As we stopped at the broad path leading to the parsonage, I ventured to
say a few words which I will not set down.

More and more I was drawn towards the high and intense life of the woman
in whom all that was wrong seemed but an excess of virtue. I could have
besought some fanatical warlike spirit to take possession of Clifton and
make him capable of hate, and so, perhaps, of love. Anything to arouse
this personator of our human mutability, this vacillator between doing
and letting alone!

The wild future of the minister I did not anticipate. Hereafter it may
possibly be written, to show such lessons as it has. But on that autumn
night he walked up the gray pathway a broken man. The spiritual part was
dead; he had lost faith in the invisible. He walked as one in a funeral
procession,--ever doomed to follow a dead idea.

* * * * *

THE UNITED STATES ARMORY.


The United States Armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, is the largest,
best appointed, and altogether the most productive establishment for the
manufacture of small arms in the world,--those belonging to the Austrian
Government at Vienna, and to the British at Enfield, being greatly
inferior both in size and appointments; while the quality of the guns
manufactured here is very superior to that at either of those important
establishments. Indeed, the Springfield rifled musket is justly regarded
as the most perfect arm of its kind which has ever been produced. To
attain this desirable point of excellence has required the skill and