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"Oh! my brother," replied the gentle Angel of Slumber, "and will not the good man, at his awakening, recognize in thee his friend and benefactor, and gratefully bless thee in his joy? Are we not brothers, and ministers of one Father?" As he spake, the eyes of the Death-Angel beamed with pleasure, and again did the two friendly Genii cordially embrace each other.

Six summers has the green grass waved and sweet flowers bloomed over Aunt Judith's grave; six long, long years have come and gone since Miss Deborah entered that silent room and found the death-angel casting his dread shadow there. And what have the seasons brought? Ease to the sorrowing heart and laughter to the weeping eyes.

Some are in pain, and want to be rid of it, even though the anodyne be dropped, as in the legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel. Some are stupid, mercifully narcotized that they may go to sleep without long tossing about.

She and the elder girl were all that were left to him of love and comfort, and the elder sister had been taken from him while she was a little child. He would not have known her had he met her unawares; nor had he ever felt for her such a pathetic love as for this guiltless death-angel, this baby whose coming had ruined his life, whose love was nevertheless the only drop of sweetness in his cup.

The soft wailing of the night-zephyr seemed to warn him that the death-angel was approaching every moment. He prayed for his beloved sister in the hands of ruthless enemies prayed only as he could pray when he realized her peril.

Would you take the offer, verbally made by the death-angel? Would the meanest among us take it, think you? Yet practically and verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure; many of us grasp at it in its fulness of horror.

In this strait the pontiff is said to have devised a form of prayer to be uttered when the paroxysm was seen to be coming on, and which, it was hoped, would avert the stroke of the death-angel. There are some curious cases of anomalous sneezing on record, some of which are possibly due to affections akin to our present "hay fever," while others are due to causes beyond our comprehension.

In the broken stem of an unfinished life, a mother mourns a host of possibilities that can never now be realized; if we may credit the prophecies of such sorrowing mothers who, bending over the cradle from which some baby-spirit has just passed into the kingdom of the little ones, tell in broken accents of sorrow and regret of all the promises of goodness and greatness which have been sacrificed with that life, we must truly admit that the world in all its wealth of heroes, bold and brave, its bards, its poets, its grand masters of the quill, the chisel and the brush, has not on record such another career as has been blighted in its bloom each time the stern death-angel stood beside an infant's cot.

So fervent and persistent was the cry for help, that even the sobs of the stricken wife were hushed in awe, and only the watching doctor, with his finger on the pulse, knew when the last fluttering beat died out, and the death-angel pressed his triumphant seal on pallid lip and brow. "Dr.

Ah, remorseless flatterer! as I write these lines, the images of your victims crowd before my vision: the strong men that grew weak, and pale, and thin, but fought to the last inch for life; the noble youths who were blighted just as they began to bloom; the beautiful maidens etherealized into almost more than mortal beauty by the breath of the death-angel, as autumn leaves, touched by the breath of winter, blush with the beauty of decay.