Miss Ludington's Sister

leaving the rest in shadow. During one, five, or ten blithe years, as the case may be, all the springs of life send up sweet waters; joy is in the very air we breathe; happiness seems our

careers. But with women it comes most frequently perhaps in girlhood and young womanhood. Particularly is this wont to be

he recognised that she had done with happiness, and that t

ing though that might be, which had so embittered her life, but

ace, and were regarded somewhat as local magnates. Miss Ludington's childhood had been an exceptionally happy one, and as a girl she had been the belle of the village. Her beauty, together, w

when she fell ill of a dreadful disease, and for a long time lay between life and death. Or, to state th

placed by a scanty growth of washed-out hue; the lips, but yesterday so full, and red, and tempting, were thin, and drawn, and colourless,

cases the process is so gradual as to temper the poignancy of regret, and perh

se the transition had been

h forgotten in the engrossments of later years; but with her

e of herself, at the age of seventeen, painted on ivory, the daguerrotype process not having co

near, studying the bonny, gladsome face through blinding te

tient indifference while they sought to interest her with current local gossip, and as soon as possible would turn the conversation back to the old h

ontain the ivory miniature of herself as

mpathy with the admiration expressed. The absence of anything like self-consciousness in the delight she took in these tributes to the charms of her girlish self was pathetic in its completeness. It was indeed not as herself, but as another, that she thought of this fair girl, who had vanished from the earth, leaving a pictu

put on the brightly coloured gowns, beribboned, and ruffled, and gaily trimmed, which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was a

id. At the end of that time she regained a fair measure of

orld of new interests, with which she had nothing in common. Society, in reorganizing itself, had left her on the outside. The present had moved on, leaving her behind with the past. She asked nothing better. If she was nothing to the

r died she was left without near kin. With no ties of contemporary interest to hold her

ly happiness in the recollections of that period which she retained. These were the only goods she prized, and it was the grief of her life that, while she had strong boxes

hich it was her absorbing care to keep in precisely the same condition

r the hand of change was making havoc with the village: the railroad had come, shops had been built, and stores and new houses were going up on every side, and the beautifu

ent landmark removed since she had passed that way before, perhaps a tree felled, some meadow, that had been a playg

nizing of houses, and, where nothing more expensive could be afforded, the paint-brush wrought its cheap metamorphosis. "You wou

changes effaced some souvenir of her early life. The past was once dead already; they were killing it a second

eded, it would be hard to imagine a person with less apparent use for a great deal of money. And yet no young rake, in the heyday of youth and the riot of hot blood, could have been more overjoyed at the falling to him of a fortune than was this sad-faced old maid. She became smi

and grassy street which formed the older part of it. Miss Ludington was closeted with a builder, and

another Hilton

large farm on Long Island several miles out of the city of Brooklyn. Here she had rebuilt the Hilton of her girlhood, in facsimile, with every change restored, every landmark replaced. In the midst of t

they been ten times greater. However, seeing that the part of the village duplicated consisted of but one broad maple-planted street, with not over thirty houses, mostly a story and a half, and that non

een used to fit up its Long Island duplicate, and when all was complete and Miss Ludi

had been metamorphosed into staid fathers and mothers. These respectable persons were not the schoolmates and friends of her girlhood, and with no hard feelin

nly neighbours she cared about were the shadowy forms which peopled the village she had rescued from oblivio

r passion. If she had grieved over the removal of the old landmarks and the change in the appearance of the village, how much more hopelessly must they have grieved if indeed the dead revi

Miss Ludington the pleasure she took in feeling that, by rebuild

cted, the central figure was the school-girl Ida Ludingt

midst of the village, she had hung a portrait in oil, by the first portrait-painter then in the country.

nd was fondly believed by Miss Ludington to be a more accura

ce, her luxuriant golden hair, of a rare sheen and fineness, falling upon beautifully moulded shoulders. The complexion was of a purity that needed the faint tinge

m earth of this delectable maiden with exceeding bitterness, or that her he

onality, which, indeed, had shone these many years only by the light reflected from that young face! And yet that life, in its stre

r and mother with immortelles, but the frame of th

t she should see them some day in another world; but from the death of cha