———
“I will tell you a tale,” said Father Bromley.
Father Bromley sat on the piazza of his cottage, looking over the green breadth of lawn which stretched down to Willow Brook. The sun had just gone down, and the western sky, still a-glow, seemed—seen through the willows—like a splendid tissue—gold and green; and the stream, as it rolled, might have been supposed to have its rise in that strange El Dorado which filled our country’s ancestral dreams. On his right sat his daughter Alice, needing to be but a shade paler to be wrapped in a shroud, and laid to her dreamless sleep with a white rose-bud pressed between her slender fingers, and on his left his other daughter, Margaret, fresh as a June rose at sunrise. The father sat between them; the very pattern of paternal grace and quiet benignity. His worldly cares had been slight, so his face had been left smooth, full, and sunny; so sunny, in fact, that it appeared to have taken and retained the quintessence of every sunbeam which had fallen upon it. But now, like external nature, it had a sort of twilight expression, approaching to spirituality, which would awaken in the beholder an abiding interest, and lead him to pause and study ere he passed. Various circumstances conspired to this—the time, the place, and the proximity of his pale child, propt up with pillows, and almost as ethereal as a moonbeam. For a long time they had been sitting in a deepening silence, which neither wished to disturb; and so absorbed were the two daughters with their own thoughts, that the first words of the gray father fell upon unheeding ears.
“I will tell you a story,” he repeated, after a little pause, and in a firmer tone.
Slowly, and with a sigh, like one awakening from a pleasant dream to an unpleasant reality, Alice lifted the lids, and upturned her eyes, filled with a gathering dreaminess, to the dawning love-look of her only parent. Those deep, dark eyes, they must have known many tears.
“Do let us hear it, papa,” she murmured, “but let it be in harmony with gathering stars and slanting moonbeams, and let it have a true golden tinge from the sunset which lights up the gloaming.”
“And do let us hear it!” echoed Margaret, turning quite away from the moon, which was just rising.
“And of what shall it be?” asked Father Bromley, as he looked inquiringly from one to the other.
“O, something that will please Alice!” returned the sweet girl. “For who knows how many times we shall have it in our power to please her,” she thought but did not say, for all of that household knew that sooner or later death would knock at their door.
There was a long pause, and then Alice said—