow; clever, but not so clever as Vance!

CHAPTER XXVIII.

A LETTER OF BUSINESS.

"This war's duration can be more surely calculated from the moral progress of the North than from the result of campaigns in the field. Were the whole North to-day as one man on the moral issues underlying the struggle, the Rebellion were this day crushed. God bids us, I think, be just and let the oppressed go free. Let us do his bidding, and the plagues cease."-Letter from a native of Richmond, Va.

TH

HE following letter belongs chronologically to this stage in our history:

From F. Macon Semmes, New York, to T. J. Semmes, New Orleans.

"DEAR BROTHER: I have called, as you requested, on Mr. Charlton in regard to his real estate in New Orleans. Let me give you some account of this man. He is taxed for upwards of a million. He inherited a good part of this sum from his wife, and she inherited it from a nephew, the late Mr. Berwick, who inherited it from his infant daughter, and this last from her mother. Mother, child, and father-the whole Berwick family - were killed by a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi some fifteen or sixteen years ago.

--

"In the lawsuit which grew out of the conflicting claims of the relatives of the mother on the one side, and of the father on the other, it was made to appear that the mother must have been killed instantaneously, either by the inhalation of steam from the explosion, or by a blow on the head from a splinter; either cause being sufficient to produce immediate death. It was then proved that the child, having been seen with her nurse alive and struggling in the water, must have lived after the mother, thus inheriting the mother's property. But it was further proved that the child was drowned, and that the father survived the child a few hours; and thus the father's heir became entitled to an estate amounting to upwards of a million of dollars, all of which was thus diverted from the Aylesford family (to whom the property ought to have gone), and bestowed on a man alien in blood and in every other respect to all the parties fairly interested.

"This fortunate man was Charlton. The scandal goes, that even the wife from whom he derived the estate (and who died before he got it) had received from him such treatment as to alienate her wholly. The nearest relative of Mrs. Berwick, née Aylesford, is a Mrs. Pompilard, now living with an aged husband and with dependent step-children and grandchildren, in a state of great impoverishment. To this aunt the large property derived from her brother, Mr. Aylesford, ought to have gone. But the law gave it to a stranger, this Charlton. I mention these facts, because you ask me to inform you what manner of man he is.

"Let one little anecdote illustrate. Mr. Albert Pompilard, now some eighty years old, has been in his day a great operator in Wall Street. He has made half a dozen large fortunes and lost them. Five years ago, by a series of bold and fortunate speculations, he placed himself once more on the top round of the financial ladder. He paid off all his debts with interest, pensioned off a widowed daughter, lifted up from the gutter several old, broken-down friends, and advanced a handsome sum to his literary son-in-law, Mr. Cecil Purling, who had found, as he thought, a short cut to fortune. Pompilard also bought a stylish place on the Hudson; and people supposed he would be content to keep aloof from the stormy fluctuations of Wall Street.

"But one day he read in the financial column of the newspaper certain facts that roused the old propensity. His near neighbor was a rich retired tailor, a Mr. Maloney, an Irishman, who used to come over to play billiards with the venerable stock-jobber. Pompilard had made a visit to Wall Street the day before. He had been fired with a grand scheme of buying up the whole of a certain stock (in which sellers at sixty days at a low figure were abundant) and then holding on for a grand rise. He did not find it difficult to kindle the financial enthusiasm of poor Snip.

"Brief, the two simpletons went into the speculation, and lost every cent they were worth in the world. Simultaneously with their break-down, Purling, the son-in-law, managed to lose all that had been confided to his hands. The widowed daughter, Mrs. Ireton, gave up all the little estate her father had settled on her. Poor Maloney had to go back to his goose; and Pompilard, now almost an octogenarian, has been obliged, he and his family, to take lodgings in the cottage of his late gardener.

"The other day Mr. Hicks, a friend of the family, learning