SCENE III.

The time is the late afternoon of the same day, and the place is again

Sanford Browne's plantation.

Judith Browne, having exhausted her experiments on the frock, the

bonnet, and the hoop petticoat bought for her in London and sent like

the proverbial pig in a poke, had taken to watching the Yankee peddling

sloop, which, having lain for an hour at Patterson's on the Virginia

shore, was now heading for the Browne place. It was pretty to see the

sloop heel over under a beam wind and shoot steadily forward, while the

waves dashed fair against her weather side and splashed the water from

time to time to the top of her free board. It was a pleasant sight to

mark her approach by the gradual increase in her size and the growing

distinctness with which the details of her rigging could be made out.

At length, when her bow appeared to Judith Browne to be driving so

straight on the bank that nothing could prevent the vessel's going

ashore Captain Perkins called to his only man, standing at the helm,

"Hard down!" and the sloop swung her nose into the waves, and

gracefully rounded head into the wind just in time to lie close under

the bank, rocking fore and aft like a duck. As soon as she had swung

into the wind enough for her sail to flap, the captain called to the

boy who was the third member of the crew to let go the halyards; and as

the sail ran rattling down, the captain heaved the anchor at the bow

with his own hands. Then a plank was run out, a line made fast forward,

and Perkins climbed the bank and greeted Mrs. Browne. His manner

combined strangely the heartiness of the seaman with the sinuous

deference of the peddler. His speech was that which one hears only in

the most up-country New England regions and among London small

shopkeepers. The uttering of his vowel sounds taper end first greatly

amused his customers in the Chesapeake regions, while their abrupt

clipping of both vowels and liquids was equally curious to Perkins, who

regarded all people outside of New England as natives to be treated

with condescending kindness alike for Christian and for business

reasons, and as people who were even liable to surprise him by the

possession of some rudimentary virtues in spite of their unlucky

outlandishness.

"Glad to see yeh again, Mis' Braown," he said when he reached the top

of the bank. "Where's Mr. Braown?"

"He's gone down to the Nancy Jane. Won't you come in, Captain Perkins?

Come in and sit down a while."

"Wal, yes. And how's your little gal?" Seeing a dubious look on Mrs.

Browne's face, he said: "Or is it a boy, now? I call at so many houses

I git confused. Fine child, I remember."

"The lad's gone off with his father," said Judith, giving Perkins a

seat in the passage.

After more preliminary talk the peddler got to his main point, that he

had lots of nice notions and things this year cheaper'n they could be

had in London. All the folks agreed that his things were "cheaper,

considerin' quality, Mis' Braown, than you could git 'em in London."

Judith knew by experience that his things were neither very good nor

very cheap, but her only chance in life to know anything of the

delights of shopping lay in the coming of peddling sloops. One might

order a frock, a bonnet, or a petticoat from London, but one must wait

nearly a year till the tobacco ship returned to get what had been sent

for. It was better to be cheated a little in order to get the pleasure

of making up her mind and then changing it, of fancying herself

possessor now of this and now of that, and finally getting what she

liked best after having had the usufruct of the whole stock. She was

soon examining the goods that Perkins's boy had brought up to

her--fancy things for herself and young Sanford, and coarse cloth for

her servants. She concluded nothing about staple trading till her

husband should return; for prices were to be fixed on the corn and

bacon which must be paid in exchange. But there were articles that she

craved, and of which she preferred not to speak to her husband, for a

while at least, and these she paid for from her little hoard of pieces

of eight, or Spanish dollars. The change she made in fractions of these

coins--actual quarters of dollars cut like pieces of pie. These were

tested in Perkins's little money scales. Less than a quarter of a

dollar was usually disregarded in the South; and as for Perkins, he

never seemed to have any fractional silver to give back in change, but

always proposed some little article that he would put in at cost just

to fill up to the value of a piece of eight.

* * * * *

Paddling with the wind, Sanford Browne's cedar canoe made good speed,

and as the sun was setting and the wind falling it glided past the

Yankee sloop into shoal water farther up, where its inmates

disembarked, and beached their craft.

Sanford Browne walked rapidly up the bank, followed by his son, the

servants, and the old convict. He approached Perkins and greeted him,

but in a manner not cordial and hardly courteous. He looked at Judith

so severely that she fancied him offended with her. She reflected

quickly that he could not have known anything of her surreptitious

trading with the peddler. Uriah Perkins concluded that a storm was

brewing between husband and wife, and found it necessary to return to

the sloop to make her fast astern, against the turn of the tide and the

veering of the wind.

When Perkins had disappeared, Sanford Browne pointed to the convict and

said slowly and with fierceness:

"Judy, that's the man. That's Black Jim Lewis, that stole me away from

home and sold me for a redemptioner. Jocko, go fetch the manacles."

Judith stood speechless. It was a guiding maxim with her that women

should not meddle with men's business, and it was an article of faith

that whatever her husband did was right. She sympathized with his

resentment against the man who had kidnaped him. But the sight of the

terror-stricken face of the cowardly brute smote her woman's heart with

pity as the manacles were put on the convict's wrists.

"See that he doesn't get away," said Browne to Bob.

"He can't pound his corn with them things," said Bob, pointing to the

handcuffs. "Shall I get him some meal?"

"Not to-night," said Browne. "He didn't give me a crust to eat the

first night I was on ship. Turn about's fair play, Captain Lewis. Take

him to the quarters."

When the convict found himself manacled, his terror increased. He

pulled away from Bob and approached Browne.

"Let me speak a word, master," he began tremulously. "I'm all broke up

and ruinated, anyhow. I know the devil must 'a' been in me the day I

took you away. I've thought of it many a time, and I've said, 'Jim

Lewis, something dreadful'll come to you for stealin' a good little boy

that way.'" Here he paused. Then he resumed in a still more broken

voice: "When I was put on to a transport to come to this country I

remembered you, and I says, 'That's what's come of it.' Soon as I saw

that little fellow, the very picture of you the day when I coaxed you

away, I says to myself, 'O my God, I'm done fer now! I'm ruinated for a

fact; I might as well be in hell as in Maryland.' But, master, if

you'll only have just a little pity on an old man that's all broke up

and ruinated, I'll--I'll--be a good servant to you. I promise you,

afore Almighty God. Don't you go and be too hard on a poor ruinated old

man. I'm old--seems to me I'm ten year older than I wuz afore I saw you

this mornin'. I know you hate me. You've got strong reasons to hate me.

I hate myself, and I keep sayin' to myself, says I, 'Jim Lewis, what an

old devil you are!' But please, master, if you won't be too hard on me,

I think I'll be better. I can't live long nohow. But----"

"There, that'll do," said Browne.

"Please, Mr. Browne," interposed Judy.

"Lewis, do you remember when you woolded a sailor's head?" demanded the

planter.

"I don't know, master. I have done lots of things a little hard.

Sailors are a hard lot."

"If you'd had pity on that poor sailor when he begged for mercy, I'd

have pity on you to-night But I cried over that sailor that you

wouldn't have mercy on, and now I can't pity you a bit. You've made

your own bed. Your turn has come."

Saying this, Sanford Browne went into the house, while the old sea

captain followed Bob in a half-palsied way round the south end of the

house toward the servants' quarters, muttering, "Well, now, Jim Lewis,

you're done fer."

"Mr. Browne, what are you going to do with that old man?" asked Judy,

with more energy than she usually showed in speaking to her husband.

"I don't know, Judy. Something awful, I reckon." Browne could not make

up his mind to any distinct act of cruelty beyond sending the convict

supperless to bed.

"I don't like you to be so hard on an old man. I know he's bad--as bad

as can be, but that's no reason why you should be bad."

"I wouldn't be bad, Judy. Just think how he sold me, like Joseph, away

from my family!"

"But Joseph wasn't really very unkind to his brothers, Mr. Browne; and

you won't be too hard on the poor old wretch, now will you?"

"Judy, I mean to make him suffer. When I think of my mother, and all

she must have suffered, I haven't a drop of pity in me. He's got to

suffer for his crimes now. That's what he was thrown into my hands for,

I reckon, Judy."

"Then you won't be the man you have been. Time and again you've bought

some poor kid from a hard master like old Hoak, to save him from

suffering. Now you'll get to be hard and hateful like old Hoak

yourself."

"Judy, remember my mother."

"Do you think your mother, if she is alive, would like to think of your

standing over that old wretch while he was whipped and whipped and

washed with salt water, maybe? If your mother has lived, she has been

kept alive just by thinking what a good boy you were; and she says to

herself, 'My Sanford wouldn't hurt anything. If he was run off to the

plantations, he has grown to be the best man in all the country.' Do

you think she'd like to have you turn a kind of public whipper or

hangman for her sake?"

Browne looked at his wife in surprise. Her eyes flashed as she spoke,

and the little womanly body, whose highest flight had seemed to end in

a London frock and petticoat, had suddenly become something much more

than he had fancied possible to her. She had taken the first place, and

he felt himself overshadowed. He looked up at her with a sort of

reverence, but he held stubbornly to a purpose that had been ossifying

for twenty years.

"That's all well enough for a woman, Judy. But you know that any other

man would do just what I am going to do, under the same circumstances.

