BRIGHTLY'S ORPHAN.
CHAPTER I.
John Brightly jumped out of bed. He filled his short and stout pantaloons with a pair of legs proportionable, and ran to the window.
Nothing to be seen through the thick frost upon the panes, until he had breathed himself a round eye-hole bearing upon his thermometer.
That erect little sentry had an emphatic fact to communicate to the scrutinizing eye of John Brightly. It was a very frigid fact, and made the eye that perceived it shiver a little. But the temperature of Brightly's mind was perpetual summer. The iciest ideas admitted into his brain became warmed and melted by the sunny spirits there; and so it was with this cold fact which the cold mercury fired at him through its cold glass barrel.
"Zero!" said he, "a sharp zero, Mrs. Brightly!"
A pretty, delicate, anxious face, lifted itself from the pillow by the side of its fellow, still depressed in the middle and high at the sides as her husband's head had left it.
"Zero!" rejoined a voice sweet, but feeble. "I
