German emigrant class, though she has engaged pupils in music that she may stave off anxiety from Frank." "Anxiety is Frank's infirmity; and she knows it, and provides against it, like the best of wives as she is. What a healing balsam is such a temper as her's to the inevitable corrosions of married life! Yes, I rejoice that Frank has been true to his convictions-a pity he is lost to the Church. As I have lived, so will I die in it!" CHAPTER XXI. The Sybil. "The stars that guide most men are dark to me, Up towards the doubtful light of thine enchantments." R. A. VAUGHAN. WHEN Grace had returned from the funeral at her sister's house to her own home, Mrs. Herbert, after a little a-hem-ing, had said, "Grace, I wish to consult you—or rather, I wished to say to you that I hope and trust Eleanor's feelings will not be wounded by Anne's not putting on mourning." Grace made no reply, and the lady proceeded: "It may appear odd to see you in mourning, and Anne in gay colours-they are wearing very gay colours just now-but poor Anne has just received her orders from Paris, and it would be a trial, you know, to lay such lovely things aside, and see all the world coming out in fresh fashions before her. Next Sunday is EasterSunday, you know!" Still Grace made no answer, and she proceeded, "What style of mourning do you propose, Grace? I hope not bombazine." 66 Indeed, Mrs. Herbert, I have not thought about itnor, I believe, has my sister. We shall wear what others wear in like circumstances. Our dress-maker, the representative of that august tribunal 'the world,' will arrange the proprieties of the outside-what is under it we shall take care of ourselves." "My dear Grace, I did not mean to hurt your feelings, but I must say I do think Eleanor has thought about it. She has such a well-balanced mind. I apologized at the funeral for my bonnet; though it was quite plain, you know-I have never worn high colours since your father's death-I do not think them suitable for a widow, but my bonnet certainly was not quite the thing for the funeral, being rather a lively brown velvet, you know. I told Eleanor that Lawson had not sent home my mourning bonnet, and she answered me so sweetly, so like herself!' "What did Eleanor say, ma'am ?” "Why, she said I had always been so very kind to little Herbert, that she was sure I should do everything that was right." "Are you not content to leave it there, ma'am? I am!" and Grace went to her own apartment, leaving her stepmother wondering that her sister's affliction had not at all softened her; and Grace sharing the wonder in her own way, for as she mounted the stairs she said to herself, "If I and my step-mother meet in heaven, will the first word she speaks to me rasp my nerves ?" As she opened her own door, a fresh bouquet and a note on her table from Copley struck her eye. She filled a Bohemian glass vase with water, and was about to put the flowers in, when the remembrance of little May's antipathy to "old Copley's flowers" struck her like an oracle, and she wavered between throwing the bouquet into the fire, or cherishing it in the water. "What a child! what a dastardly fool I am!" she exclaimed aloud, and placed them in the centre of her table. She then opened the note, written on exquisite French paper, stamped with Copley's crest and initials, written, folded, and sealed with a pedantic elegance, that does not indicate 'thoughts that breathe and words that burn.' It began with gentlemanly common-places of sympathy for the Esterlys, and proceeded to express the intense anxiety he had felt for her. The note was filled with exhalations of passionate admiration. Grace pondered over each elaborated phrase, searching, as an alchemist would for gold, for one spontaneous effusion of feeling; and finally she threw it down, ejaculating, "I hate this way of writing-if he loves me, why does he not tell me so simply and directly, and ask my love in return ?—could I answer him simply-directly?" She shook her head in painful doubt. Suddenly an inspiration, as she fancied, came to her. Persons of Grace's temperament are apt to mistake impulses for inspirations. În her desire to relieve the monotonous frivolity of her life, Grace had repeatedly been present at the "circles," the technical designation of those séances, where the natural laws are supposed to be suspended, that fond mortals may hold social communion with immortals. She had become interested in a belief which relates to the mysterious elements of our being, and which she found implicitly accepted by a few sound minds and many honest ones-"men veracious, nowise mad." On one occasion she had gone, at the invitation of a friend, to a large house in one of our finest streets, where a suite of elegant apartments were devoted to the reception of the spirits. The walls were garnished with fitting pictures, large sheets of parchment with costly frames, on which were written texts of Scripture in all known tongues, and the autographs of the signers of our Independence, interspersed with those of emperors, popes, philosophers, and poets from Homer to L. E. L., and from Aristotle to Jonathan Edwards; all these worthies having condescendingly visited the apartment of a poor divinity student, and there inscribed their