I don't like to do what you don't want me to do, but I sha'n't let old

Lewis off. I reckon he'll find my hand hard on him as long as he holds

out. Any other man would do just the same, Judy."

Judith Browne stood still and looked at her husband in silence. Then

she spoke in a repressed voice:

"Sanford Browne, what do you talk to me that way for? Any other man

might worry this old wretch out of his life, but you won't do it. What

did I marry you for? Why did I leave my father's house to take you, a

poor redemptioner just out of your time? It was because you weren't

like other men. I knew you were kind and good-hearted when other men

were cruel and unfeeling. From that day to this you have never made me

sorry that I left home and turned my father against me. But if you do

this thing you have in mind to a poor old wretch that can't help

himself, then you won't be Sanford Browne any more. You'll have that

old man's blood on your hands, and Judy will never get over being sorry

that she left her friends to go with you." The woman's voice had broken

as she spoke these last words, and now she broke down completely, and

sobbed a little.

"What shall I do, Judy?" said her husband softly. "God knows, if I keep

him in sight I shall kill him some day."

"Sell him. Sell him right off. There's Captain Perkins coming up the

bank now."

"You sell him, Judy. Perkins has things you want. I give Lewis to you.

Make any trade you please." Then, as his wife moved away, he followed

her, and said in a smothered voice: "Sell him quick, Judy. Don't stand

on the price. Get him out of sight before I kill him."

Judith went out to meet the peddling captain, who was now strolling

toward the house in hope of an invitation to supper, knowing that Mrs.

Browne's biscuit and fried chicken were better than the salt pork and

hoecake cooked by the boy on the sloop. The wind had fallen, and the

water view was growing dim in the gloaming. Judith explained to the

peddler that the convict her husband had bought proved to be an old

enemy of his. She stammered a little in her endeavor not to betray the

real reasons for selling him, and Perkins, who was proud of his own

penetration, inferred that Browne was afraid of his life if he should

keep the new servant. He saw in this an unexpected chance for profit.

When Mrs. Browne offered to sell him if Perkins would take him to the

eastern shore or some other place away off, he said that servants wuz a

thing he didn't deal in--a leetle dangerous at sea where the crew wuz

so small as his. Hard to sell an old fellow; the planters wanted young

men. But he wanted to accommodate, you know, an' seein' as how Mis'

Braown had been a good customer, he would do what he could. He would

have to make a run over to the eastern shore perticular to sell this

man. Folks on the eastern shore didn't buy much. Hadn't sold 'em a hat,

for instance. They all wore white cotton caps, men an' women; an' they

made the caps themselves out of cotton of their own raisin'. But, as he

wuz a-sayin', Mis' Braown had been a good customer, an' he wanted to

accommodate. But he'd have to put the price low enough so as he

wouldn't be poorer by the trade. Thus he faced about on his disjunctive

conjunction, now this way, now that, until he had time to consider what

was the very lowest figure he could offer as a basis for his higgling.

He couldn't offer much, but he would give a price which he named in

pieces of eight, stipulating that he should pay it in goods. He saw in

this a chance for elastic profits in both directions.

Judith hardly gave a thought to the price he named; but as soon as she

perceived that he had disentangled himself from his higgling preamble

so far as to offer a definite sum, she accepted it.

This lack of hesitation on her part disconcerted the peddler, who had a

feeling that a bargain made without preliminary chaffering had not been

properly solemnized. He was suspicious now that he was the victim of

some design.

"That is to say, Mis' Braown, I only dew this to accommodate ole

friends. It ain't preudent to make such a trade in the dark. I'll dew

it if I find the man sound in wind and limb, and all satisfactory, when

I come to look him over."

"Of course that's what I mean," said Judith. "Now come in and take

supper with us, captain," she continued, her voice still in a quiver

with recent emotions.

"Well, I don't keer if I dew, jest fer to bind the bargain, you knaow.

I told the boy I'd be back, but I reckon they won't wait long. Ship

folks don't wait much on nobody."

Judith turned toward the house, followed by the peddler. Sanford Browne

was still sitting in the entry just as Judith had left him, surprised

and in a sense paralyzed by the sudden and effective opposition which

his wife had offered to the gratification of his only grudge.

"Mr. Browne!" called Judith, almost hysterically, her tense nerves

suddenly shaken again. "What's that? Something's happened down at the

quarters."

Looking through the wide passage into the dim twilight beyond, she

could see running figures like shadows approaching the house. Sanford

Browne rose at his wife's summons in time to meet the convict Lewis,

still manacled, as he rushed into the passage at the back of the house

and dashed out again at the front. Browne attempted to arrest his

flight, crying out, as he made an effort to seize him, "Stop, you old

villain, or I'll kill you!" But the momentum of the flying figure

rendered Browne's grasp ineffectual, and in a moment he was out of

doors, just as Bob and Jocko and the other servants entered the passage

in a pell-mell pursuit.

As the running man emerged from the darkness of the passage, Perkins,

thinking his profit in jeopardy, threw himself athwart his path, and

cried: "Here! Where be you a-goin' so fast with them things on your

wrist?"

"To hell and damnation!" yelled Lewis, striking the peddler fair in the

breast with both manacled hands, and sending him rolling on the ground.

The convict did not pause a moment in his flight, but, with the whole

pack in full cry after him, dashed onward to the bank and down it.

Before any of his pursuers could lay hands on him he was aboard the

sloop.

"Ketch him! Ketch him!" cried Captain Perkins, once more on his feet,

and giving orders from the top of the bank.

The cabin boy had just emerged from the cabin to call the man to

supper. He and the sailor tried hard to seize the fleeing man, but

Captain Lewis swerved to one side and ran round the gunwale of the

sloop with both men after him. When he reached the stern he leaped

beyond their reach, and plunged head first into the water, sinking out

of sight where the fast-ebbing tide was now gurgling round the rudder.

In vain the boy and the sailorman looked with all their might at the

place where he had gone down; in vain they poked a long pole into the

water after him; in vain did Bob and Jocko paddle in the canoe all over

the place where Black Jim Lewis had sunk.

Perkins took the precaution, before descending the bank, to say:

"You'll remember, Mis' Braown, that I only bought him on conditions,

and stipple-lated I wuz to be satisfied when I come to look him over.

'Tain't no loss of mine." This caveat duly lodged, he descended to the

deck of his sloop, where he found the cabin boy shaking as with an

ague.

"What be you a-trimblin' abaout, naow? Got a fever 'n' agur a'ready? Y'

ain't afeard of a dead man, be yeh, Elkanah?"

"I don't noways like the idear," said Elkanah, "of sleepin' aboard, an'

him dead thar by his own will, a-layin' closte up to the sloop."

"He ain't nowher's nigh the sloop," responded Perkins. "This ebb-tide's

got him in tow, an' he'll be down layin' ag'in' the Nancy Jane afore

mornin'. That's the ship he'll ha'nt, bein' kind uv used to her."

Browne had remained standing at the top of the bank, without saying a

single word. He turned at last, and started slowly toward the house.

Judith, forgetting her invitation to the peddler, went after her

husband and took his hand.

"I'm so glad he's dead," said she. "I know the cruel man deserved his

fate. He'll be off your mind, now, dear; and nobody can say you did

it."

A BASEMENT STORY.

I.

It was one of those obscure days found only on the banks of

Newfoundland. There was no sun, and yet no visible cloud; there was

nothing, indeed, to test the vision by; there was no apparent fog, but

sight was soon lost in a hazy indefiniteness. Near objects stood out

with a distinctness almost startling. The swells ran high without

sufficient provocation from the present wind, and attention was

absorbed by the tremendous pitching of the steamer's bow, the wide arc

described by the mainmast against no background at all, and by the

smoky and bellying mainsail, kept spread to hold the vessel to some

sort of steadiness in the waves. There was no storm, nor any dread of a

storm, and the few passengers who were not seasick in stateroom bunks

below, or stretched in numb passivity on the sofas in the music saloon,

were watching the rough sea with a cheerful excitement. In the total

absence of sky and the entire abolition of horizon the eye rejoiced,

like Noah's dove, to find some place of rest; and the mainsail, smoky

like the air, but cutting the smoky air with a sharp plane, was such a

resting place for the vision. This sail and the reeky smokestack

beyond, and the great near billows that emerged from time to time out

of the gray obscurity--these seemed to save the universe from chaos. On

such a day the imagination is released from bounds, individuality is

lost, and space becomes absolute--the soul touches the poles of the

infinite and the unconditioned.

