dark-looking mirror in a rim of tarnished gold.

By the fire an elderly woman of grave and stern aspect, but who had once been handsome, sat reading the newspaper. Near the window, two apprentices sewed, under the superintendence of Rachel Gray.

A mild ray of light fell on her pale face, and bending figure. She sewed on, serious and still, and the calm gravity of her aspect harmonized with the silence of the little parlour which nothing disturbed, save the ticking of an old clock behind the door, the occasional rustling of Mrs. Gray's newspaper, and the continuous and monotonous sound of stitching.

Rachel Gray looked upwards of thirty, yet she was younger by some years. She was a tall, thin, and awkward woman, sallow and faded before her time. She was not, and had never been handsome, yet there was a patient seriousness in the lines of her face, which, when it caught the eye, arrested it at once, and kept it long. Her brow, too, was broad and intellectual; her eyes were very fine, though their look was dreamy and abstracted; and her smile, when she did smile, which was not often, for she was slightly deaf and spoke little, was pleasant and very sweet.

She sewed on, as we have said, abstracted and serious, when gradually, for even in observation she was slow, the yellow crocuses attracted her attention. She looked at them meditatively, and watched them closing, with the decline of day. And, at length, as if she had not understood, until then, what was going on before her, she smiled and admiringly exclaimed:

"Now do look at the creatures, mother!"

Mrs. Gray glanced up from her newspaper, and snuffed rather disdainfully.

"Lawk, Rachel!" she said, "you don't mean to call crocuses creatures—do you? I'll tell you what though," she added, with a doleful shake of the head, "I don't know what Her Majesty thinks; but I say the country can't stand it much longer."

Mrs. Gray had been cook in a Prime Minister's household, and this had naturally given her a political turn.

"The Lord has taught you," murmured Rachel, bending over the flowers with something like awe, and a glow spread over her sallow cheek, and there came a light to her large brown eyes.

Of the two apprentices—one a sickly, fretful girl of sixteen, heard her not; she went on sewing, and the very way in which she drew her needle and thread was peevish. The other apprentice did hear Rachel, and she looked, or rather stared at the dress-maker, with grim wonder. Indeed, there was something particularly grim about this young maiden—a drear stolidity that defies describing. A pure Saxon she was—no infusion of Celtic, or Danish, or Norman blood had lightened the native weight of her nature. She was young, yet she already went through life settling everything, and living in a moral tower of most uninviting aspect. But though Jane settled everything, she did not profess to understand everything; and when, as happened every now and then, Rachel Gray came out with such remarks as that above recorded, Jane felt confounded. "She couldn't make out Miss Gray—that she couldn't."

"I'm so tired!" peevishly said Mary, the fretful apprentice.

At once Rachel kindly observed: "Put by your work, dear."

Again Mrs. Gray snuffed, and came out with: "Lawk! she's always grummy!"

Mary tossed away her work, folded her arms, and looked sullen. Jane, the grim apprentice, drew her needle and thread twice as fast as before. "Thank Heaven!" she piously thought, "I am not lazy, nor sickly, and I can't see much difference between the two—that I can't."

Rachel's work lay in her lap; she sat looking at the crocuses until she fell in a dream far in the past.

For the past is our realm, free to all, high or low, who wish to dwell in it. There we may set aside the bitterness and the sorrow; there we may choose none but the pleasing visions, the bright, sunny spots where it is sweet to linger. The Future, fair as Hope may make it, is a dream, we claim it in vain. The Present, harsh or delightful, must be endured, yet it flies from us before we can say "it is gone." But the Past is ours to call up at our will. It is vivid and distinct as truth. In good and in evil, it is irrevocable; the divine seal has been set upon it for evermore.

In that Book—a pure and holy one was hers—though not without a few dark and sad pages—Rachel Gray often read. And now, the sight of the yellow flower of spring took her back, to a happy day of her childhood. She saw herself a little girl again, with her younger sister Jane, and the whole school to which they belonged, out on a holiday treat in a green forest. Near that forest there was a breezy field; and there it was that Rachel first saw the yellow crocuses bloom. She remembered her joy, her delight at the wonderful beauty of the wild field flowers—how she and Jane heaped their laps with them, and sat down at the task; and how, when tired with the pleasant labour, they rested, as many yellow crocuses as before seemed to blow and play in the breeze around them. And she remembered, too, how, even then, there passed across her childish mind, a silent wonder at their multitude, an undefined awe for the power of the Almighty Hand who made the little flower, and bade it bloom in the green fields, beneath the misty azure of a soft spring sky.

And then swiftly followed other thoughts. Where was little, blue-eyed Jane, her younger sister, her little companion and friend? Sleeping in a London grave, far from the pleasant and sunny spots where God's wild flowers bloom. And she—why she was pursuing her path in life, doing the will of God Almighty.

"And what more," thought Rachel, "can I hope or wish for?"

"Now, Rachel, what are you moping about?" tartly asked her mother, who, though half blind, had a quick eye for her daughter's meditative fits.

Abruptly fled the dream. The childish memories, the holy remembrance of the dead, sank back once more to their quiet resting-place in Rachel's heart. Wakening up with a half-lightened start, she hastily resumed her work.

"I don't think there ever was such a moper as that girl," grumbled Mrs.
Gray to herself.

Rachel smiled cheerfully in her mother's face. But as to telling her that she had been thinking of the yellow crocuses, and of the spots they grew in, and of the power and greatness and glory of Him who made them, Rachel did not dream of it.

"There's Mrs. Brown," said Mrs. Gray, as a dark figure passed by the window. "Go, and open the door, Mary."

Mary did not stir, upon which Jane officiously rose and said, "I'll go." She went, and in came, or rather bounced, Mrs. Brown—a short, stout, vulgar-looking woman of fifty or so, who at once filled the room with noise.

"La, Mrs. Gray!" she began breathlessly, "What do you think? There's a new one. I have brought you the paper; third column, second page, first article, 'The Church in a Mess.' I thought you'd like to see it. Well, Rachel, and how are you getting on? Mrs. James's dress don't fit her a bit, and she says she'll not give you another stitch of work: but la! you don't care—do you? Why, Mary, how yellow you look to day. I declare you're as yellow as the crocuses in the pot. Ain't she now, Jane? And so you're not married yet—are you, my girl?" she added, giving the grim apprentice a slap on the back.

Jane eyed her quietly.

"You'd better not do that again, Mrs. Brown," she said, with some sternness, "and as to getting married: why, s'pose you mind your own business!"

Mrs. Brown threw herself back in her chair, and laughed until the tears ran down her face. When she recovered, it