Men Can counsel, and speak comfort to that grief We bid be quiet when we hear it cry; But were we burdened with like weight of pain, SHAKSPEARE (Much ado about Nothing). THE PRIDE OF MOSES GRANT. IT I. T was a wild, wet December night, full of tempest. Outside the red wooden house in the hollow, where Moses Grant had lived all his respectable life, the winds blew with an eerie sound, like a lost spirit's wail, and the snow fell steadily, folding the earth in great white shrouds. Moses Grant and his wife sat before the fire. A cheerful glow came out from the blazing logs; a mug of cider was toasting unheeded on the hearth, and a few apples stood untouched on the stand between them. Every thing in this peaceful family sittingroom wore a snug and comfortable look, from the neat bed standing in a recess in the wall, with homemade blue woolen spread and snowy linen, to the brightly-polished pewter plates upon the dresser and the unsoiled sand on the white floor. Outside, through the snow and the storm, tottered a single female figure-wearily, painfully, as if every step must be her last. Forsaken of God and man, the very elements seemed to do battle with her-the winds blew her feeble steps backward-the snow piled up higher and higher drifts before her feet, and yet those feeble feet tottered on-over the drifts, against the wind steadily toward the red house in the hollow. There was a strange shadow on the face of that meek woman, Moses Grant's wife. Her knitting had fallen from her busy fingers, her foot tapped the floor with a restless beat, and at last, as if she could endure the stillness no longer, she arose and began moving hurriedly about the room, giving a touch here and there to her domestic arrangements, and now and then going stealthily to the window to look forth into the night. "Oh!" she cried, in a low voice, "God have mercy -this pitiless, pitiless storm!" "You are thinking of Margaret," said the slow, firm tones of Moses Grant. The woman started, and dropped the candlestick she held in her confusion. She turned ghastly pale, and grasped the dresser, near which she stood, for support. If a grave had opened at her very feet she would have been no more overwhelmed with wonder. For many months in that household that name-Margaret-had been dead and buried-a forbidden sound. Perhaps -her eyes gleamed with a wild hope, and the color came back to her cheeks-perhaps her husband had relented; perhaps he would forgive their child-their Margaret. She went toward him, that meek woman, and, kneeling at his feet, lifted up her pleading voice. "Surely, father, I may speak of her, now you have called her name. It may be you are willing to forgive her-to let her come back again. Five-and-twenty years I have walked patiently by your side; I have tried to be a help-meet to you. God has given us seven children, and we have made their graves-all but one-behind the church on the hill-top. And now she is gone--the last-my one child-Margaret. Oh, husband, will you forgive her? Will you let her come back? What would even shame be to the loss of her? And perhaps she has not sinned as we have thought. She was a good child always, our Margaret. She loved the church and the Bible, and you used to say no one else learned their lessons in the catechism so well as she. We are getting old, father-may I have my girl back again?" The old man's face had worked convulsively while she poured forth her pleading prayer, but it settled back now into stony, immovable calm. He looked sternly at the woman crouching at his knees, as if she, too, had some share in Margaret's sin. He said, in his cold, resolved tones, "It is of no use. If we would take the child back we do not even know where to seek her. She is dead to us, now and forever. Hear me, Mary: if she lay at this moment outside that door, with this storm falling on her bare, unsheltered head, I would not open it one inch to let her in. She has made her bed; she shall lie in it. We have lived here many years—I, and my father, and my father's father-elders, one after another, in the church-and when did disgrace ever come to our humble, honest name, till she brought it? She chose that bad young man and his unholy love, and father and mother she has none. Hear me, Mary; we are childless. Let her name never pass your lips or mine." The woman rose and groped blindly to her chair. She sat there with half-closed eyes, swaying herself to and fro, muttering now and then, "Oh, this pitiless storm!" Outside, the figure tottered on. Suddenly there was a cry borne upon the blast-a wild, wailing human cry, rising high above the wind, piercing into the red house, piercing Moses Grant's firm, stony heart, as he sat before the fire. A weight seemed to fall helplessly against the outside door, and then there was silence. The mother sprang up and mechanically threw open the door, and the snow tumbled in, and the wailing wind rushed in. What was it lying there, stiff and helpless, upon the stone step, lifting up, whiter than the snow, its ghastly human face? The old man sprang to his wife's side. He had overrated his own stoicism. He shook her arm, almost harshly. "What are you thinking of, Mary ?" he cried, passionately; "have you no mother's heart? will you let her die there before your eyes-our child, Margaret?" He caught the prostrate figure in his arms-to his breast; he carried her in, to the warmth, the light, the father's house whence she had wandered; and then the cold, iron man wept over her like a helpless child; while the mother, fully herself now, worked with wild energy, collecting and applying restoratives, chafing the thin hands and the numb, half-frozen feet. Her efforts were successful in so far that the girl, for she was not more than eighteen, opened her eyes and came back to life with a gasping shudder. She did not seem quite restored, however, to the full use of her faculties. She spoke by snatches, in a strange, wandering fashion. "I thought I was dead," she said, "but I'm not. This is home, isn't it? and there's father! What do you cry so for, father? You never used to. I never saw you do so before. ing about poor Margaret. You think, now, that she Oh! I know; you are cry |