I do not pretend that such emotions filled the breasts of all the

twenty passengers on deck that day. One man was a little seasick, and

after every great rushing plunge of the steamer from a billow summit

into a sea valley he vented his irritation by wishing that he had there

some of the poets that--here he paused and gasped as the ship balanced

itself on another crest preparatory to another shoot down the flank of

a swell, while the screw, thrown clean out of the water, rattled wildly

in the unresisting air and made the ship quiver in every timber--some

of those poets, he resumed with bitterer indignation, that sing about

the loveliness of the briny deep and the deep blue--but here an errant

swell hit the vessel a tremendous blow on the broadside, making her

roll heavily to starboard, and bringing up through the skylights sounds

of breaking goblets thrown from the sideboards in the saloon below,

while the passenger who hated marine poetry was capsized from his

steamer chair and landed sprawling on the deck. A small group of young

people on the forward part of the upper deck were passing the day in

watching the swells and forecasting the effect of each upon the

steamer, rejoicing in the rush upward followed by the sudden falling

downward, much as children enjoy the flying far aloft in a swing or on

a teetering see-saw, to be frightened by the descent. Some of the young

ladies had books open in their laps, but the pretense that they had

come on deck to read was a self-deluding hypocrisy. They had left their

elderly relatives safely ensconced in staterooms below, and had worked

their way up to the deck with much care and climbing and with many

lurches and much grievous staggering, not for the purpose of reading,

but to enjoy the society of other young women, and of such young men as

could sit on deck. When did a young lady ever read on an ocean steamer,

the one place where the numerical odds are reversed and there are

always found two gallant young men to attend each young girl? This

merry half dozen, reclining in steamer chairs and muffled in shawls,

breathed the salt air and enjoyed the chaos into which the world had

fallen. On this deck, where usually there was a throng, they felt

themselves in some sense survivors of a world that had dropped away

from them, and they enjoyed their social solitude, spiced with apparent

peril that was not peril.

The enthusiastic Miss Sylvia Thorne, who was one of this party, was

very much interested in the billows, and in the attentions of a student

who sat opposite her. From time to time she remarked also on some of

the steerage passengers on the deck below; particularly was she

interested in a young girl who sat watching the threatening swells

emerge from the mist. Miss Sylvia spoke to the young lady alongside of

her about that interesting young girl in the steerage, but her

companion said she had so much trouble with the Irish at home that she

could not bear an Irish girl even at sea. Her mother, she went on to

say, had hired a girl who had proved most ungrateful, she had--but here

a scream from all the party told that a sea of more than usual

magnitude was running up against the port side. A minute later and all

were trying to keep their seats while the ship reeled away to starboard

with vast momentum, and settled swiftly again into the trough of the

sea.

Miss Thorne now wondered that the sail, which did not flap as she had

observed sails generally do, in poems, did not tear into shreds as she

had always known sails to do in novels when there was a rough sea. But

the blue-eyed student, having come from a fresh-water college, and

being now on a homeward voyage, knew all about it, and tried to explain

the difference between a sea like this and a storm or a squall. He

would have become hopelessly confused in a few minutes more had not a

lucky wave threatened to capsize his chair and so divert the

conversation from the sail to himself. And just as Sylvia was about to

change back to the sail again for the sake of relieving his

embarrassment, her hat strings, not having been so well secured as the

sail, gave way, and her hat went skimming down to the main deck below,

lodged a minute, and then took another flight forward. It would soon

have been riding the great waves on its own account, a mark for curious

sea gulls and hungry sharks to inspect, had not the Irish girl that

Sylvia had so much admired sprung to her feet and seized it as it swept

past, making a handsome "catch on the fly." A sudden revulsion of the

vessel caused her to stagger and almost to fall, but she held on to the

hat as though life depended on it. The party on the upper deck cheered

her, but their voices could hardly have reached her in the midst of the

confused sounds of the sea and the wind.

The student, Mr. Walter Kirk, a large, bright, blond fellow, jumped to

his feet and was about to throw himself over the rail. It was a chance

to do something for Miss Thorne; he felt impelled to recover her

seventy-five-cent hat with all the abandon of a lover flinging himself

into the sea to rescue his lady-love. But a sudden sense of the

ludicrousness of wasting so much eagerness on a hat and a sudden lurch

of the ship checked him. He made a gesture to the girl who held the

hat, and then ran aft to descend for it. The Irish girl, with the curly

hair blown back from her fair face, started to meet Mr. Kirk, but

paused abruptly before a little inscription which said that steerage

passengers were not allowed aft. Then turning suddenly, she mounted a

coil of rope, and held the hat up to Miss Thorne.

"There's your hat, miss," she said.

"Thank you," said Sylvia.

"Sure you're welcome, miss," she said, not with a broad accent, but

with a subdued trace of Irish in the inflection and idiom.

When the gallant Walter Kirk came round to where the girl, just

dismounted from the cordage, stood, he was puzzled to see her without

the hat.

"Where is it?" he asked.

"The young lady's got it her own self," she replied.

Kirk felt foolish. Had his chum come down over the rail for it? He

would do something to distinguish himself. He fumbled in his pockets

for a coin to give the girl, but found nothing smaller than a half

sovereign, and with that he could ill afford to part. The girl had

meanwhile turned away, and Kirk had nothing left but to go back to the

upper deck.

The enthusiastic Sylvia spoke in praise of the Irish girl for her

agility and politeness, but the young lady alongside, who did not like

the Irish, told her that what the girl wanted was a shilling or two.

Servants in Europe were always beggars, and the Irish people

especially. But she wouldn't give the girl a quarter if it were her

hat. What was the use of making people so mean-spirited?

"I'd like to give her something, if I thought it wouldn't hurt her

feelings," said Sylvia, at which the other laughed immoderately.

"Hurt her feelings! Did you ever see an Irish girl whose feelings were

hurt by a present of money? I never did, though I don't often try the

experiment, that's so."

"I was going to offer her something myself, but she walked away while I

was trying to find some change," said Kirk.

The matter of a gratuity to the girl weighed on Sylvia Thorne's mind.

She had a sense of a debt in owing her a gratuity, if one may so speak.

The next day being calm and fine, and finding her company not very

attractive, for young Kirk was engaged with some gentlemen in a stupid

game of shuffleboard, she went forward to the part of the deck on which

the steerage passengers were allowed to sun themselves, and found the

Irish girl holding a baby. "You saved my hat yesterday," she said with

embarrassment.

"Sure that's not much now, miss. I'd like to do somethin' for you every

day if I could. It isn't every lady that's _such_ a lady," said the

girl, with genuine admiration of the delicate features and kindly

manner of young Sylvia Thorne.

"Does that baby belong to some friend of yours?" asked the young lady.

"No, miss; I've not got any friends aboard. Its mother's seasick, and

I'm givin' her a little rest an' holdin' the baby out here. The air of

that steerage isn't fit for a baby, now, you may say."

Should she give her any money? What was it about the girl that made her

afraid to offer a customary trifle?

"Where did you live in Ireland?" inquired Sylvia.

"At Drogheda, miss, till I went to work in the linen mills."

"Oh! you worked in the linen mills."

"Yes, miss. My father died, and my mother was poor, and girls must work

for their living. But my father wanted me to get a good bit of readin'

and writin' so as I might do better; but he died, miss, and I couldn't

leave my mother without help."

"You were the only child?"

"I've got a sister, but somehow she didn't care to go out to work, and

so I had to go out to service; and I heard that more was paid in

Ameriky, where I've got an aunt, an' I had enough to take me out, an' I

thought maybe I'd get my mother out there some day, or I'd get money

enough to make her comfortable, anyways."

"What kind of work will you do in New York? I don't believe we've got

any linen mills. I think we get Irish linen table-cloths, and so on."

"Oh, I'm going out to service. I can't do heavy work, but I can do

chambermaid's work."

All this time Sylvia was turning a quarter over in her pocket. It was

the only American coin she had carried with her through Europe, and she

now took it out slowly, and said:

"You'll accept a little something for your kindness in saving my hat."

"I'm much obliged, miss, but I'd rather not I'd rather have your kind

words than any money. It's very lonesome I've been since I left

Drogheda."

She put the quarter back into her pocket with something like shame;

then she fumbled her rings in a strange embarrassment. She had made a

mess of it, she thought. At the same time she was glad the girl had so

much pride.

"What is your name?" she asked.

"Margaret Byrne."

"You must let me help you in some way," said Miss Thorne at last.

"I wonder what kind of people they are in New York, now," said

Margaret, looking at Sylvia wistfully. "It seems dreadful to go so far

away and not know in whose house you'll be livin'."

Sylvia looked steadily at the girl, and then went away, promising to

see her again. She smiled at Walter Kirk, who had finished his game of

shuffleboard and was looking all up and down the deck for Miss Thorne.

She did not stop to talk with him, however, but pushed on to where her

mother and father were sitting not far from the taffrail.

"Mamma, I've been out in the steerage."

"You'll be in the maintop next, I don't doubt," said her father,

laughing.

"I've been talking to the Irish girl that caught my hat yesterday."

"You shouldn't talk to steerage people," said Mrs. Thorne. "They might

have the smallpox, or they might not be proper people."

"I suppose cabin passengers might have the smallpox too," said Mr.

Thorne, who liked to tease either wife or daughter.

"I offered the Irish girl a quarter, and she wouldn't have it."

"You're too free with your money," said her mother in a tone of

complaint that was habitual.

"The girl wouldn't impose on you, Sylvia," said Mr. Thorne. "She's

honest. She knew that your hat wasn't worth so much. Now, if you had

said fifteen cents----"

"O papa, be still," and she put her hand over his mouth. "I want to

propose something."

"Going to adopt the Irish----" But here Sylvia's hand again arrested Mr.

