Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/87

12, 1862.] “If you’d please to offer it, sir, I’d work the flesh off my bones to pay it back again,” he urged. “I’ll live upon a crust myself, and I’ll keep my home upon a crust, but what I’ll get it up. If there’s a reward pasted up, sir, we might come upon the villain.”

Mr. Verner appeared, then, to awake to the question before him, and to awake to it in terrible excitement.

“He’ll never be found, Robin,—the villain will never be found, so long as you and I and the world shall last!”

They looked at him in consternation; Lionel, Frederick Massingbird, and Robin Frost. Mr. Verner recollected himself, and calmed his spirit down.

“I mean, Robin,” he more quietly said, “that a reward will be useless. The villain has been too cunning, rely upon it, to—to—leave his traces behind him.”

“It might be tried, sir,” respectfully urged Robin. “I’d work—”

“You can come up to-morrow, Robin, and I’ll talk with you,” interrupted Mr. Verner. “I am too ill—too upset to-night. Come at any hour you please, after twelve, and I’ll see you.”

“I’ll come, sir. I’ve registered a vow afore my old father,” went on Robin, lifting his right arm, “and I register it again afore you, sir,—afore our future master, Mr. Lionel,—that I’ll never leave a stone unturned by night nor by day,—that I’ll make it my first and foremost business in life to find that man. And when I’ve found him—let him be who he will—either him or me shall die. So help me—”

“Be still, Robin!” passionately interposed Mr. Verner, in a voice that startled the man. “Vows are bad things. I have found them so.”

“It was registered afore, sir,” significantly answered Robin, as he turned away. “I’ll be up here to-morrow.”

The morrow brought forth two departures from Verner’s Pride. John Massingbird started for London in pursuit of his journey, Mr. Verner having behaved to him liberally. And Lionel Verner was summoned in hot haste to Paris, where his brother had just met with an accident, and was supposed to be lying between life and death.

saw the nest of snow and ice

Where the lauwine was born,

We stood beneath the obelisk

Of that great Matterhorn.

Where’er the timid chamois drinks

We traced the mountain stream,

Around whose curves and shallow slips

Blue stars of gentian gleam.

We saw, from a gray mountain top,

The rainbow in the spray,

Where mimic icebergs float across

The blue Marjälen See.

I hardly can remember all,

It seems so long ago,

Since three of us walked merrily

Among the fields of snow.

The mountains look so lonely,

So scornful of our mirth,

As if they’d sat for ever

As Princes of the earth.

When our world was rolled in fire,

Shapeless among the spheres,

The Alps rose in a bubble

To last a million years.

Shall we tell our little troubles,

Shall we mar the hour that runs,

Shall we raise the ghost of sorrow

Before those kingly ones?

Far better be a Crétin,

And sleep with beasts at night,

Than cry for to-morrow, like children,

Or weep for a dead delight.

Look on the grim old mountains,

And learn of them repose,

They flame in the Morgen-glimmer,

But never melt their snows.

To them we seem no stronger

Than foam on a wintry sea;

Our lives will soon be covered

By the snows of eternity.

It is an old old lesson,

And we learned it long ago,

When three of us walked merrily

Among the fields of snow. C. I. E.

years ago, I spent a few weeks at the Mauritius. I have shared in many moving incidents by sea and land since then, yet I still remember with delight the moment when I first was made aware of the proximity of that lovely isle. We had made the land at night, after a disagreeable steam voyage from the Cape, and as we could not enter Port Louis during the darkness, we lay to, under the lee of the land. The sea had become smooth; there was little or no motion; so opening our narrow scuttles, we allowed the heated pent-up atmosphere to escape; and, oh! with what an ecstacy I regaled my long-suffering senses with the balmy perfume-laden air which blew gently, and so sweetly, from that hidden shore. I never see the island on the map, I never hear it spoken of, without recalling it.

But there is another recollection connected with the Mauritius which is still more vivid than the