This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

ness of Chopin and Mendelssohn, the lyric voices of little boys, flowers—so sweet that you close your eyes and believe yourself at a wedding; and last the grave, and the cynical "Dust to dust," or the furnace and the undoing heat.

O Lord, make of me a conjurer's coin! Now you see it—now you don't.

Something like this went through Judge Tyler's mind when he had lifted Harmony from the floor, and found that she was really dead. Had she been an unknown, he could hardly have felt the responsibility to be more heavy and unjust. Mingled with pity and the proper feelings that go with all hearts was a righteous resentment against her for dying. But his predominating, first, middle, and last thought was of the little boy waiting in the dining-room for his mother's call.

Judge Tyler was a brave man, but he paused for a moment and looked upward at his duty, as one wearied with climbing looks upward to the mountain-top. He was strongly armored, but the present