Thorne's speech.

"No, I'm not going to adopt her, but I want mamma to take her for

upstairs girl when we get home."

Mr. Thorne made another effort to push away Sylvia's hand so as to say

something, but the romping girl smothered his speech into a gurgle.

"I couldn't think of it. She's got no references and no character."

"Maybe she has got her character in her pocket, you don't know," broke

out the father. "That's where some girls carry their character till

it's worn out."

"I'll give her a character," said Sylvia. "She is a lady, if she is a

servant."

"That's just what I don't want, Sylvia," said Mrs. Thorne, with a

plaintive inflection, "a ladylike servant."

"Oh, well, we must try her. How's the girl to get a character if nobody

tries her? And she's real splendid, I think, going off to get money to

help her mother. And I'm sure she's had some great sorrow or

disappointment, you know. She's got such a wistful look in her face,

and when I spoke about Drogheda she said----"

"There you are again!" exclaimed the father. "You'll have a heroine to

make your bed every morning. But you'd better keep your drawers locked

for all that."

"Now, I think that's mean!" and the young girl tried to look stern. But

the severity vanished when Mr. Kirk, of the senior class in Highland

College, came up to inform Miss Thorne that the young people were about

getting up a conundrum party. Miss Sylvia accepted the invitation to

join in that diluted recreation, saying, as she departed, "Let's try

her anyway."

"If she wants her I suppose I shall have to take her, but I wish she

had more sense than to go to the steerage for a servant."

"She could hardly find one in the cabin," ventured Mr. Thorne.

So it happened that, on arrival in New York, Margaret Byrne was

installed as second girl at the Thornes'. For in an American home the

authority is often equitably divided--the mother has the name of ruling

the household which the daughter actually governs.

II.

How much has the setting to do with a romance? The old tales had

castles environed with savage forests and supplied with caves and

underground galleries leading to where it was necessary to go in the

novelist's emergency. In our realistic times we like to lay our scenes

on a ground of Axminster with environments of lace curtains, pianos,

and oil paintings. How, then, shall I make you understand the real

human loves and sorrows that often have play in a girl's heart, where

there are no better stage fittings than stationary washtubs and kitchen

ranges?

Sylvia Thorne was sure that the pretty maid from Drogheda, whose

melancholy showed itself through the veil of her perfect health, had

suffered a disappointment. She watched her as she went silently about

her work of sweeping and bedmaking, and she knew by a sort of

divination that here was a real heroine, a sufferer or a doer of

something.

Mrs. Thorne pronounced the new maid good, but "awfully solemn." But

when Maggie Byrne met the eyes of Sylvia looking curiously and kindly

at her sad face, there broke through her seriousness a smile so bright

and sunny that Sylvia was sure she had been mistaken, and that there

had been no disappointment in the girl's life.

Maggie shocked Mrs. Thorne by buying a shrine from an image vender and

hanging it against the wall in the kitchen. The mistress of the house,

being very scrupulous of other people's superstitions, and being one of

the stanchest of Protestants, doubted whether she ought to allow an

idolatrous image to remain on the wall. She had read the Old Testament

a good deal, and she meditated whether she ought not, like Jehu, the

son of Nimshi, to break the image in pieces. But Mr. Thorne, when the

matter was referred to him, said that a faithful Catholic ought to do

better than an unfaithful one, and that so long as Margaret did not

steal the jewelry she oughtn't to be disturbed at her prayers, which it

was known she was accustomed to say every night, with her head bowed on

the ironing table, before the image of Mary and her son.

"How can the Catholics pray to images and say the second commandment,

I'd like to know?" said Mrs. Thorne, one morning, with some asperity.

"By a process like that by which we Protestants read the Sermon on the

Mount, and then go on reviling our enemies and laying up treasures on

earth," said her husband.

"My dear, you never will listen to reason; you know that the Sermon on

the Mount is not to be taken literally."

"And how about the second commandment?"

"You'd defend the scribes and Pharisees, I do believe, just for the

sake of an argument."

"Oh, no! there are plenty of them alive yet; let them defend

themselves, if they want to," said the ungallant husband, with a wicked

twinkle in his eye.

As for Sylvia, she was all the more convinced, as time went on, that

the girl "had had a disappointment." On the evenings when the cook was

out Sylvia would find her way into the kitchen for a talk with Maggie.

The quaint old stories of Ireland and the enthusiastic description of

Irish scenes that found their way into Margaret Byrne's talk delighted

Sylvia's fancy. But the conversations always ended by some allusion to

the ship and the hat, and to the large-shouldered blond young man that

came down after the hat; and Sylvia confided to Maggie that he had

asked permission to call to see her the next summer, when he should

come East after his graduation. Margaret had no other company, and she

regularly looked for Sylvia on the evenings when she was alone,

brightening the kitchen for the occasion so much as to convince the

"down-stairs girl" that sly Maggie was accustomed to receive a beau in

her absence.

One evening Miss Thorne found Maggie in tears.

"I've a mind to tell you all about it," said the girl, in answer to the

inquiries of Sylvia, at the same time pushing her hair back off her

face and leaning her head on her hands while she rested her elbows on

the table.

"Maybe it will do you good to tell me," answered Sylvia, concealing her

eager curiosity behind her desire to serve Margaret.

"Well, you see, miss, my sister Dora is purty."

"So are you, Maggie."

"No, but Dora is a young thing, and kind of helpless, like a baby. I

was the oldest, and that Dora was my baby, like. Well, Andy Doyle and

me were always friends. I wish I hadn't never seen him. But he seemed

to be the nicest fellow in the world. There was never anything said

between him an' me, only--well--but I can't tell ye--you're so

young--you don't know about such things."

"Yes, I do. You loved him, didn't you?"

"You see, miss, he was always so good. Dora, she hadn't no end of b'ys

that liked her. But anything that I had she always wanted, you may say,

and I always 'umored her in a way. She was young and a kind of a baby,

an' she is that purty, Miss Sylvy. Well, one of us had to go out to

work in the mill, an' my mother, she said that Dora must go, because

Dora wasn't any good about the house to speak of. She never knew how to

do anything right. But Dora cried, and said she couldn't work in the

mill, and so I went down to Larne to work in the mill, and Dora

promised to look after the house. Now, at the time I went away Dora was

all took up with Billy Caughey, and we thought sure as could be it was

a match. But what does that girl do but desave Billy, and catch Andy. I

don't think, miss, that he ever half loved her, but then I don't know

what she made him believe; and then, ye know, nobody ever could refuse

Dora anything, with her little beggin', winnin' ways. She just dazed

him and got him engaged to her; and I don't believe he was ever

entirely happy with her. But what could I do, miss? I couldn't try to

coax him back--now could I? She was such a baby of a thing that she

would cry if Andy only talked to me a minute after I come home. And I

didn't want to take him away from her. That was when the mill at Larne

had shut up. And so I hadn't no heart to do anything more there; it

seemed like I was dead; and I knowed that if I stayed there would be

trouble, for I could see that Andy looked at me strange, like there was

somethin' he didn't quite understand, ye may say; but I was mad, and I

didn't want to take away Dora's beau, nor to have anything to do with a

lad that could change his mind so easy. And so I come away, thinkin'

maybe I'd get some heart again on this side of the sea, and that I

could soon send for me old mother to come."

Here she leaned her head on the table and cried.

"Now, there," she said after a while, "to-day I got a letter from Dora;

there it is!" and she pushed it to the middle of the table as though it

stung her. "She says that Andy is comin' over here to make money enough

to bring her over after a while, sure. It kind o' makes my heart jump

up, miss, to think of seein' anybody from Drogheda, and more'n all to

see Andy again, that always played with me, and---- But I despise him

too, miss, fer bein' so changeable. But then, Dora she makes fools out

of all of them with her purty face and her coaxin' ways, miss. She

can't help it, maybe."

"Well, you needn't see Andy if you don't want to," said Sylvia.

"Oh! but I do want to," and Margaret laughed through her tears at her

own inconsistency. "Besides, Dora wants me to help him get a place, and

I must do that; and then, sure, miss, do you think I'd let him know

that I cared a farthin' fer him? Not a bit of it!" and Maggie pushed

back her hair and held herself up proudly.

The next morning, as Margaret laid the morning paper on Mr. Thorne's

table in the library, she ventured to ask if he knew of a place for a

friend of hers that was coming from Ireland the next week. That

gentleman had caught the infection of Sylvia's enthusiasm for the Irish

girl, and by the blush on her cheek when she made the request he was

sure that his penetration had divined the girl's secret. So he made

some inquiries about Andy, and, finding that he was "handy with tools,"

the merchant thought he could give him a place in his packing

department.

It happened, therefore, that Sylvia rarely spent any more evenings in

the kitchen. Instead of that, her little sister used to frequent it,

for Andy was very ingenious in making chairs, tables, and other

furniture for doll houses, and little Sophy thought him the nicest man

in the world. Maggie was very cool and repellent to him, with little

spells of relenting. Sometimes Andy felt himself so much snubbed that

he would leave after a five minutes' call, in which event Maggie Byrne

was sure to relax a little at the door, and Sylvia or Sophy was almost

certain to find her in tears afterward.

