A cry rang through the house—cry on cry. The startled servants ran up trembling at they knew not what, to find their master clasping in his arms the fair dead body of his newly-married wife.
"Dead—she is dead," they passed in terrified whispers from each to each.
Leam, standing upright in her room, in her clinging white night-dress, her dark hair hanging to her knees, her small brown feet bare above the ankle—not trembling, but tense, listening, her heart on fire, her whole being as it were pressed together, and concentrated on the one thought, the one purpose—heard the words passed from lip to lip. "Dead," they said—"dead!"
Lifting up her rapt face and raising her outstretched arms high above her head, with no sense of sin, no consciousness of cruelty, only with the feeling of having done that thing which had been laid on her to do—of having satisfied and avenged her mother—she cried aloud in a voice deepened by the pathos of her love, the passion of her deed, into an exultant hymn of sacrifice, "Mamma, are you happy now? Mamma! mamma! leave off crying: there is no one in your place now."
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
FAMISHING PORTUGAL.
The following paper contains the substance of a remarkable letter and accompanying documents recently received from Portugal:
LISBON, September, 1875.
You wish to know what truth there is in the cable reports of "a drought in the north and south of Portugal, and a threatened famine in two or three provinces." Shall I tell you all? Well, then, Heaven nerve me for the task! I shall have an unpleasant story to narrate.