THE TOWN. 45

 Placid living brought length of days. The
 dates of the coming and the going upon some
 of the wooden crosses in the burial-ground are
 very far apart. Seur Marie: Requiescat in
 pace. Joseph: Marie: Jesu; and then, per-
 haps, seventy years or longer.
 How many years of vacancy that must mean
 for Sceur Marie, if she became religieuse"
 at twenty! One falls to speculating upon the
 crisis ot those twenty years, the possible
 catastrophe which made life seem worthless,
 or, perhaps it were truer to say, made the
 preparation for that other life seem better. If
 the end these fifty years was Religion,
 surely the beginning was Love! It is safe to
 infer as much as that; and how often in these
 fifty empty, tranquil, waiting years may not
 Sister Marie have lived over again the pleasure
 and the pain that drove her for relief into
 silence, -silence which had no sorrow and no
 disappointment; only the precious memory of
 a disappointment, which for all its pain she
 would not lose even though she did penance
with every prayer!