THE BIRTH OF FLEANCE BY CAROLINE CHESE BRO. KRÜGER. A STONE-CUTTER stands in his yard, on the last day of spring, and looks thoughtfully at the granite blocks scattered around him. He has his tools in his hands, and his attitude is that of one who is going forth, rather than of one who has come in, to labors. And this is true of him; he is going forth. He is going from his accustomed place of business, in the village, up to the mountain-quarry, full ten miles away. To the quarry where he worked when he was young. Until quite recently he has been able to regard this stone-yard, in the village, as the reward of his industry; and, accordingly, has taken no little pride in it; such reasonable pride as a good man may indulge over the evidences of his honest toil. Frequently, since he entered into partnership with Proprietor Adams, Kruger has been up to the quarry, but he goes now as he never went before, leaving his heart behind him. Kruger's youth was spent up there. In those days it was a rare thing for him to make a pilgrimage to any of the hamlets scattered through the valley. Nature had more to do with his development than human society. Among his fellow-workmen he was early distinguished for his prudence and skill, his sobriety and diligence. He assumed nothing among them, but his personal dignity was so great that even old men deferred to him, and felt his influence. His charac ter was strong in moral integrity, his countenance the index of that character. It had a purity and a repose, that of itself was a restraint, agreeable and wholesome upon his fellows. Benjamin Kruger's father had been a quarry-man, and as no accidental circumstance had breathed the spirit of adventure into the son, he had gone on from year to year, occupied in the same labors, only enlarging his sphere as opportunity led and compelled. He was not driven by any internal influence to find companionship in the heart of nature, or among the riotous crowds of men. Nor was imagination ever quickened by a sense of want, to find responses of himself in any direction. He had not the spirit of the young brave who waits watching in solitude and darkness for the honor of knighthood; his sole battle-field was that on which spirits are marshaled; his contest, that of which the SAVIOUR is the Judge. But his spirit was greatly acted upon by the influences surrounding him. They were in harmony with the life that was in him. That spark, kindled into pure and steady flame, in its nature could never occasion conflagration. He was open to the sweetest and best influences of the wild mountain-country; needed not that any should call his observation to the clouds that circled round the heights that lifted far above him; to the dazzling effulgence of the seventh heaven; to the VOL. XLVI. 30 branches of the pines as they stood in fair relief against the azure sky on some great tower of granite; to the mosses which overspread the rocks, or the delicate flowers, that sprung out on their thread-like stems from a sterile bed, or to the softness of a summer day, or to the sunrise or the moonlight; he saw all these, sang at his labor, and was happy. When, having won the confidence of the owner of the quarry, by his constant well-doing, Kruger accepted his offer, and invested his earnings with the funds of Adams, in opening the yard in the village, and removed from the quarry to the region below, not a man of his companions but rejoiced in and was proud of his prosperity; the raggedest among them felt that some honor reflected upon himself in the advancement of his fellow, though he should never take the first step to prove himself the holder of a like aspiration and intent; not one of them but wished Benjamin all future good-luck. In the village Kruger's relations to life of course differed from those sustained by him in the mountain. He had not only the opportunity, but also the necessity of making new observations of life, and some changes in himself soon became manifest. He was sought by the young people of his own rank, and did not retire before the seeking. Thus he came into contact with those who were occupied by thoughts and things to which he was a stranger, and with his limited experience it must needs be a long time before he understood perfectly either himself or them. Before this time came, he married. Many people do the like. Don't blame him. The girl of his choice was a gay, sprightly creature. She had seen more of the world than Benjamin, and yet but very little. She had been a belle among the rustic beauties. Kruger loved her at first sight; she broke upon his vision a miracle of beauty. It might have been the new face, or the manly beauty of the stoneyard man, or the reputed fortunes of Kruger, or his good looks, or all these things together, that made the impression on the heart of Fleance Brook. Most likely these influences acted in unison, for so they generally do. In good time this young man and woman wedded, but it did not prove a very happy marriage. Fleance was not the person Kruger would have chosen or desired for a wife, had he known the world better; and Fleance, for her part frivolous and gay and ignorant, would as soon have thought of marrying the Czar himself, as Benjamin, had she known what he was. When experience proved to Kruger, that there was a cause for the differences