Page:Peterson's Magazine 1842, Volume I.pdf/58

. unconquerable fear. "It is he," also cried Teresa, " and there is no hope of aid for him."

"We shall try, Teresa," said two stout and vigorous fishermen " we shall try, and may God assist us !"

But Teresa heard no more ; for she fell deprived of all sense, upon the strand. Two women hastened up to her, and conveyed her into the cabin. She could not see the signals of distress that were made by Josselin ; nor the efforts of the generous men, who devoted themselves to save him, nor the marks of interest that were exhibited by all who clung to the shore that night ; for all loved Josselin and Teresa.

A sad day succeeded to that frightful night. Toward the dawn, Teresa recovered her senses. She cast her eyes in unsteady glances around her, as if she wished to collect together her imperfect thoughts. At last memory returned fully and distinctly to her, and she spoke not a single word nor uttered a single cry, nor did even a solitary tear escape from her. Her children were near to her, and still sleeping. She kissed each of them, and her kiss seemed marked with a singular impression, and then- going out from the cabin, and making a mysterious sign to the fishermen who watched over her ; she directed her steps in a straight line ( as if she had been conducted by some mysterious power, or by an irresistible inspiration) toward a black point, which could scarcely be remarked upon the strand, and which was touched by the last line of foam, that the sea had left when ebbing. That point was a dead body ; and the dead body was that of Josselin, that the sea had carried during night toward the shore. As to the two fishermen who had devoted their lives to preserve his, they were seen no more.

Teresa fell on her knees beside the body of her husband, and at first, it was thought she was praying. The next morning a grave was dug at the western end of the church-yard, and in that grave were deposited, side by side, the remains of Josselin and Teresa. All the village attended their funeral. That day saw not on its waves a fisherman of Roscoff, and the sea-weed remained ungathered. H. K.

HAPPINESS IN MARRIAGE.--" There is but one divine cement, LovE. No substitute can atone for its absence ; no talisman can produce consequences that belong only to this holy principle. Many joys are inherent in true marriage. It has sympathies, the most intimate of which mortals are capable ; and it calls forth affections, such as pertain to no other voluntary relation of life. But these sentiments are the fruits of love alone. Disgust and aversion cannot produce them, nor are they the growth of indifference."

THE RESCUE.

A LEGEND OF THE JAMES RIVER.

BY M. RUSSELL THAYER.

THIRTY-TWO miles from the mouth of this beautiful river, and on its northern shore, there is seen by the traveller an old and fast crumbling ruin. It consists of a single dark and broken wall, with a door-way, whose simple arch is still spared by time and tempest, a sad memorial of the thrilling incidents of years long gone. The scene itself at present though pleasing, is not strikingly beautiful—a golden harvest stretches for miles in its rear, bounded by dark forests of pine-before it, rolls the broad and placid James, as calmly as on the morn when its waters were first broken by the stranger's bark, while at intervals its banks are studded with the lofty mansion of some country gentleman, or the humble abodes of his tenantry. Yet, could ruins speak, how many a tale of sorrow and adventure would break from the wasting walls of that old church, shaded as it is by many a clambering vine, and girt by its moss-grown fragments ! More than two centuries have now elapsed since the settlement of Jamestown by the English ; but though the wild forests which then encircled it have shrunk before the axe of the husbandman and the improvements of civilized life, save this ancient relic, there remains no memorial of the early colonists- the flowerets that adorned the grave of the early settler now bloom above the hearths of his children ; a few more years and tradition alone marking the spot,

"Where grass o'ergrown each mouldering bone, And stones themselves to ruin gone- "

will point to this peninsula, as the theatre of the first struggle of Anglo-Saxon enterprize with the wild barbarism of this western world. It would seem that the Genius of their wilds, mourning over the decay of her favorite sons, had returned to erase from the soil, the footsteps of their destroyer, and the marks of his early triumph. He, who now stands upon that forsaken spot, listening to the river wind as it sighs through the rents of the ruin, or the solitary notes of the black-bird, as they pour from the thick foliage of the vine, experiences a feeling of melancholy solitude. The mind wanders back through the long lapse of years to the rude fortifications and grouped dwellings of 1607- it recalls the struggle of the infant colony with treachery, famine and disease, the cautious vigilance and desperate alternatives of the colonist, his weariness of toil-his abandonment of labor-the birth of conspiracy, and the inroad of the savage-it clothes those fertile fields with their primeval forests, peoples their obscure recesses with the athletic forms of Sachem and Indian-it lights the evening air with the blaze of the camp-fire, and loads the evening