“Oh God! my child is dying,” groaned the father. “Helen, Helen,” he continued, raising his voice, “do you not know me? I am your father—your murderer. Do not look on me with such strange eyes! Helen, Helen dear, say, if only by a smile, that you forgive me. Oh! Lord God of heaven,” he exclaimed, lifting his eyes agonizingly above, “have mercy on me—suffer her to live to forgive me—crush not the bruised reed,” and hot tears gushed from his eyes and trickled in his daughter’s face.
“Who weeps?” faintly said the dying sufferer, “weep not for me. Tell my father how I love him, and die blessing him—”
“Thank thee, Almighty Father, I thank thee,” gasped the penitent. “Helen, here is your father—I am he.”
For the first time, now, the dying girl seemed fully to comprehend her situation. She looked a minute around the group, and then, with a sweet smile, her eyes rested on her father’s face. She faintly pressed his hand. Tears gushed from his eyes like rain, and though he strove to speak he could not for his sobs. She murmured of him, of her mother, of heaven, and then they knew she was dead. The father looked on her a moment, and with a groan—which none there ever forgot—sunk helpless to her side. They raised him, but he was a corpse. “Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord, “and I will repay.”
A RACE FOR A SWEETHEART.
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BY MR. SEBA SMITH.
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Hardly any event creates a stronger sensation in a thinly settled New England village, especially among the young folks, than the arrival of a fresh and blooming miss, who comes to make her abode in the neighborhood. When, therefore, Squire Johnson, the only lawyer in the place, and a very respectable man of course, told Farmer Jones one afternoon that his wife’s sister, a smart girl of eighteen, was coming in a few days to reside in his family, the news flew like wildfire through Pond village, and was the principal topic of conversation for a week. Pond village is situated upon the margin of one of those numerous and beautiful sheets of water that gem the whole surface of New England, like the bright stars in an evening sky, and received its appellation to distinguish it from two or three other villages in the same town, which could not boast of a similar location. When Farmer Jones came in to his supper about sunset that afternoon, and took his seat at the table, the eyes of the whole family were upon him, for there was a peculiar working about his mouth and a knowing glance of his eye, that always told them when he had something of interest to communicate. But Farmer Jones’ secretiveness was large, and his temperament not the most active, and he would probably have rolled the important secret as a sweet morsel under his tongue for a long time, had not Mrs. Jones, who was of rather an impatient and prying turn of mind, contrived to draw it from him.