daily rising between him and Fleance, lying deeper than education or circumstance had fathomed, he was, more than ever, master of himself, and his integrity remained uncompromised. This is the same as saying that he was by no means an ordinary person. His disappointment was too deep to find relief in querulous utterances, or by taking the village into his confidence. No gossip was refreshed at his fireside, or gathered refuse there, to distribute again to those that languished for such unwholesome food. Nor did he ever seek redress for his mistake, by visiting with any sort of vengeance the unfortunate occasion of it. He was too generous for that. He labored rather for the reclamation of his wife's thoughts and aims from their frivolity; 1855.] The Birth of Fleance Krüger. to enter as he might into her enjoyments; to please her as he might. But they never were companions, as either he or she in days of courtship had anticipated. And all Kruger's efforts in his wife's behalf found their best result in his own soul. It could not be a vain work, since all endeavor must have a consequent. It was to their child that the father learned to look with hoping eyes for the fulfilment of the longing, that from the day his eyes were opened, took possession of his soul. Fleance the daughter was the heir She had her father's refined and beautiful of her parents' best estate. mental organization, his sterling virtue of character, and her mother's vivacity of temperament, and grace of physical structure. -- She was like every thing that had any loveliness to Kruger's eyes. as free, pure, meek, innoLike the pure and fragile mountain-flowerscent. She was like the stars he used to watch in the summer evenings of his youth, when he sat resting in his cabin-door, up in the mountainland; the stars, who were called by the old Hebrew poets' Daughters of God,' and 'Angels!' She was like the laughing brooks that danced whither they would, and always might be trusted that they would disHer voice, so soft yet strong, cover for themselves the best way. so loving, brave, and so melodious, reminded him of the clearest and the softest notes of the horns of hunters, when they rode among the hills and told upon the bugles the tidings of success. In the hour of her birth Kruger consecrated himself once again to Gon, by vows, the like of which he had not before uttered, and he implored divine wisdom for the guidance of his child. From the hour of her birth, she was the burden of his thoughts. He carried her, thus, about with him, wherever he went, as her mother carried the child on her bosom; he was as faithful cherishing the thought as she the form; He was not demonstrative of as solicitous in guarding it from harm. his paternal pride; he had even no birth-day festivities for her; but he watched the development of his daughter with eyes that saw no fairer, purer, or more precious thing on earth. Thought of her sent him deeper and deeper into himself; made him a searcher for all knowledge hidden there that could concern her. He would learn of no less loving oracle, all that he might do for her sake. More and more exacting he became of his energies and impulses and thoughts. His love exacted of him self-denial in which an anchorite His sense of obligation to this life, his sense of might have gloried. responsibility to this being he had called into the world, deepened with each passing day. Time and eternity, with their dangers, trials, glories, impressed him as they might not otherwise have done, and demanded of him, in her behalf, that which he was ready to yield, incessant watching, care, and toil. The responsibility, in the first weeks of the child's life, took the form of a moral obligation to his consciousness, and he said to himself, She shall never out-grow the instinct of these days; this instinct of loving dependence shall endure. But, as weeks and months passed on, and his mind, under the new influences, expanded, Kruger began to take a more serious thought of his worldly fortunes than he had yet taken. He became - and his wife hailed with joy the symptoms which she could not understand he became ambitious. Small though the village was, in it were to be found many of the varieties and grades of social life. When Kruger began to look for diversities of rank, circumstances, and capacity, he beheld the phenomena. And as his daughter grew out of babyhood into speech, and winning ways, and gracefulness, he began to consider these manifestations with all a parent's seriousness. When Kruger began to talk about these things, to manifest some curiosity in regard to the methods by which the best people in the village had attained their elevation, his wife in secret did rejoice. Now there was a bond of sympathy between them; and, perhaps with some exaggeration, as she gave him a town history, she dwelt upon the fact that among the notable families, the chief among them all, the wealthiest, had risen from nothing.' 'Do not all men rise from nothing?' asked Kruger, with a solemn smile. But the words of Fleance had made an impression. There was a duty which he owed to his child, and he returned to his labors with renewed energy, and a steadfastness of purpose that robbed life of some of its freshness, and brought about a struggle in the once serene dominion of his soul. For these were cares from which he had been free; anxieties new and strange beset him, and a hope that was to hold his life in bondage till a deliverer should come. 