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SHIRLEY.

was encountered at the end, barring with fleshless arm the portals of Eternity, how Genius still held close his dying bride, sustained her through the agony of the passage, bore her triumphant into his own home—Heaven; restored her, redeemed, to Jehovah—her Maker; and at last, before Angel and Archangel, crowned her with the crown of Immortality?

Who shall, of these things, write the chronicle?


"I never could correct that composition," observed Shirley, as Moore concluded. "Your censor-pencil scored it with condemnatory lines, whose signification I strove vainly to fathom."

She had taken a crayon from the tutor's desk, and was drawing little leaves, fragments of pillars, broken crosses, on the margin of the book.

"French may be half-forgotten, but the habits of the French lesson are retained, I see," said Louis: "my books would now, as erst, be unsafe with you. My newly-bound St. Pierre would soon be like my Racine: Miss Keeldar, her mark—traced on every page."

Shirley dropped her crayon as if it burned her fingers.

"Tell me what were the faults of that devoir?" she asked. "Were they grammatical errors, or did you object to the substance?"

"I never said that the lines I drew were indica-