Andy could not, perhaps, have defined his feelings toward Margaret. He

could not resist the attraction of the kitchen, for was not Maggie his

old playmate and the sister of Dora? Sure, there was no harm at all in

a fellow's goin' to see, just once a week, the sister of his

swateheart, when the ocean kept him from seein' his swateheart herself.

But if Andy had been a man accustomed to analyze his feelings he might

have inquired how it came that he liked his swateheart's sister better

even than his swateheart herself.

One evening he had a letter from Dora, and he thought to cheer Margaret

with good news from home. But she would not be cheered.

"Now what's the matter, Mag?" Andy said coaxingly. "Don't that fellow

in Larne write to ye?"

"What fellow in Larne?" demanded Margaret with asperity.

"Why, him that used to be so swate when ye was a-workin' in the mill."

"Who told you that?"

"Oh, now, you needn't try to kape it from me! Don't you think I knew

all about it? Do you think Dora wouldn't tell me, honey? Don't I know

you was engaged to him before you left the mill at Larne? Has he gone

an' desaved you now, Maggie? If he has, I don't wonder you're cross."

"Andy, that isn't true. I never had any b'y at Larne, at all."

"Now, what's the use denying it? That's always the way with you girls

about such things."

"Andy Doyle, do you go out of this kitchen, and don't you never come

back. I never desaved you in my life, and I won't have nobody say that

I did."

A conflict of feeling had made Margaret irritable, and Andy was the

most convenient object of wrath in the absence of Dora. Andy started

slowly out through the hall; there he turned about, and said:

"Hold a bit, my poor Mag. Let me git me thoughts together. It's me's

been desaved. If it hadn't 'a' been fer that fellow down at Larne there

wouldn't never 'a' been anything betwixt me and Dora. And now----"

"Don't you say no more, Andy. Dora's a child, and she wanted you. Don't

ye give her up. If you give her up, and she, poor child, on the other

sides of the water, I'll never respict ye--d'ye hear that, now, Andy?

Only the last letter she wrote she said she'd break her heart if I let

you fall in love with anybody else. The men's all fools now, anyhow,

Andy, and some of them is bad, but don't you go and desave that child,

that's a-breakin' her heart afther you. And don't ye believe as I ever

keered a straw for ye, for I don't keer fer you, nor no other man

a-livin'."

Andy stood still for some moments, trying in a dumb way to think what

to do or say; then he helplessly opened the door and went out.

III.

The next Thursday evening Andy did not come, and Margaret felt sorry,

she could not tell why. But Sylvia came down into the lower hall,

peered through the glass of the kitchen door, and, finding the maid

sitting alone by the range, entered as of old. And to her Maggie Byrne,

sore pressed for sympathy, told of her last talk with the comely young

man.

"You see, miss, it would be too mean for me to take Dora's b'y away

from her, fer he's the finest-lookin' and altogether the nicest young

man anywhere about Drogheda; and Dora, she's always used to havin' the

best of everything, and she always took anything that was mine,

thinkin' she'd a right to it, and, bein' a weak and purty young thing,

I s'pose she had, now, miss."

"I think she's mean, Maggie, and you're foolish if you don't take your

own lover back again."

"And she on the other sides of the say, miss? And my own little sister

that I packed around in me arms? She's full of tricks, but then she's

purty, and she's always been used to havin' my things. At any rate,

'tain't meself as'll be takin' away what's hers, and she's trusted him

to me, and she's away on the other sides of the water. At least not if

I can help it, miss. And I pray fer help all the time. Besides, do you

think I'd have Andy Doyle afther what's happened, even if Dora was out

of the way?"

"I know you would," said Sylvia.

"I believe I would, miss, I'm such a fool. But then sometimes I despise

him. If it wasn't fer me dear old mother, that maybe I'll never see

again," and Maggie wiped her eyes with her apron, "I'd join the

Sisters. I think maybe I have got a vocation, as they call it."

It was the very next evening after this interview that Bridget Monahan,

the downstairs girl, gave Margaret a little advice.

"He's a foine young feller, now, Mag, but don't you be in no hurry to

git married. You're afther havin' a nice face--a kind o' saint's face,

on'y it's a thrifle too solemn to win the men. But if Andy should lave,

ye might be afther doin' better, and ye might be afther doin' worruss

now, Mag. But don't ye git married till ye've got enough to buy a

brocade shawl. Ef ye don't git a brocade shawl afore you're married,

niver a bit of a one'll ye be afther gittin' aftherwards. Girls like us

don't git no money afther they are married, and it's best to lay by

enough to git a shawl beforehand now, Mag. That's me own plan."

A few weeks later Maggie was thrown into grief by hearing of the death

of her mother. Of course she received sympathy from Sylvia. Andy, also

having received a letter from Dora, ventured to call on Maggie to

express in his sincerely simple way his sympathy for her grief, and to

discuss with her what was now to be done for the homeless girl in the

old country.

"We must bring her over, Andy."

"I know that," said the young man. "I'll draw all my money out of the

Shamrock Savings Bank to-morry and send her a ticket. But I'll tell you

what, Mag, after I went away from here the last time I felt sure I'd

never marry Dora Byrne. But maybe I was wrong. Poor thing! I'm sorry

fer her, all alone."

"Sure, now, Andy, you must 'a' made a mistake," said Maggie. "It's

myself as may've given Dora rason to think I'd got a young man down at

Larne. I don't know as she meant to desave you. She needn't, fer you

know I don't keer fer men, neither you nor anybody. I'm goin' into the

Sisters, now my mother's dead. I've spoken to Sister Agnes about it."

But whether it was from her lonely feeling at the death of her mother,

or from her exultation at her victory over her feelings, or whether it

was that her heart, trodden down by her conscience, sought revenge, she

showed more affection for Andy this evening than ever before, following

him to the area gate, detaining him in conversation, and bidding him

goodnight with real emotion.

The next evening Andy came again with a long face. He had a paper in

which he showed Maggie an account of the suspension of the Shamrock

Savings Bank, in which the money of so many Irishmen was locked up, and

in which were all of Andy Doyle's savings, except ten dollars he had in

his pocket.

"Now, Mag, what am I goin' to do? It takes thirty-five dollars for a

ticket. If I put my week's wages that I'll git to-morry on to this, I'm

short half of it."

"Sure, Andy, I'll let you have it all if you want it. You keep what

you've got. She's me own sister. On'y I'll have to wait a while, for I

don't want to fetch into the Sisters any less money than I've spoke to

Sister Agnes about."

"I'm a-goin' to pay ye back every cint of it, Mag, and God bless ye!

But it 'most makes me hate Dora to see you so good. And I tell you,

Maggie, the first thing when she gits here she's got to explain about

that fellow down at Larne that she told me about."

"Andy," said Maggie, "d'ye mind now what I say. I've suffered enough on

account of Dora's takin' you away from me, but I'd rather die with a

broken heart than to have anything to do with you if you are afther

breakin' that poor child's heart when she comes here."

"Oh, then you did keer for me a little, Maggie darlint?" exclaimed

Andy. "I thought you said you never did keer!"

Maggie was surprised. "I don't keer for you, nor any other man, and I

never----" But here she paused. "You ought to be ashamed to be talkin'

that way to me, and you engaged to Dora. There, now, take the money,

Andy, and git Dora's ticket, and don't let's hear no more foolish

talkin' that it would break the poor dear orphan's heart to hear. The

poor baby's got nobody but you and me to look afther her, now her

mother's gone, and it's a shame and a sin if we don't do it."

IV.

Margaret Byrne hurried her work through. The steamer that brought Dora

had come in that day. Dora was met at Castle Garden by her aunt, and

Margaret had got permission to go to see her in the evening. As Andy

Doyle had to go the same way, he stopped for Maggie. All the way over

to the aunt's house in Brooklyn he was moody and silent, the very

opposite of a man going to meet his betrothed. Margaret was quiet, with

the peace of one who has gained a victory. Her struggle was over. There

was no more any danger that she should be betrayed into bearing off the

affections of her sister's affianced lover.

Maggie greeted Dora affectionately, but Dora was like one distraught.

She held herself aloof from her sister, and still more from Andy, who,

on his part, made a very poor show of affection.

"Well," said Dora after a while, "I s'pose you two people have been

afther makin' love to one another for six months."

"You hain't got any right to say that, Dora," broke out Andy. "Maggie's

stood up fer you in a way you didn't more'n half desarve, and it's

partly Maggie's money that brought you here. You know well enough what

a--a--lie, if I must say it, you told me about Mag's havin' a beau at

Larne, and she says she didn't. You're the one that took away your

sister's----" But here he paused.

"Hush up, Andy!" broke in Margaret. "You know I never keered fer you,

or any other man. Don't you and Dora begin to quarrel now."

Andy looked sullen, and Dora scared. At length Dora took speech

timidly.

"Billy will be here in a minute."

"Billy who?" asked Andy.

"Billy Caughey," she answered. "He came over in the same ship with me."

"Oh, I s'pose you've been sparkin' with him ag'in! You pitched him over

to take me----"

"No, I haven't been sparkin' with him, Andy; at least, not lately. He's

my husband. We got married three months ago."

