Sadly the pale, sick mother wept, and mourned her absence, listening in vain for the light footfall and soft, ringing voice she would never hear again.
Three weeks had passed away, and then, far and near the papers teemed with accounts of the horrible Norwalk catastrophe, which desolated many a home, and wrung from many a heart its choicest treasure.

Side by side they found them--Nellie and her husband--the light of her brown eyes quenched forever, and the pulses of his heart still in death! I was present when they told the poor invalid of her loss, and even now I seem to hear the bitter, wailing cry which broke from her white lips, as she begged them to unsay what they had said, and tell her Nellie was not dead--that she would come back again.
It could not be.

Nellie would never return; and in six weeks' time the broken-hearted mother was at rest with her child.
THE THANKSGIVING PARTY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES..