THE LAST HOPE CRUSHED.

The cabin door was open, and Mrs. Holt sat near it, looking out upon the river. A little time before she had seen the boat, containing her son and Dora, floating through the shadows, and the sight had set her to dreaming, as mothers will when the welfare of their children is at stake. Since this lady had taken up her life on the prairie, she had become better acquainted with the young girl than years of intimacy could have made her in the city. Thrown, as these two families were, into near neighborhood among the pioneers, surveyors, and workmen, who were busy on the railroad, the cohesion of natural refinement brought them into close relationship. Mrs. Holt saw the growing attachment of her son, and was made hopeful by it, for she loved Dora already with almost maternal fondness.

"Let them be happy," she said, with tears of gentle tenderness filling her eyes, as the boat floated off through the purplish mist. "God forbid that their youth should be shipwrecked, as mine was. Oh! if we, who have learned how to suffer, could bear all the burdens of those we love, life would lose half its anxieties."

So the boat went out of sight, winding sleepily down the river; and that woman's mind, in like fashion, launched itself on the stream of her life, but her thoughts turned up the stream, and floating through the dim shadows of memory till they became anguish, and she started up in a desperate effort to fling off the past, and make that log cabin pleasant as the palace she had been thinking of.

At this moment, Sterling passed.

She spread a little table of black walnut, rudely fashioned by some of the railroad workmen, with a cloth of snow-white linen—one of her hoarded treasures; brought out bread, and fruit, and milk, with some delicate round cakes, and, at last, set a vase of wild flowers just beneath the lamp, which scattered delicate shadows all over the snowy whiteness of the table. Her mind had turned from the young persons who had first occupied it, and was dwelling, somewhat anxiously, on the husband whom she had followed, with such devotion, into the West.

Holt should have been home to his supper before sunset; and now it was getting quite dark, and, so far as she could discover, looking anxiously out toward the railway, no sign of his coming was visible. She walked out a little way into the wild grass, looking for him. In the distance was a group of shanties, where many of the workmen went for their meals, and where that eternal curse to civilization, whisky, was kept in abundance. Had he stopped there? Once again had his manhood given way? Were the hopes she had cherished so thankfully about to be trodden in the dust?

Poor woman! she had made her bed among thorns and thistles from the first. How they pierced and wounded her now! At last she heard a rustling in the long grass, the low protest of a voice she knew, expostulating with the earth for rising up, swelling, and rolling so unevenly; and with the grass for tying up four pair of feet, that wanted to wade through, and could not.

The woman's heart died within her. She knew the sound too well. Many, and many a time had she heard that muffled voice, cursing the pavement and the stars for oscillating under his drunken progress, as he came home from some of his many haunts in the city. But the prairie life had seemed to regenerate him. His strength and manhood had come back in the bright, pure air of the plains. She had hoped so much for him, and, of late, trust had superseded hope. Now both were gone, and she stood, trembling and broken-hearted, almost ready to die, rather than see his degradation.

He came up, reeling and stumbling, through the thick grass. His hat was gone; his coat floated open at the bosom, and, in a fit of half-strangulation, he had torn off his neck-tie, leaving his throat bare to the chest.

This was what the poor woman saw, reeling toward her in the pure starlight of that summer night.

"What—what—is it you, old woman? It—it, it's my opinion, the prairies are—a—a—afire; sparks a—all round me, right—yes, right and left, every—every way. What do you—you keep moving back so for? Can't ye keep steady on yer—yer—feet, like a decent woman with—without dancing up and down—to—to, and fro, like a—a—like a woman, and a confounded old woman at that? Can't you hear? Stand still! It—it's indecent for a woman of your age, hop—hop—hopping about that way. Just wait till your feet get tangled in the grass, and if that don't trip—trip you up——There! didn't I tell you!"

Here the drunken man gave a lurch forward, and fell to the ground, where he lay, wallowing in the long grass almost at his wife's feet, all the time rebuking her, and wondering at her unsteadiness. She helped him up from the earth with as heavy a heart as ever ached in a woman's bosom. While he leaned roughly on her shoulder, fairly bending down her delicate form under his weight, she led him towards home, weeping silently all the way.

What a neat, tasteful picture was that still cabin when they entered it. Curtains of cloud-white muslin floated at the little windows. The table, with its milk, its fruit and flowers, stood in the middle of the room, clearly revealed by the radiance of the lamp. Two or three easy chairs stood about; luxurious, and not ungraceful affairs, scooped out of flour-barrels, stuffed with fine hay, and covered with stout, white linen, altogether an invention which sprang out of necessity. That long packing-box was cushioned and draped into a pretty article of furniture, which might not have been out of place in a city parlor.

Mrs. Holt had, with great taste and industry, thus embellished her prairie-home, hoping and praying for the new life which would spring out of her husband's reformation. With her own hands she had covered the rough walls of her cabin with coarse cloth and concealed that under delicate paper, against which two or three fine engravings, hung in frames of fir-cones, acorn-cups, and vine-tendrils, that looked like ancient carving. If any home on earth could have won the heart of a wanderer to domestic ease, this would have done so, for here that woman had brought all the refinement and mechanical genius of a life-time. Love had made her an inventor, and her life on the prairies, instead of being a hardship, was like working out a poem.

