"And while I have my good angel Hope, I shall not despair, even if I wait another thirty years before I step beyond the circle of the sacred little world in which I still have a place to fill."
So one bleak December day, with their few possessions piled on an ox-sled, the rosy children perched atop, and the parents trudging arm in arm behind, the exiles left their Eden and faced the world again.
"Ah, me! my happy dream. How much I leave behind that never can be mine again," said Abel, looking back at the lost Paradise, lying white and chill in its shroud of snow.
"Yes, dear; but how much we bring away," answered brave-hearted Hope, glancing from husband to children.
"Poor Fruitlands! The name was as great a failure as the rest!" continued Abel, with a sigh, as a frostbitten apple fell from a leafless bough at his feet.
But the sigh changed to a smile as his wife added, in a half-tender, half-satirical tone,—
"Don't you think Apple Slump would be a better name for it, dear?"
THE ROMANCE OF A SUMMER DAY.
"What shall we do about Rose? We have tried Saratoga, and that failed to cheer her up; we tried the sea-shore, and that failed; now we have tried the mountains, and they are going to fail, like the rest. See if your woman's wit can't devise something to help the child, Milly."