"And didn't tell me?" said Andy, between pleasure and anger.

"No, we wanted to come over here, and we couldn't have come if it

hadn't been for the money you sent."

"Why, Dora, how mean you treated Andy!" broke out Margaret.

"I knew you'd take up for him," said Dora pitifully, "but what could I

do, sure? You won't hurt Billy, now, will you, Andy? He's afeard of

you."

"Well," said Andy, straightening up his fine form with a smile of

relief, "tell Billy that I wish him much j'y, and that I'll be afther

thankin' him with all my heart the very first time I see him for the

kindness he's afther doin' me. Good-night, Mrs. Billy Caughey, good

luck to ye! As Mag says she don't keer fer me, I'll be after going home

alone." This last was said bitterly as he opened the door.

"O Andy! wait fer me--do!" said Margaret.

"Ain't you stayin' to see Billy?" asked Dora.

"Not me. It's with Andy Doyle I'm afther goin'," cried Margaret, with a

lightness she had not known for a year.

And the two went out together.

The next evening Margaret told Sylvia about it, and the little

romance-maker was in ecstasy.

"So you won't enter the sisterhood, then?" she said, when Margaret had

finished.

"No, miss, I don't think I've got any vocation."

THE GUNPOWDER PLOT.

THE STORY OF A FOURTH OF JULY.

Whenever one writes with photographic exactness of frontier life he is

accused of inventing improbable things.

"Old Davy Lindsley" lived in a queer cabin on the Pomme de Terre River.

If you should ever ride over the new Northern Pacific when it shall be

completed, or over that branch of it which crosses the Pomme de Terre,

you can get out at a station which will, no doubt, be called for an old

settler, Gager's Station; and if you would like to see some beautiful

scenery, take a canoe and float down the Pomme de Terre River. You will

have to make some portages, and you will have a good appetite for

supper when you reach the old Lindsley house, ten miles from Gager's,

but its present owner is hospitable.

A queer old chap was Lindsley the last time I saw him. I remember how

he took me all over his claim and showed me the beauties of

Lindsleyville, as he called it. His long iron-gray hair fluttered in

the wind, and his face seemed like a wizard's, penetrating but

unearthly. That was long before the great tide of immigrants had begun

to find their way into this paradise through the highway of the Sauk

Valley. Lindsleyville was a hundred and fifty miles out of the world at

that time. Its population numbered two--Lindsley and his daughter. The

old man had tried to make a fortune in many ways. There was no sort of

useless invention that he had not attempted, and you will find in the

Patent Office models without number of beehives and cannons, steam

cut-offs and baby jumpers, lightning churns and flying machines on

which he had taken out patents, assured of making a fortune from each

one. He had raised fancy chickens, figured himself rich on two swarms

of bees, traveled with a magic lantern, written a philosophic novel,

and started a newspaper. There was but one purpose in which he was

fixed--which was, to guard his daughter jealously. To do this, and to

make the experiment of building a Utopian city, he had traveled to the

summit of this knoll on the right bank of the Pomme de Terre. There

never was a more beautiful landscape than that which Lindsleyville

commanded. But the town did not grow, chiefly because it was so far

beyond the border, though the conditions in his deeds intended to

secure the character of the city from deterioration were so many that

nobody would have been willing to buy the lots.

At the time I speak of David Lindsley had dwelt on the Pomme de Terre

for five years. He had removed suddenly from the Connecticut village in

which he had been living because he discovered that his daughter had,

in spite of his watchfulness, formed an attachment for a young man who

had the effrontery to disclose the whole thing to him by politely

asking his consent to their marriage.

"Marry my daughter!" choked the old man. "Why, Mr. Brown, you are

crazy! I have educated her upon the combined principles of Rousseau, of

Pestalozzi, of Froebel, and of Herbert Spencer. And you--you only

graduated at Yale, an old fogy mediæval institution! No, sir! not till

I meet a philosopher whose mind has been symmetrically developed can I

consent for my Emilia to marry."

And the old man became so frantic, that, to save him from the madhouse,

Emilia wrote a letter, at his dictation, to young Brown, peremptorily

breaking off all relations; and he, a sensitive, romantic man, was

heartbroken, and left the village. He only sent a farewell to his

friends the day before he was to sail from New Bedford on a whaling

voyage. He carried with him the impression that an unaccountable change

of mind in Emilia had left no hope for him.

To prevent a recurrence of such an untoward accident as this, and, as

he expressed it, "to bring his daughter's mind into intimate relations

with nature," the fanatical philosopher established the town of

Lindsleyville, determined that no family in which there was a young man

should settle on his town plot, unless, indeed, the young man should

prove to be the paragon he was looking for.

Emilia's motherless life had not been a cheerful one, subjected to the

ever-changing whims of a visionary father, with whom one of her

practical cast of mind could have no point of sympathy. And since she

came to Lindsleyville it was harder than ever, for there was no

neighbor nearer than Gager's, ten miles away, and there was not a woman

within fifty miles. There is no place so lonesome as a prairie; the

horizon is so wide, and the earth is so empty!

Lindsley had spent all his own money long ago, and it was only the

small annuity of his daughter, inherited from her mother's family, the

capital of which was tied up to keep it out of his reach, that

prevented them from starving. Emilia was starving indeed, not in body,

but in soul. Cut off from human sympathy, she used to sit at the gable

window of the cabin and look out over the boundless meadow until it

seemed to her that she would lose her reason. The wild geese screaming

to one another overhead, the bald eagles building in the solitary elm

that grew by the river, the flocks of great white pelicans that were

fishing on the beach of Swan Lake, three miles away, were all objects

of envy to the lonesome heart of the girl; for they had companions of

their kind--they were husbands and wives, and parents and children,

while she--here she checked her thoughts, lest she should be disloyal

to her father. To her disordered fancy the universe seemed to be a

wheel. The sun and the stars came up and went down over the monotonous

sea of grass with frightful regularity, and she could not tell whether

there was a God or not. When she thought of God at all, it was as a

relentless giant turning the crank that kept the sky going round. The

universe was an awful machine. The prayers her mother taught her in

infancy died upon her lips, and instead of praying to God she cried out

to her mother. Un-protestant as the sentiment is, I can not forbear

saying that this talking to the dead is one of the most natural things

in the world. To Emilia the dimly remembered love of her mother was all

of tenderness there was in the universe, the only revelation of God

that had come to her, except the other love, which was to her a

paradise lost. For the great hard fate that turned the prairie universe

round with a crank motion had also--so it seemed to her--snatched away

from her the object of her love. This disordered, faithless state was

all the fruit she tasted of the peculiar education so much vaunted by

her father. She had eaten the husks he gave her and was hungry.

I said she had no company. An old daguerreotype of her mother and a

carefully hidden photograph (marked on the back, in a rather immature

hand, "E. Brown") seemed to answer with looks of love and sympathy when

she wetted them with her tears. They were her rosary and her crucifix;

they were the gifts of a beclouded life, through which God shone in

dimly upon her.

This poor girl looked and longed so for the company of human kind that

she counted those red-letter days on which a half-breed voyageur

traveled over the trail in front of the house, and even a party of

begging and beggarly Sioux, hungry for all they could get to eat,

offering importunately to sell "hompoes" (moccasins) to her father,

were not wholly unwelcome. But the days of all days were those on which

Edwards, the tall, long-haired American trapper, fished in the Pomme de

Terre in sight of the Lindsley cabin. On such occasions the old man

Lindsley would leave his work and stay about the house, and watch

jealously and uneasily every movement of the trapper. On one or two

occasions when that picturesque individual, wearing a wolf-skin cap,

with the wolf's tail hanging down between his shoulders, presented

himself at the door of the cabin to crave some little courtesy,

Lindsley closed the front door and brought out the article asked for

from the back, like a mediæval chieftain guarding his castle. But all

the time that poor Emilia could hear the voice of the tall trapper her

heart beat two beats for one. For was it not a human voice speaking her

own language? And the days on which he was visible were accounted as

the gates of paradise, and the moments in which he spoke in her hearing

were as paradise itself.

This churlish, inhospitable manner made Lindsley many enemies in a land

in which one can not afford to have enemies. Every half-breed hunter

took the old man's suspicious manner as a personal affront. "He thinks

we are horse thieves," they said scornfully. And Jacques Bourdon, the

half-breed who had "filed on" the claim alongside Lindsley's, and even

claimed unjustly a "forty" of Lindsley's town plot, had no difficulty

in securing the sympathy of the settlers and nomads, who looked on

Lindsley as a monster quite capable of anything. He was even reported

to have beaten his daughter, and to have confined her in the wilderness

that he might keep her out of an immense fortune which she had

inherited. So Lindsley grew every day in disfavor in a region where

unpopularity in its mildest form is sure to take a most unpleasant way

of making itself known. Emilia knew enough to understand this danger,

and she was shaken with a nameless fear whenever she heard the sharp

words that passed between her father and Bourdon, the half-breed. The

resentment of the latter reached its climax when the decision of the

land office was rendered in favor of Mr. Lindsley. From that hour the

revenge of this man, whose hot French was mixed with relentless Indian

blood, hung over the head of the old man, who still read and wrote, and

invented and theorized, in utter ignorance of any peril except the

danger that some man, not a fool, should marry his daughter.

