DIANA.

MY friend Rossiter spends the latter part of these long winter evenings gazing silently into the fire. I never dared to ask him what shadows he saw there. But last evening he drew me to his side, and while we sat together in the ruddy ember gloom, he painted this picture:-

"She was a dark beauty. Her face was of rather a heavy cast, yet her features were strongly marked. Her forehead was high and exquisitely moulded, her mouth and chin large and round, and her eyes full, restless, and glowing. A rich clear color trembled through the brown of a cheek that had been tanned by exposure to sun and wind. She had the most beautiful hair that any woman has worn since Helen. It was a soft dark brown, rich, thick, and tremulous.

"She was a Canadian backwoods girl, who could wield gun and paddle as skilfully as her hunter brother, with whom she lived in the wilderness. When I first saw her, she was speeding a canoe across the wild river that ran in front of their cabin. The apparition of this beautiful girl set the last charm upon the loveliness of the spot. The utter solitude of the forest around; the white water of the river, that mirrored the hemlocks hanging in rich tracery over its edge; the densely wooded mountains behind, that rose blue in the thin autumnal haze, - all were consecrated by her presence. She was a perfect Diana, save that she would not have kissed Endymion; but if she had Endymion could never have resisted.

"As I came to know her better, I found a peculiar charm in her which I never saw in other women, whom contact with the social world makes selfish. Here was a woman who, during the twenty years of her life, had met with no more than a score of human beings. Yet she possessed the germ of those pure inborn gifts which cultivation can mock, but never equal. She could analyze the beauty of forest scenery; but she criticised it intuitively, not by reason. She did not know that this was a rare gift. She was not conscious of her powers, and did not know but that every woman was stirred to deep emotion by the quiet beauty of a lake or the wild grandeur of a windy mountain. Her life was given to the loveliness of the silent forest and the misty waterfall; to the flowers, the rocks, and the trees. They were her companions, her teachers, her world. In them she lost all thought of self, and therefore she was natural. It is true that 'there is real grace in ease of manner,' and her every movement was beautiful. We find elegance in the wilderness sometimes, as well as in drawing-rooms. The backwoods girl was a lady. Not all the wildness of rough swamp or grim shaggy mountain could make her spirit other than a gentle one. Nature made her in the mood in which she made the roses, the sunlight, and the dew, and she made her one with all of them. She was a poem, this lady of the wilderness,- her mind was a mirror of the divine life of nature. It is not true that 'men must have enough knowledge of the world to see the vanity of it' before solitude will become them. Only when alone with nature does man cease to be an egotist. I never meet the artificial lilies of our social life without thinking of this natural lily of Lake Massawepie."

Rossiter sat watching the red coals. I did not speak to him. He was in love with a creature of his fancy. The flickering light upon his face was the light of the camp-fire, and he breathed again the autumn air, fresh-laden with the odors of the balsam.

W.