intervals, into the indistinctness of the world to come. There had
been feverish turns which tossed him from side to side and wore away
what little strength he had. But in his most convulsive struggles and
in the wildest vagaries of his intellect, when no other thought
retained its sober influence, he still showed an awful solicitude lest
the black veil should slip aside. Even if his bewildered soul could
have forgotten, there was a faithful woman at his pillow who with
averted eyes would have covered that aged face which she had last
beheld in the comeliness of manhood.

At length the death-stricken old man lay quietly in the torpor of
mental and bodily exhaustion, with an imperceptible pulse and breath
that grew fainter and fainter except when a long, deep and irregular
inspiration seemed to prelude the flight of his spirit.

The minister of Westbury approached the bedside.

"Venerable Father Hooper," said he, "the moment of your release is at
hand. Are you ready for the lifting of the veil that shuts in time
from eternity?"

Father Hooper at first replied merely by a feeble motion of his head;
then--apprehensive, perhaps, that his meaning might be doubtful--he
exerted himself to speak.

"Yea," said he, in faint accents; "my soul hath a patient weariness
until that veil be lifted."

"And is it fitting," resumed the Reverend Mr. Clark, "that a man so
given to prayer, of such a blameless example, holy in deed and