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This was four years ago.  My Aunt Ann died, as Annie had said she would, in a very few months afterward.  My uncle came, a broken and trembling man, to live with us, and Edward Neal gladly gave his little son into my hands, as Annie had desired.  He went abroad immediately, finding it utterly impossible to bear the sight of the scenes of his lost happiness.  He came back in two years, bringing a bright young wife with him, a sunny-haired English girl, who, he said, was so marvelously like Annie.  She is like the Annie whom he knew!

Every day their baby boy is brought to our house to see his brother; but I think two children of one name never before looked so unlike.

My little Henry is the centre of his grandfather’s life and of mine.  He is a pensive child, and has never been strong; but his beauty and sweetness are such that we often tremble when we look in his face and remember Annie.

George Ware is still in India.  Every ship brings brave sweet letters, and gifts for the baby.  I sent him the little paper which I found in the corner of Annie’s jewel-case, bearing his name.  I knew that it was for him when I saw her feeble hands laying the baby’s hair and hers together in the locket.

In November Annie’s grave is snowy with white chrysanthemums.  She loved them better than any other flowers, and I have made the little hillock almost into a thicket of them.

In George Ware’s last letter he wrote:—­

“When the baby is ten years old I shall come home.  He will not need me till then; till then, he is better in your hands alone; after that I can help you.”

The One-Legged Dancers.

Very early one morning in March, ten years ago, I was sitting alone on one of the crumbling ledges of the Coliseum:  larks were singing above my head; wall-flowers were waving at my feet; a procession of chanting monks was walking slowly around the great cross in the arena below.  I was on the highest tier, and their voices reached me only as an indistinct wail, like the notes of a distant Aeolian harp; but the joyous sun and sky and songs, were darkened and dulled by their presence.  A strange sadness oppressed me, and I sank into a deep reverie.  I do not know how long I had been sitting there, when I was suddenly roused by a cry of pain, or terror, and the noise of falling stones.  I sprang to my feet and, looking over, saw a young and beautiful woman lying fearfully near the edge of one of the most insecure of the projecting ledges on the tier below me—­the very one from which I had myself nearly fallen, only a few days before, in stretching over after some asphodels which were beyond my reach.