names. While Grace was looking at these records, smiling incredulously, her eye was caught by a sybil, who, in a trance, was giving to the commandant at a communication from his daughter, who had recently died. It was such as might come from the beatified spirit of a child-tears poured down the soldier's cheek-Grace felt herself irresistibly drawn into the circle, and beside the "medium." She was not young, but just on the confines of middle age; her form was attenuated, and her skin so colourless and transparent, her form and face so spiritualized, that it seemed as if at any moment her earthly tenement might dissolve. Suddenly she opened wide her halfclosed eyes, and fixed them, as if spell-bound, on Grace. Every eye followed her's to the beautiful and excited young woman. The blood rushed to Grace's cheek. "There is," said the sybil to her, in a low, earnest voice; "a spirit present that will give you a written communication-if you wish-not else." "I do not wish it," said Grace, firmly, governed by her previous cool judgment. "Some other time," she whispered to the friendly medium, "I may ask for what I now decline." "You do not look," replied the spiritualist, with a sad smile, "like one of the church of Laodicea."" her a Grace made no reply, but by a fervid grasp of the hand, and by hastily withdrawing from what was becoming to "charmed" circle. This visit occurred just before the death of Eleanor's child. Now, perplexed by Copley's note-wishing for a better faith, and yet distrustful of him, and dissatisfied with her own self-examination, she recurred to the medium. She had, since their meeting, heard much of her. Many believed in her preternatural powers, and no one had the audacious scepticism to question her sincerity. Grace was not a believer in mesmerism, spiritualism, and other kindred discoveries (?); but, highly imaginative, she hovered on their confines, and sometimes fancied she perceived definite truths in their obscure regions. Grace had been told that this medium had the power of extracting from a letter the spirit and character of its writer, by simply laying it on her bosom, without opening it. She had seen striking evidences of this potent gift in rhapsodies written down while the infusions of the letter-writer's mind predominated over the medium's. Grace ordered a carriage, and in the twilight set off to find the residence of the seeress. She found in the outskirts of the city a small, quaint old Dutch house perched on the top of a sand-hill nearly undermined by the levelling processes of city-improvement. Few of its cotemporary tenements are standing. Scarcely a material vestige, a gable, or a pointed window, remains of the venerable Knickerbockers; yet, thanks to the genius of our Irving, these primitive homes, and their sage proprietors are, to the mind's eye, intact and indestructible. "Fit abode for an astrologer, oracle, seeress, dium,'" thought Grace, as she ascended the almost perpendicular steps to the door, divided horizontally into me two equal parts. At the call of the massive knocker, the head of a "little marchioness" peeped over the lower section, who, on being told that Miss Herbert had private business with Miss Ida Roorbach, led her up а dark staircase to an attic apartment, where, after lighting the three burners of a tall Roman lamp, she went to summon her mistress. She, as her name indicated, was of mixed blood, her Dutch father having married one of those ubiquitous aspirants, a Yankee itinerant teacher. The seeress probably owed her spiritual inquisitiveness to the maternal source, as the Dutch superstitions were of the material order, concerning themselves chiefly with haunted houses, and human subjects. The apartment, frugally furnished, was decorated with beautiful engravings of Raphael's Sybils, Michael Angelo's Fates, and the heads of eccentric men and women of genius. Most conspicuous among these last was that of the great social reformer, Fourier! These were cheaply and ingeniously framed with pine cones, or braided strings of the more delicate cones of the hemlock. Each was surmounted by a chaplet woven of dried oak leaves, or laurel, or myrtle, as symbolically suited the pourtrayed individual. Odd volumes of Carlisle, Emerson, Miss Barrett, and Browning, were intermingled with German mysticism. A ponderous volume of Emanuel Swedenborg lay open on the table. Grace smiled as she read its title, and the thought crossed her that it might serve her oracle instead of the intoxicating fumes from the Delphic cave. The inkstand on the table was Persian, and all its adjuncts, the paper-cutter, sealing-lamp, etc., had a suggestive form or quality. Grace had the curiosity to examine a set of seals strung on a hooped serpent. Every one of them had either an inscrutable device, or an inscription in a language unknown to her. But, perhaps the most characteristic of all these objets-de-mystère was a very beautiful halffinished sketch by Ida Roorbach herself, in which she was attempting to embody the vision of a certain notorious disciple of Mesmer, who reports that being in the room, and in the midst of the weeping friends of a poor old woman in death-agony with a hideous disease, he fell into the mesmeric state, and saw, as death overcame the mortal, |