Heaven that you are come! Ask me no
questions at present, but hasten into the
village, and fetch Doctor Davis up to the
Grange, as soon as you can. I must go back
now, but do not be long before you follow."

She was gone again before I could reply;
so, deeply pondering, I did her bidding as
swiftly as possible. In the course of half
an hour, the Doctor and I were on our way
to the Grange.

Meanwhile, Grace had got back home, and
found her father as she had left him, staring
stonily at the pallid features of his daughter,
upturned beside him as she lay on the floor;
her yellow hair, once so smooth and beautiful,
falling in tangled disorder round her face;
while at a short distance from her, her infant
lay, calmly sleeping, unconscious of its loss.
Grace once more applied herself to the task
of restoration; and, thus occupied, we found
her on our arrival. But the breath of life
had fled for ever from the loved form. Our
dear one was dead.

A weary time elapsed after that sad evening.
Mark, after a while, recovered in some measure
the use of his speech; but was never afterwards
able to walk. At his desire, I undertook
the superintendence of the farm. Little
Kitty grew and throve wonderfully under the
tender care of her aunt Grace: a slight fragile
child, like her mother in form and features:
a most loving disposition: soon moved to
tears, but not readily consoled. Old Mark
grew passionately fond of her; when she
began to run about, and to climb on to his
knees, he could scarcely bear her out of his
sight, the day through. In warm weather
he used to be wheeled out in his arm-chair,
beneath the chesnuts in front of the house,
and there smoke his pipe, while Kitty played
beside him. As the powers of his mind
gradually weakened, he often fancied himself
a young man again, and that Kitty's mother
was again a child playing round him; and
was permitted to forget the sad events of
later times. And so his life gradually burnt
itself out; until Grace was hardly surprised
when, one day, on taking him a cup of tea,
as he sat beneath the trees, she found him
sitting in his chair, dead; with the unconscious
child playing at his feet.

Drawn together by the bond of a common
affection for our loved one in the grave, now
that I lived once more under the same roof
with Grace, there gradually grew up between
us an attachment of a warmer nature. I say
that it grew up between us, but in truth it
came to be within us both, and there was
one of us in whom it was not new. A
few months after Mark's death, we were
married. Not till we were man and wife
did Grace reveal to me that she had loved me
in secret for several years; but, seeing that
my heart was with Letty, she had put her
love away, like a faded flower; and had gone
on, doing her duty quietly, and without a murmur.
The troubled clouds had parted at
last; and the star of peace, serene and
beautiful, shone down into my heart; and there
it shines still, and will shine till the end.

CHIP.

WHY IS THE NEGRO BLACK ?

OUR ancient superstitious wonderments are
quitting us one by one, and soon there will
be no mysteries of ignorance left us. We
caught one lately, gliding out of the door of
a laboratory; but we held it fast, that we
might examine it carefully, and learn of
science the spell by which it had laid at least
one of the ghosts which used to go about the
world, and trouble men's minds with falsehoods
and cruelties. For instance, the negro
and his organic difference to the white man
—which was the ghost we caught at the
laboratory door—how often have we not
heard it gravely argued that his black blood
is the mark set on the descendants of Cain,
or—on another side—the sign of servitude
by which the children of unrighteous Ham
are to be known for ever. We remember
how, in our youthful home, where orthodoxy
and respectable superstition were strong, any
attempt to explain the physiological cause of
that blackness would have been scouted as
impiety and a presumptuous prying into the
inscrutable ways of Providence. Now, however,
times are changed. Nothing is held to
be an unreadable riddle; from the formation
of worlds to the laws of human life: and, in
particular, the problem standing as our text,
has assumed to itself an Euclid in the person
of a Dr. Draper of New York, who, in a
recent and most elaborate work on Human
Physiology, undertakes to explain why the
negro is black, and how he becomes so. And
these are his steps.

Human blood is made up of certain
corpuscles called cells; which, amongst many
other things, contain globulin—a substance
chemically between casein and albumen —and
hæmatin. Now, hæmatin is red, and contains
an infinite amount of iron. One of the most
important wheels in our internal machinery
is the liver; and a healthy action of the liver
is necessary for the healthy action of every
other organ and function. And one of the
duties of the liver is to help in removing the
old and worn out blood-cells, while aiding,
at the same time, in the construction of new
ones: which duty includes the carrying out
from the system, of all excess of hæmatin or
iron. A hot climate disturbs the normal
action of the blood; also of the liver. The
imperfect oxygen accompanying great heat
not only adds to the darkness of the arterial
blood, but also, by the want of energetic
respiration which it involves, tends to the
over fatness and torpidity of the liver. By
this inaction of the great cleansing agent, the
hæmatin of the blood-cells accumulates in
the system; and, wandering restlessly about,