golden hairs tied together with a blue silken thread.

Aunt Kindly had never been married; yet once in her life, also, the
right man seemed to offer, and the blossom of love opened with a dear
prophetic fragrance in her heart. But as her father was soon after
struck with palsy, she told her lover they must wait a little while, for
her first duty must be to the feeble old man. But the impatient swain
went off and pinned himself to the flightiest little humming-bird in all
Soitgoes, and in a month was married, having a long life before him for
bitterness and repentance. After the father died, Kindly remained at
home; and when Nathan returned, years after, they made one brotherly and
sisterly household out of what might else have gladdened two connubial
homes. "Not every bud becomes a flower."

Uncle Nathan sat there, his locket in his hand, looking into the fire;
and as the wind roared in the chimney, and the brands crackled and
snapped, he thought he saw faces in the fire; and when the sparks rose
up in a little cloud, which the country children call "the people coming
out of the meeting-house," he thought he saw faces in the fire; they
seemed to take the form of the boys and girls as he had lately seen them
rushing out of the Union School-house, which held all the children
in the village; and as he recognized one after the other, he began
to wonder and conjecture what would be the history of this or that
particular child. While he sat thus in his waking dream, he looked
fixedly at the locket and the blue thread which tied together those
golden rays of a summer sun, now all set and vanished and gone, but
which was once the morning light of all his promised days; and as his
eyes, full of waking dreams, fell on the fire again, a handsome young
woman seemed to come forth from between the brands, and the locks of her
hair floated out and turned into boys and girls, of various ages, from