The Fourth of July was celebrated at Gager's. People came from fifty

miles round. Patriotism? No! but love of human fellowship. The

celebrated Pierre Bottineau and the other Canadians and half-breeds

were there, mellowed with drink, singing the sensual and almost lewd

French rowing songs their fathers had sung on the St. Lawrence. "Whisky

Jim," the retired stage driver, and Hans Brinkerhoff and the other

German settlers, with two or three Yankees, completed the slender

crowd, which comprised almost the entire population of six skeleton

counties. And the ever-popular Edwards was among them, his grave face

and flowing ringlets rising above them all. A man so ready to serve

anybody as he was idolized among frontiermen, whose gratitude is almost

equal to their revenge. Captain Oscar, the popular politician, who wore

his hair long and swore and drank, just to keep in with his widely

scattered constituents, whom he represented in the Minnesota Senate

each winter (and who usually cast half a dozen votes each for him),

made a buncombe speech, and then Edwards, who wouldn't drink, but who

knew how to tell strange stories, kept them laughing for half an hour.

Edwards was a type of man not so uncommon on the frontier as those

imagine who think the trapper always a half-horse, half-alligator

creature, such as they read of in the Beadle novels. I knew one trapper

who was a student of numismatics, another who devoted his spare time to

astronomy, and several traders and trappers who were men of

considerable culture, though they are generally men who are a little

morbid or eccentric in their mental structure. All Edwards's natural

abilities, which were sufficient to have earned him distinction had he

been "in civilization," were concentrated on the pursuits of his wild

life, and such a man always surpasses the coarser and duller Indian or

half-breed in his own field.

After a game of ball, and other sports imitated from the Indians, the

_bois brûlés_[1] began to be too much softened with whisky to keep up

athletic exercises, and something in their manner led Edwards to

suspect that there were other amusements on the programme into the

secret of which he had not been admitted.

[1] _Bois brûlés_, "burnt wood," is the title the half-breeds

apply to themselves, in allusion to their complexion.

By adroit management he contrived to overhear part of a conversation in

which "_poudre à canon_" was mixed up with the name of Linds_lee_. He

inferred that the blowing up of Lindsley's house was to finish the

celebration of the national holiday. Treating Bourdon to an extra glass

of whisky, and seasoning it with some well-timed denunciations of "the

old monster," he gathered that the plan was to plant a keg of powder

under the chimney on the north side of the cabin and blow it to pieces,

just to scare the monster out, or kill him and his daughter, it did not

matter which. Edwards praised the plan. He said that if it were not

that he had to go to Pelican Lake that very night he would go along and

help blow up the old rascal.

Soon after this he shook hands all around and wished them _bon voyage_

in their trip to Lindsleyville. He winked his eyes knowingly, playing

the hypocrite handsomely. Oscar and Bottineau left in different

directions, the Germans had gone home drunk, and only "Whisky Jim"

joined the half-breeds in their trip. They took possession of an

immigrant team that was in Gager's stable, and just after sunset

started on their patriotic errand. They were going to celebrate the

Fourth by blowing up the tyrant.

Meantime Edwards had taken long strides, but his moccasin-clad feet

were not carrying him in the direction of Pelican Lake. Half the time

walking as only "the long trapper" could walk, half the time in a

swinging trot, he made the best possible speed toward Lindsleyville. He

had the start of the half-breeds, but how much he could not tell; and

there was no time to be lost. At the summit of every knoll he looked

back to see if they were coming, crouching in the grass lest they

should discover him.

Lindsley received him as suspiciously as ever, and positively refused

to believe his story. But by using his telescope Edwards soon convinced

him that the party were just leaving Gager's. The dusk of the evening

was coming on, and Lindsley's fright was great as he realized his

daughter's peril.

"I will fight them to the death," he said, getting down his revolver,

with an air that would have done honor to Don Quixote.

"If you fight them and whip them, they will waylay you and kill you.

But there are ten of them, and if you fight them you will be killed,

and this lady will be without a protector. If you run away, the house

will be destroyed, and you will be killed whenever you are found. But

what have you here--a magic lantern?"

The old gentleman had, before Edwards's arrival, taken down the

instrument to introduce some improvement which he had just invented.

When Edwards stumbled over it and called it a magic lantern he looked

at him scornfully.

"A magic lantern!" he cried. "No, sir; that is a dissolving view,

oxy-calcium, panto-sciostereoscopticon."

"With this we must save you and your daughter from the half-breeds,"

said the trapper, a little impatient at this ill-timed manifestation of

pedantry. "Get ready for action immediately."

"I have no oxygen gas."

"Make it at once," said Edwards. He picked up some papers marked

"chlor. potass." and "black oxide."

"Here is your material," he said.

"Do _you_ understand chemistry?" asked Lindsley. But the trapper did

not answer. He got out the retort, and in five minutes the oxygen was

bubbling furiously through the wash bottle into the India-rubber

receiver. Edwards stood at the window scanning the road toward Gager's

with his telescope until it grew dark, which in that latitude was at

about ten o'clock. Then the magic lantern was removed to the little

grass-roofed stable, in which dwelt a solitary pony, and by Edwards's

direction the focus was carefully set so that it would throw a picture

against the house. Edwards selected two pictures and adjusted them for

use in the two tubes.

The half-breeds were not in haste, and in all the long hour of suspense

Emilia, hidden in the barn with her father and young Edwards, was

positively happy. For here was human companionship, and a hungry soul

will gladly risk death if by that means companionship can be purchased.

It did not matter either that conversation was out of the question. It

is presence, and not talk, that makes companionship.

But hark! the _bois brûlés_ are on the bank of the river below. Emilia's

heart grew still as she heard them swear. Their _sacr-r-r-r-ré_ rolled

like the rattle of a rattlesnake. They were coming up the hill,

quarreling drunkenly about the powder. Now they were between the house

and the stable, getting ready to dig a hole for the "_poudre à canon_"

"I'll give them fireworks!" said Edwards in a whisper.

A picture of Thorwaldsen's bas-relief of "Morning" having been

previously placed in the instrument, Edwards now removed the cap, and

the beautiful flying female figure, with the infant in her arms, shone

out upon the side of the house with marvelous vividness.

"By thunder!" said Whisky Jim, steadying himself, while every hair

stood on end.

"_Mon Dieu!_" cried the _bois brûlés_, who had never seen a picture in

their lives except in the cathedral of St. Boniface, at Fort Garry.

"_Mon Dieu! La Sainte Vierge!_" And they fell on their knees before

this apparition of the Blessed Virgin, and crossed themselves and

prayed lustily.

But "Whisky Jim" straightened himself up, and hiccoughed, and stammered

"By thunder!" and added some words which, being Saxon, I will not

print.

"The devil!" cried Jim, a minute later, starting down the hill at full

speed, for, by Edwards's direction, the light had been shifted to the

other tube in such a way as to dissolve the "Morning" into a hideous

picture of the conventional horned and hoofed devil. The picture was

originally meant to be comic, but it now set Jim to running for dear

life.

"_Oui, c'est le diable! le diable! le diable!_" cried the frantic _bois

brûlés_, breaking off their invocations to the Virgin most abruptly,

and fleeing pellmell down the hill after Jim, falling over one another

as they ran. Quick as a flash Edwards threw about him a sheet which he

had ready, and pursued the fleeing Frenchmen. Jim had already seized

the reins, and, on the plan of "the devil take the hindmost," was

driving at a pace that would have done him credit in the Central Park,

up the trail toward Gager's, leaving the half-breeds to get on as best

they could. Bourdon stumbled and fell, and Edwards lavished some blows

upon him that must have satisfied the _bois brûlé_ that ghosts have a

most solid corporeal existence.

Then Edwards returned and captured the keg of powder. He assured the

Lindsleys that the superstitious half-breeds would never again venture

within five miles of a house that was guarded by the Holy Virgin and

the devil in partnership. And they never did. Even the Indians were

afraid to approach the place, pronouncing it "Wakan," or supernaturally

inhabited. They regarded Lindsley as a "medicine-man" of great power.

But what a night that was! For Edwards stayed two hours, and made the

acquaintance of Lindsley and his daughter. And how he talked, while

Emilia thought she had never known how heaven felt before; and the old

man forgot his inventions, and did not broach more than twenty of his

theories in the two hours. He was so much interested in the tall

trapper that he forgot the rest. Edwards ate a supper set out by the

hands of Emilia, and left at three o'clock. He was at Pelican Lake next

morning, and no man suspected his share in the affair except Gager, who

had sense enough to say nothing. And Emilia lay down and dreamed of

angels about the house. One was like Thorwaldsen's "Morning," and the

other wore long hair and beard, and was very tall.

This abortive attempt to make a skyrocket out of Lindsley's cabin

wrought only good to Emilia at first. The father was now wholly in love

with the trapper. He praised him at all hours.

