"My eyes were strangely keen, for at that distance I could discern a man leaning out of the nearest window. I knew who it must be, and almost expecting to see the last dreadful particular fulfilled, held out my hand—the sign that all was safe. The driver signaled that he understood, and quickened pace. I shut my eyes when it drew near, but, as it passed, distinctly heard my name called thrice.
"There was a moment that seemed never-ending. Then a clatter as of a hundred anvil strokes, a rush of snow-white steam, a shower of red-hot ashes scattered far, the hum of voices, and the clanging of the bell. Then, and not till then, I ventured to look up and hurry to the spot. The train, a series of shapeless wrecks, luggage-vans, trucks, carriages in wild confusion, lay across the road; live coals from the engine-fire were hissing in the black canal stream; the guard was bleeding and crushed beneath a wheel; twining wreaths of white steam, like spirits, melted into air above. Huntly was stooping over a begrimed corpse. The glare of the lantern, as it flashed upon the face, showed every omen true. It was Marcliffe.
"I can bear to chronicle my own temptations, yielding, guilt, but not to write down the separation that I dreaded most, and tried to avert, alas! so fatally. It is indeed a lesson of the nothingness of man's subtlest plans to avoid the penalty his crimes call down. How vain have all my efforts been to preserve our hearth inviolate, to keep our home in blessed security. Indeed, that night God's peace and favor 'departed from the threshold of the house' forever."
The misfortune alluded to was thus briefly mentioned at the end of the newspaper report of the accident, inclosed with the other papers of the dead man:
"We are sorry to say that the wife of the station-keeper, Darke, whose dangerous state we noticed a week ago, expired last night, after giving birth to a child, still-born."
With the sentence given above Darke's diary closed. Here and there the curate read a verse of a psalm, or a heart-broken ejaculation, but no continued narrative of his after-sufferings. From what he could glean, it appeared that he was put on his trial on the charge of manslaughter, and acquitted, but that he had lost his situation in consequence of the want of presence of mind he had evinced; after, it seemed, that he had led a miserable vagrant life, earning just enough by chance-work to support himself and his little Harry, the constant attendant of his wanderings. The boy was at the inn on the night of the father's wretched death, though the landlady's kindness removed him from the sight of the troublous parting. An asylum was soon found for him by my friend's kindness, and when I was at the parsonage last Christmas, as I read the history of his father's fitful life, the unconscious son sat by with little Faith, gazing with his large melancholy eyes at the strange faces in the fire.
STORY OF A BEAR.
Thirty leagues from Carlstad, and not far from the borders of the Klar, upon the shores of the lake Rada, rises a little hamlet named St. John, the most smiling village of Scandinavia. Its wooden houses, mirrored in the translucent waters, stand in bold relief against a background of extensive forests. For a space of twenty leagues round, Nature has blessed the generous soil with abundant harvests, filled the lake with fish, and the woods with game. The inhabitants of St. John are rich, without exception; each year they make a profit of their harvests, and bury beneath their hearthstones an addition to their little fortunes.
In 1816, there lived at St. John a young man of twenty years of age, named Daniel Tissjoebergist. A fortunate youth he thought himself, for he possessed two farms; and was affianced to a pretty young girl, named Raghilda, celebrated through all the province of Wermeland for her shapely figure, her little feet, her blue eyes, and fair skin, besides a certain caprice of character that her beauty rendered excusable.