'The cares of this world.' It was no lust of riches. In the midst of his new surroundings, and with his new aspirations, there was still nothing in his heart that could respond to the voice whose utterance, as his wife gave it, astonished and disgraced him. She had lived all her life in sight of those goodly mountains, but was not thus protected from certain very, very grovelling, and alas! common notions in regard to worldly fortunes. Success she regarded as in itself an absolute good-not the token, not the outward and visible sign of an inward possession of the powers that control circumstance, and make the possessors everywhere and at all times triumphant. She had not found it possible, even amid the surroundings of her childhood, to grow as Benjamin had done. The fault is not in our stars, dear Brutus! Neither mountains, atmosphere, nor education were at fault. Evil is not of circumstance and surroundings. Circumstance may foster, surroundings may encourage, but a man's soul is a power distinct from, and not to be confounded with, its conditions. A man's clothes cannot be the best of him, unless he is a beggar! Clothes are not Man-Circumstance is not Evil. -- Kruger was not the prisoner of lust but of hope, when he began to give more thought to labor, and more strength to money-getting. He had a lofty aim in view the best good of his child. And he only manifested his abnegation of self, in the exhaustion to which he cheerfully submitted in his labors. Let no professional hair-splitter presume to say that he was after all but selfish in his working, because it was for his child. A selfish soul must of necessity be selfish in all its loving; because the object loved is loved for what it is to him, and not for what it is to others and to God. No assurance of perpetuity is ever given in such demonstration of affection, though it issue even from a parent's heart. It was not, I say, because the infant Fleance was his child, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh; not that she should in after-times reflect honor or credit upon him, that he would have her adorned in royal appareling. But for her own sake. Not that she might eclipse her neighbors. For the advantage, not the vanity for the enduring joy, not the hourly parade; he would have the young immortal's wings grow for immortal flight-not clipped for a safe strutting through the limits of his paternal pride. And for this he would first of all guard her against the assaults of time and temporal things; he would prevent the possibility of want; spiritually, as well as in her external fortunes, he would fortify her, he would make the ways of life broad and open to his child. She should have the means of culture; all that was advantageous as aids to her growth. With joy did he behold, as she out-grew the obligations and necessities of instinct, that a true filial love was unfolding in the child's heart, manifesting itself, and more and more distinctly as the spirit within her more intelligently ascertained itself, in obedience, reverence, perfect trust. With joy too he beheld eagerly he had watched for this manifestation that the mother of the child shared in this filial recognition, this expression of the young heart's loyalty. Nor was he blind that he could not behold the purifying and exalting influence of their daughter's love on the heart of her mother. With the child's growth and development, she too seemed to grow and develop. External nature with all its significancies had been in a most vital sense lost upon her; but the demonstrations of the heart, when they were made through her child, were not beyond her grasp and apprehension. She was alive, and she too became with her husband a prisoner of hope, and if the bonds and bondage were not precisely what they were to him, if there was more of dross in them, and fear and weariness because of them, still the bondage was the same, and both felt their union in it. But Fleance had not out-grown her childhood when her mother died, and Kruger was left alone in charge of his daughter. There were many ways suggested to him for the disposition of the child after this bereavement; his friends offered their counsel, and the parents of his wife opened their doors for their son and grand-child; no plan that occurred to him, none that was submitted by the sympathy of his friends, did Kruger reject without careful consideration; but the result of his deliberation was in the face of every proposition, and the occasion of no small surprise among the people to whom he was known. He took the house of one of his workmen on the borders of the stone-yard, and removed to it from his pretty cottage. There would he live, and Fleance should thus be ever under his own watchful care; by day and by night she would be with him; none should come between them; he would be all in all to her, as she certainly already was all in all to him. Since that time, year after year the partnership between the proprietor of the quarry and Kruger had continued, and Kruger by diligent working and prudence had brought all affairs in which he was concerned into a very prosperous condition; but the proprietor, for his part, had been |