drinking up every bright dewdrop that welcomed him with a quiver of
joy. The branches shook themselves in the gentle breezes his
presence had called forth to dally amid their foliage and sport with
the flowers; and every green thing put on a fresher beauty in
delight at his return; while from the bosom of the trees--from
hedgerow and from meadow--went up the melody of birds.

In the brightness of this morning, the lovers went out to look at
the storm-wrecks that lay scattered around. Here a tree had been
twisted off where the tough wood measured by feet instead of inches;
there stood the white and shivered trunk of another sylvan lord,
blasted in an instant by a lightning stroke; and there lay, prone
upon the ground, giant limbs, which, but the day before, spread
themselves abroad in proud defiance of the storm. Vines were torn
from their fastenings; flower-beds destroyed; choice shrubbery,
tended with care for years, shorn of its beauty. Even the solid
earth had been invaded by floods of water, which ploughed deep
furrows along its surface. And, saddest of all, two human lives had
gone out while the mad tempest raged in uncontrollable fury.

As the lover and maiden stood looking at the signs of violence so
thickly scattered around, the former said, in a cheerful tone--

"For all his wild, desolating power, the tempest is vassal to the
sun and dew. He may spread his sad trophies around in brief, blind
rage; but they soon obliterate all traces of his path, and make
beautiful what he has scarred with wounds or disfigured by the tramp
of his iron heel."

"Not so, my children," said the calm voice of the maiden's father,