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quent of healthful poverty, how remote from squalid penury, the whitewashed walls, the homely furniture within. Creepers lately trained around the door-way. Christmas holly, with berries red against the window-panes; the beehive yonder; a starling, too, outside the threshold, in its wicker cage. In the background (all the rest of the neighboring hamlet out of sight), the church spire tapering away into the clear blue wintry sky. All has an air of repose—of safety. Close beside you is the Presence of HOME—that ineffable, sheltering, loving Presence—which, amidst solitude, murmurs " not solitary; " a Presence unvouch- safed to the great lady in the palace she has left. And the lady herself .-' She is resting on the rude gnarled root-stump from which the vagrant had risen; she has drawn Sophy toward her; she has taken the child's hand; she is speaking now—now listening; and on her face kindness looks like happiness. Per- haps she is happy at that moment. And Waife? he is turning aside his weather-beaten, mobile countenance, with his hand anxiously trembling upon the young scholar's arm. The scholar whispers, " Are you satisfied with me?" and Waife answers in a voice as low but more broken, "God reward you! Oh, joy!— if my pretty one has found at last a woman friend!" Poor vagabond, he has now a calm asylum—a fixed humble liveli- hood—more than that, he has just achieved an object fondly cherished. His past life—alas! what has he done with it? His actual life—broken fragment though it be—is at rest now. But still the everlasting question—mocking, terrible question—with its phrasing of farce and its enigmas of tragical sense—" What WILL HE DO WITH IT?" Do wiih what? The all that remains to him—the all he holds!—the all which man himself, betwixt free-will and pre-decree is permitted to do. Ask not the va- grant alone—ask each of the four there assembled on that flying bridge called the Moment. Time before thee—what wilt iJiou do with it? Ask thyself!—ask the wisest! Out of effort to an- swer that question, what dream-schools have risen, never wholly to perish! The science of seers on the Chaldee's Pur-Tor, or in the rock-caves of Delphi, gasped after and grasped at by horn-handed mechanics to-day in their lanes and alleys. To the heart of the populace sink down the blurred relics of what once was the lore of the secretest sages—hieroglyphical tatters which the credulous vulgar attempt to interpret—" U'hat will HE DO with it?" Ask Merle and his Crystal! But the curtain descends! Yet a moment,there they are—age and childhood— poverty, wealth, station, vagabondage: the preacher's sacred learning and august ambition; fancies of dawning reason;—-