How the children leave us: and no traces
Linger of that smiling angel band;
Gone, for ever gone; and in their places,
Weary men and anxious women stand.

Yet we have some little ones, still ours;
They have kept the baby smile we know,
Which we kissed one day, and hid with flowers,
On their dead white faces long ago.

When our joy is lost: and life will take it,
Then no memory of the past remains;
Save with some strange, cruel sting, that makes it
Bitterness beyond all present pains.

Death, more tender-hearted, leaves to sorrow
Still the radiant shadow—fond regret:
We shall find, in some far bright to-morrow,
Joy that he has taken, living yet.

Is love ours, and do we dream we know it,
Bound with all our heart-strings, all our own;
Any cold and cruel dawn may show it,
Shattered, desecrated, overthrown.

Only the dead hearts forsake us never:
Love, that to death's loyal care has fled,
Is thus consecrated ours for ever,
And no change can rob us of our dead.

So when fate comes to besiege our city,
Dim our gold, or make our flowers fall,
Death, the angel, comes in love and pity,
And to save our treasures, claims them all.

PULLING THROUGH.

MRS. PAWLEY having made my punch, has
left me by the fire, and is in bed. Bokes, the
apprentice, having sent out all medicines, made
all his infusions for to-morrow, and rolled a
gallipot full of our house pills, has earned and
eaten an enormous supper, learnt the lower jaw-
bone, read ten pages of Tennyson's In Memoriam,
written a letter to his sweetheart, sharpened his
penknife, operated upon his own finger nails,
and is in bed. Eleven Pawleys junior retired
to bed at different times during the evening. All
the house is asleep, I hope, and everything alive
in it pulsating as calmly as the study clock on
yonder chest of drawers.

This is my hour for reading what my brother
doctors are about, and picking up new crumbs
of knowledge helpful to me in my practice from
our weekly journals, quarterly reviews, and half-
yearly retrospect of medicine and surgery. After
a hard day's work one gets through an hour's
study best upon tobacco; but it is the opinion
of Mrs. Pawley, against which I do not fight,
that a tumbler of punch, made as she makes it,
is also useful to that end. Sometimes, in spite
of all precaution, it will happen that the crumbs
of science lie untasted, while Thomas Pawley,
Esq., F.R.C.S., L.S.A., enjoys an hour's wool-
gathering, his thoughts helped back now and
then into the past by a stray reference to the
contents of all those drawers on which the
representative of friendly Time now sits
triumphant. It was a work of time, Deborah
Tims, but we pulled through. What pious
resignations of all hope of marriage, and what
vows to be a faithful single woman until death,
true to the unfortunate Tom Pawley, that old
clock is chuckling over, with its long hand just
about to strike, and pointed up-stairs towards
the nursery over my head. One, two, three.
. . . .  . . eleven!

There lies, ready to be posted, Bokes's letter
to "Miss Comfort, the Misses Dummie and
Stiff, Chlorosis House, near Godsacre." He is
not yet of age to doubt about his pulling through,
and he will have to pull through his examination,
to get into practice, and pull through many a
shallow, before Jane Comfort, now a governess
pupil, presently to be a governess, shall have
pulled through the troubles of her single
state. Bokes's father failed last year, and
he has no rich friend. But, wherever that young
gentleman sleeps, there sleeps the brave. No
misgiving about the future hurts his appetite or
breaks his rest. Indeed, he looks down from a
mental elevation of his own upon my country
practice, profitable as it is, with all its toil and
the disgraceful rows of gallipots and bottles in
the surgery. He means to be a consulting or
an operating surgeon, or a physician with a place
of business in Saville-row and an estate at
Windsor. Let him unlearn his day-dreams, but
remain determined in his hope; and, with the help
of time, he will pull through.

Five-and-thirty years ago, my best friend in
this village, and my sole companion in this house,
was a dog. The old post-woman ought to have been
held a better friend, punctually as she toddled to
the back door twice a week with a bit of the love
tale of Deborah Tims in her basket. But then,
also, she toddled to the back door daily with
wafered letters of demand from creditors and
lawyers, with notes of contemptuous pity or
expostulation from friends, refusal of small
requests, portentous missives of advice, anonymous
letters, meant to sting (though these counted
but as the gain of so much waste paper) with
everything that could premise shipwreck of T.
Pawley's life. In those days the sight of the
post-woman's red cloak gave me a thrill of pain.
We have a dapper postman now (for
Beetleborough has enlarged its borders), and the
post-office is a fountain of delight to all our household
—now that it is thirty years since I pulled
through. The story of that pull may be of use
to some young Bokes; so here it is, and much
good may it do him.

I was a white-haired and pink-faced young
student of the sort commonly known as "nice
young men who play upon the flute." I was
the accepted of Miss Tims, the lovely and
accomplished daughter of John Tims, bookseller,
Twickenham. I was myself only an orphan,
with three hundred pounds for patrimony, but I
had a wealthy Uncle James, a stocking-maker,
nearly the kindest and entirely the most obstinate
man alive, with whom I lived at Bradford, and
in whom only, of things human, except myself,
I had to trust. This Uncle James had many
children of his own, and, while he took great
pains to secure for me a perfect education, and
to give me a right start in life, it was his whim
or conscience to charge against me in a book the
cost of education as a debt to his estate. He