Alas! alas! how did this woman, so delicate and sensitive, come back to her pretty home that night, bending beneath the weight of a drunken man; her dress drenched with dew, her feet so wet that they left tracks on the matting, tears upon her face, ice at her heart—hopeless, utterly hopeless. The last prop had fallen away from her. The rest of her existence must be painful and humiliating endurance.

Mrs. Holt led her husband into the house, and closed the door, afraid that some one might see his disgrace.

"Sup—supper," muttered the inebriate, gathering his weight up from the shoulder of his wife, and staggering toward the table. "Told you I'd be home! but they set the prairies a-fire—snap, flash, lus, sparks here—sparks there; sp—sparks. Yes! got home to supper, in spite of 'em all. Come, set to, old Methuselah! What's that on your dress? Water? Been wading in the creek, ha! It's rainin' down your face, too, running down the wrinkles like gutters! What an old guy! Take care, you're in my way! I want to catch that chair when it comes round! Hello!—the table's getting into a whirl! Hold on!—hold on, I say! One, two, three, four baskets of berries! Pitchers of milk hopping about! Hold on!—hold on, I say!"

Here the man squared his feet, planted them heavily on the floor, and pressing both hands on the table, held on to it in dread earnest, calling out,

"Stop it!—stop it! By George! it whirls round like a cart-wheel! Steady!—steady!—steady!"

Here he dropped into the chair his wife had placed for him, still holding on to the table with one hand, while he poured a flood of milk over the table-cloth, in vainly trying to fill a bowl with it.

"My dear," said he at last, turning his heavy eye upon his wife, and speaking with a great effort at politeness, "oblige me by—by picking it up. It isn't just the thing to see good milk lying about loose! Pick it up, my love, and do it in a bowl! Run, my dear! pour out the bread, and I'll try and make a supper, my—my darling!"

The poor woman had no smiles for this ridiculous address, but she sat down by the table, wiped the milk up with a napkin, filled the bowl, and crimsoned the white fluid with a rich supply of berries. These seemed to fill her husband with nothing but loathing, for he pushed the table away with a violent jar that shook everything upon it; got up, reeled toward the pretty white couch, and then threw himself heavily upon it. In a few moments he was asleep, and breathed like a man seized with apoplexy.

Then the woman sat down in her rustic easy-chair, and, dropping both hands into her lap, fell into a dull lethargy of despair. She looked ten years older than she had done that morning. All the bloom which reviving hopes and the fresh air of a wild country had given her, was swept away. The very heart in her bosom was heavy as marble.

Young Sterling came in, and found his mother sitting there, helpless and hopeless. He also saw the man, whom she loved so dearly, lying upon the whiteness of that pretty couch, degrading it with his besotted sleep. He paused a step from the door, and took in the scene with a glance full of pain and surprise. After months of blamelessness, had it come to this with the man?

Mrs. Holt saw the scorn and sorrow in her son's look, and shrunk away from it with a shiver. He saw it, and went up to her softly, and with the tenderness of great love in his voice,

"Do not let it trouble you so, mother. It may not happen again."

The poor woman gave him a look of piteous gratitude, and her tears began to flow like rain. The kindness of her son thawed the ice at her heart.

The young man let her cry in peace, and, going up to the couch, put a pillow under the sleeping man's head; seeing which the poor woman covered her face with her hands, and began to sob.

"There! he is made comfortable now; let him sleep it off as he is, dear mother. Come, come! it is not so very bad. Let me help you into the other room. All will be right to-morrow."

She got up, wearily, and went into the little bed-room, sighing forth a faint good-night. Sterling went up the stairs, which led to a garret under the roof, and, finding his humble bed, lay upon it all night, watching the moon as it mounted higher and higher in the sky, and flooded the garret with a silvery radiance, beautiful as the joy which was keeping him in a state of celestial wakefulness. Had he ever loved before? Could any previous experience be compared to the glory and sublime blissfulness that pervaded his whole being that night? Had his love for Constance Hudson been anything like that? Was it not pity, and the ardent admiration of beauty—to which his art made him peculiarly susceptible—rather than the intense devotion that pervaded his whole being now? In his desire to respect the dead had he not given an idea of perfect love for his young wife which the facts did not entirely carry out? How beautiful Dora had looked in her first indignant surprise that so vital a secret should have existed between them. With what sweet assurances she had forgiven him! Not in words—for he had rather been permitted to read them in the uplifting of her eyes, and the cadence of her low voice—but in a hundred ways she had told him, that, in her, love was stronger than pride. Yet Dora craved entire love, as every woman must who gives it as she did.

No; Sterling could not say to himself there, in the still moonlight, that he had ever wholly loved any woman as he now loved this girl Dora. In the sweet companionship of their lives, a strong, pure feeling had rooted itself, which was unlike anything the young man had ever dreamed of before. That other passion had been of the earth; this had the holiness of eternity in it. He scarcely thought how rarely beautiful she was; for her very identity was swallowed up in his own being, and she seemed a part of his very life.

In his sweet dreaming, the young man forgot the trouble that had fallen upon his own household; but when the daylight came, and through the thin flooring he heard the sobs of a woman, in such grief that she had not closed her eyes during the night, it went to his heart like a reproach. How could he dream of perfect happiness, while his mother was suffering so keenly?

When Sterling came down stairs, his mother was busy about her household work, looking worn and haggard, as if the man, outstretched upon the couch, were dead, rather than degraded. They sat down to breakfast together in silence, with the door closed, that their shame might be shut out from the neighbors, and thus they took the first really uncomfortable meal in that house.