In the cold commanding gaze of the second figure there was a mightiness such as the student had never before beheld. She was of a colossal stature; her huge right hand held an unsheathed sword. She seemed to possess a giant's strength; her face was full of sky-aspiring thought—a picture of vaulting Ambition.
The eldest had a hollow look and withered mien, and the lustre of her eye seemed spent and faded. She looked like Destiny, the child of Earth's old age. "I heard," she said, "yon mortal's boast, that he had climbed in safety the slippery tops of human state, and reached at last its gilded pinnacle. 'Necessity and Chance approach me not, and what I will is fate.' Vain boast! Man is the sport of circumstance, when circumstance seems the sport of man. My summons monarchs must obey. Though mortal be horsed upon the swiftest couriers of the air, swifter my shafts and surer is their aim."
The youngest seemed moved almost to tears while the hands of the eldest glided over the historian, now wrapped in the depths of slumber. But Destiny was inexorable, and neither supplications nor reproaches availed to dissuade her from her predetermined course of countermanding the order of Mr. Blaine's political life. After chanting mysterious rites, and apparently concluding her midnight inquest, the eldest exclaimed, in an impatient tone, "Come! come! let me cut the thread and thrum." The youngest urged that to cut the thread so long spun upon her own distaff would be to loosen and unravel the brightest woof Fame had ever woven. But neither her supplications nor her reproaches availed; and, while Fame held the distaff and Ambition continued to spin, Destiny instantly cut the threads, which were no sooner loosened than she exclaimed, while Fame and Ambition stood by in silence,—
"The Fates, whose decrees are serviceable to wise purposes, see at one view all the threads of existence. Their sentences, which now appear but mutinous accidents, run forward into all the depths of eternity, and will be accomplished in due time according to the preordained plan and a design full of wisdom. His political life has a 'germinant, springing accomplissement;' it vanishes now, after the manner of the gods, only to appear again. The Fates will commit to your adjustment the height and ful-
