might be an enjoyment to Mrs. Lifford who had so few pleasant moments in her life, and that it would bring Gertrude into frequent companionship with her mother, which might prove an inestimable comfort to both. He assented, but remained restless and disturbed during the remainder of the day. But after the first lesson had been given, his annoyance seemed to have passed away, and he told Mrs. Redmond and Mary, how strange it had seemed to him to find Mrs. Lifford again on that same couch where he used to see her when a boy only still paler and thinner than he remembered her then. "There she lies wrapped up in shawls, and propped up by pillows her face so white and wan that it looks as if one could see through it, and her eyes appearing unnaturally large and bright. After I had given Lady-Bird some instructions, she asked me to play something very gently, as she thought her mother would like it. I thought, at that minute, of Mozart's Agnus Dei, and I played it very softly, but with a great deal of expression. I never in my life tried so much to play well not when I was most anxious to make an effect at a concert, as I did then to please that pale woman who had not heard any music for sixteen years. When I had gone on for about twenty minutes, varying the air with a few simple chords, I left off, and looking through the door towards her couch I saw that she had covered her face with her thin transparent hands, and that large tears were rolling through her fingers. She called Lady-Bird in a faint voice, and told her to go on with the lesson that she had heard enough of the soul of music for one day. This was said in broken English, but I liked the expression so much. There is something very quiet and solemn about those two rooms. Hers is so full of pictures and silk hangings, and all sorts of foreign-looking things, it looks quite like a chapel; and the next is a library, and opens on the garden. Lady-Bird has a beautiful voice, but it bores her to practise much, and what bores her I suspect she never does; as to playing she will not even attempt it. But she is coming here to-morrow at three o'clock to look over the music I brought you, and to choose the songs she will learn." "O then, it is singing lessons you give her, Maurice dear?" Mrs. Redmond asked, as he began to turn over a heap of books by the pianoforte. "I suppose so, mother," he answered with a smile. "Anything she chooses to learn; but one might as well try to teach the lark to sit still on a bush, and practise her trills, as make Lady-Bird apply herself to anything but what she fancies at the moment." "She will try your patience very much, dear Maurice." "O I shall play and sing to her, she will learn in that way; she has so much genius." ment. She was in high spirits, sung a roulade as she arrived at the green gate, better than any she had accomplished the day before; told Jane to call again in an hour; and, asking leave to gather some of the honeysuckles and jasmine on the wall which felt hot with the sun, she stood some time outside the house, playing with Mrs. Redmond's cat who was purring on the window-seat. She kept gently pinching its paw, and then kissing it to make up for it. "I am sure Mary never teased anything in her life; did she, Mrs. Redmond? But it is a bad plan to make people too happy, Mary, they say it never answers; and though 'they say' is a very spiteful, odious, and tiresome imp, I believe he is right sometimes. Puss will be much more glad to see me the next time I come, because I have plagued her a little, and then been very kind. Does Mary ever tease you, Maurice?" "Only I believe by never giving me an opportunity of finding fault with her," he answered from within the room, where he was writing out some music. 1 “O, but that is a very great fault, indeed, -- perhaps the most provoking one a woman can have. Won't you reform, Mary? It is very hard on poor Maurice. Men do so like to scold and lecture, one should not deprive them of their little amusements. It is selfish to be always so good. Father Lifford, for instance, how bored he would be if I was as good as you and mamma. Othello's occupation would be gone." After going on for some time in this way, she came into the room and began to examine the music. Opening a volume of manuscript songs, her attention was arrested by one, entitled, "The Blind Man to his Mistress. "Is this your own composition,' she asked of Maurice, as sitting down at the pianoforte she tried the notes. "Yes," he answered;" I wrote both the words and the music after seeing, at a ball, a blind man who was engaged to be married to a young girl, he seemed to listen to the sound of her footsteps while she was dancing with others." The poetry ran thus: - "Yes, others say they love, but is the love of those who see O, if they love and see, can they e'er gaze on aught but thee? Gertrude read these lines, and seemed thoughtful for a moment. "I envy," she exclaimed, "the power of rendering into verse the passing impressions of the hour,-of fixing, as it were, into shape that floating poetry which haunts the mind, and makes us what wise people call romantic. I imagine that poets are much less so than those who do not spend their capital of imagination upon paper; and, judging from the lives of poets and persons of genius, it seems to me that in general they have less deep feeling than silent people, I do not mean people who are not talkative, but those who cannot tell themselves their own story." "But, my dear, everybody must know their own story," Mrs. Redmond put in, "and if so, they can tell it, I suppose, though not, I dare say, pleasantly for other people to hear: indeed, I forget a great many things that have happened to me, and I suppose that is what you mean.". "I believe," Maurice said, "that imagination makes |