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One night, at summer's close, when the dark blue of the sky was unusually deep and luminous, and the moon only a tender crescent of light, I lay on the grass in the darkness, under my favorite tree, an oak, among whose boughs the almost imperceptible moonbeams rioted. I was hidden by the shadows of a little grove just in front of me. The path passed between, about a couple of yards away.

No window, but crevices in the door, through which, probably, the moonbeams streamed in the most attenuated and skeleton-like rays, striking sharply upon portions of wet rusty cranks and chains; a glistening wheel, turning incessantly, labouring in the dark like a captive starving in a dungeon; and instead of a floor below, gurgling water, which on account of the darkness could only be heard; water which laboured up dark pipes almost to where she lay.

The twinkling lamps of the city afloat sending out reddish lines, and the fuller, clearer, luminous pencillings of the gas-lamps of the city ashore, made a not ungrateful contrast to the quivering chart of poetic moonbeams.

"Then " said I, and was silent for a long time, watching the play of the moonbeams on the rippling water. "Well?" said she again at last. "Then," said I, "if you are friendless, God forbid that I should refuse you the shelter of even such a place as this so if you are homeless, and without money stay here if you will so long as it pleases you."

Then the impetuous throbbing of his heart almost stifled him she set her little white foot on the first step of the stairs and led the way up to the first landing, where she paused, lifting her face to the open window, through which the moonbeams streamed into the hall, flooding her head, her figure, and every surrounding object with their soft light. Heinz followed step by step.

Here's a list of the priests in Frederick. Father Tierney seems the most looked up to, and I gave him a subscription yesterday for his orphan asylum." Half an hour later Marchmont and two men found themselves before a small, square stone house, standing apart from its neighbours in a small, square yard. From without the moonbeams flooded it, from within came no pinpoint of light.

In the pure air was floating no longer that gray dust which bit the eyes and poisoned respiration. In the blue sky here and there twinkled stars which were lost in the deluge of moonbeams. Movement had stopped on the streets, but the roofs of all the houses were filled with people occupied in amusement.

Not a light: the battered hovels showed like dusky mounds intersected by the white stripes of cross lanes which the moonbeams swept. Even the dogs were surely snoring on the thresholds of the closed doors. Had the Artauds poisoned the air of the parsonage with some abominable plague? Behind him gathered and swept the gust whose approach filled him with so much anguish.

Then, still shaking from the nervous terror inspired by the incident, he crept to the dying fire, secured his cap and coat, and went back to the roots of the tree again until the growing glow above the tree-tops announced the rising of the moon. The sky grew bright rapidly and soon the moonbeams wandered among the straight, handsome trees and lay calmly upon the earth.

"Why," said my friend, "he tells about a beautiful lake, lying away back in the northern wilderness, above which Mount Marcy, and Mount Seward, and other nameless peaks of the Adirondacks, rear their tall heads to the clouds, throwing back the sunlight in a blaze of glory; on which the moonbeams lie like a mantle of silver, while away down in its fathomless depths the stars glow and sparkle, like the sheen of a million of diamonds.