"He is a philosopher, my daughter. He understands chemistry. He lives

in the arcana of nature and reads her secrets. No foolish study of the

heathen classics; no training after mediæval fashion in one of our

colleges, which are anachronisms, has perverted his taste. Here is the

Émile worthy of my Emilia," he would say, much to the daughter's

annoyance.

But when Edwards came the hours were golden. Hanging his wolf-skin cap

behind the door, and shaking back his long locks as he took his seat,

he would entrance father and daughter alike with his talk of adventure.

From the time of his first visit new life came to the heart of Emilia;

and Mr. Lindsley, whose every whim the trapper humored, was as much

fascinated as his daughter. But now commenced a fierce battle in the

heart of Emilia. Edwards loved her. By all the speech that his eyes

were capable of, he told her so. And by all the beating of her own

heart she knew that she loved the brown-faced, long-haired trapper in

return. But what about the fair-eyed student, who for very love and

disappointment had gone to the arctic seas? He was not at hand to plead

his cause, and for this very reason her conscience pleaded it for him.

When her soul had fed on the words of the trapper as upon manna in the

wilderness, she took up the old photograph and the eyes reproached her.

She shed bitter tears of penitence upon it for her disloyalty to the

storm-tossed sailor, but rejoiced again when she saw the tall figure of

the trapper coming down the trail. A desolate and lonely heart can not

live forever on the memory of a dead love. And have ye not read what

David did when he was an hungered? Do not, therefore, reproach a

starving soul for partaking of this feast in the desert.

And so Emilia tried to believe that Brown was long since dead--poor

fellow! She shed tears over an imaginary grave in Labrador with a great

sense of comfort. She tried to think that he had long since married and

forgotten her, and she endeavored to nurse some feeble pangs of

jealousy toward an imaginary wife.

Now it was very improper, doubtless, in Brown to come to life just at

this moment. One lover too many is as destructive to the happiness of a

conscientious girl as one too few. If Emilia had been trained in

society, her joy at having two lovers would have had no alloy save her

grief that there were not four of them. But it was one of the

misfortunes of her solitary and peculiar education that she had

conscience and maidenly modesty. Wherefore it was a source of bitter

distress and embarrassment to her that, at the end of a long letter

from a neighbor who had taken a notion after years of silence to write

her all the gossip of the old village, she found these words: "Your old

friend Brown did not jump into the sea at grief for his rejection,

after all. He has written to somebody here that he is coming home. I

believe he said that he loved you all the same as ever."

The greatest grief of Emilia was that she should have been so wicked as

to be grieved. Had she not prayed all these years, when she could pray

at all, for the safety of the young student? Had she not prayed against

storms and icebergs? And now that he was coming, her heart smote her as

if he were a ghost of some one whom she had murdered! Whether she loved

him, or Edwards, or anybody, indeed she could not tell. But she would

do penance for her crime. And so, when next she heard the quiet voice

of "the long trapper" asking for her, she refused to see him, though

the refusal all but killed her.

Poor Edwards! How he paced the shore of Swan Lake all that night! For

when love comes into the soul of a solitary man it has all the force

that all the thousand interests of life have to one in the busy world.

How terrible were the temptations that sometimes assailed the religious

eremites we can never guess.

Sunset of the next day found Edwards in the Red River Valley, far on

his way toward Fort Garry, bent on spending the rest of his life as a

"free trader" in British America. As for Emilia, she was now in total

darkness. The sun had set, and the moon had not appeared. Brown might

be dead, or she might not love him, or he might never find her. And she

had thrown away her paradise, and there was only blackness left.

Edwards had already come within a few miles of Georgetown, where he was

to take passage in that strangest of all the craft that ever frightened

away the elk, the little seven-by-nine steamer Anson Northrup, when, as

he was striding desperately along the trail, he was suddenly checked by

a thought. He stood five minutes in indecision, then turned and began

to walk rapidly in the opposite direction. At Breckinridge he found a

stage, and getting out at Gager's he went down the trail toward

Lindsley's.

Now Davy Lindsley had been in a terrible state of ferment. When he had

found the philosopher, "the uncontaminated child of Nature, the

self-educated combination of civilized and savage man," his daughter

had perversely refused him, and the old man had taken the

disappointment so to heart that he was in a state bordering on frenzy.

"Misfortune always pursues me!" he began, when he met Edwards under the

hill. "Fifty times I have been near achieving some great result, and my

ill luck has spoiled it all. You see me a broken-hearted man. To have

allied my family with a child of Nature like yourself would have given

me the greatest joy. But--how shall I express my grief?" And here the

old man struck a pathetically tragic attitude and drew out his

handkerchief, weeping with a profound self-pity.

"Mr. Lindsley, do you know why Miss Lindsley has become so suddenly

displeased with me?" asked the trapper, trembling.

"Miss Lindsley, sir, is perverse. It is the one evil trait that my

enlightened system of education, drawn from Rousseau, Pestalozzi,

Froebel, and Herbert Spencer, and combined by my own genius--it is the

one evil trait that my system has failed to eradicate. She is perverse.

I fear, sir, she is yet worshiping the image of a misguided youth who,

filled and puffed up with the useless learning of the schools, ventured

to address her. I am the most unfortunate of men."

"Mr. Lindsley, can I see your daughter alone?"

The old man thought he could. But she was very perverse. In truth, that

very morning Emilia had, in a sublime spirit of self-immolation, vowed

that she would love none but the long-lost lover, and that if Brown

never came back she would die heroically devoted to him, and thus she

had sacrificed to her conscience and it was appeased. But right atop

this vow came the request of Edwards for an interview. Was ever a girl

so beset? Could she trust herself? On thinking it over she was afraid

not; so that it was only by much persuasion that she was prevailed on

to grant the request.

While Edwards talked she could but listen, frightened all the time at

the faintness of her solemn resolution, which had seemed so irrevocable

when she made it. He frankly demanded the reason for her change of

conduct toward him. And she, like an honest and simple-hearted girl,

told the other love story with a trembling voice, while Edwards

listened with eyes downcast.

"This was five years ago?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

"And the young man's name?"

"Was Edward Brown."

"Curious! I think," he said slowly, pausing as if to get breath and

keep his self-control, "I think, if my hair were cut off short and

parted on one side as Edward Brown wore his, instead of in the middle,

and if my whiskers were shaven off, and if the tan of five years'

exposure were gone from my face, and if I were five years younger, and

two inches shorter, I think----" He paused here and looked at her.

"Please say the rest quickly," she said in a faint whisper. For the

setting sun was streaming in at the west window upon the face of the

trapper. His hair was thrown back, and he was looking into her eyes

with a look she had never seen before. But he dropped his head upon his

hand now and looked at the floor.

"It might be," he spoke musingly, "it might be that Edward Brown failed

to reach his ship in time at New Bedford, and changed his mind and came

here, and that after Emilia came he watched this house day and night

till his heart came nigh to bursting. But I was going to say," he said,

rousing himself, "that in case the years and the tan and the hair could

be taken off, and this trapper coat changed into one of finer cut and

material, and the name reversed, that Browne Edwards, the trapper,

would be nearer of kin than a twin brother to Edward Brown, the

broken-hearted student."

What Emilia did just here I do not know, and if I did I should not tell

you. To faint would have been the proper thing. But, poor girl! her

education had been neglected, and I think she did not faint. When the

old philosopher came in he was charmed with the situation, and that

evening, when they two walked together on the bank of the Pomme de

Terre, Emilia pointed to the stars, and said: "Do you know that in all

these years God has seemed to me a cruel monster turning a crank? And

to-night every star seems to be an eye through which God is looking at

me, as my mother used to. I feel as though God were loving me. See, the

stars are laughing in my face! Now I love Him as I did my mother. And

to-night I am going to read that curious story about Christ at the

wedding."

For God, who is love, loves to find his way to a human heart through

love. And Edwards, who had been in bitterness and rebellion during the

years of his exile, listened now to the voice of love as to that of an

angel whom God had sent out of heaven to bring him back home again.

Mr. Lindsley is an invalid now. Lindsleyville belongs to Browne Edwards

and his wife. And old Davy has made a will on twenty quires of legal

cap, bequeathing to his son-in-law all his right, title, and interest

in certain and sundry patents on churns, cannons, beehives, magic

lanterns, flying machines, etc., together with some extraordinary

secret discoveries. The old gentleman is slowly dying in the full

conviction that he is bequeathing the foundation of an immense fortune

to his son-in-law, and more wisdom to the world than has been

contributed to its stock by all that have gone before. And he often

reminds Emilia that she has to thank him for getting so good a husband.

If it hadn't been for him she might have married that sickly student.

_1871_.

THE STORY OF A VALENTINE.

When my friend Capt. Terrible, U.S.N., dines at my plain table, I am

a little abashed. I know that he has been accustomed always to a

variety of wines and sauces, to a cigarette after each course, and to

cookery that would kill an undeveloped American. So, when the captain

turns the castor round three times before selecting his condiment, and

when his eyes seem to be seeking for Worcestershire sauce and Burgundy

wine, I feel the poverty of the best feast I can furnish him. I am

afraid veteran magazine readers will feel thus about the odd little

story I have to tell. For I have observed of late that even the short

stories are highly seasoned; and I can not bear to disappoint readers.

So, let me just honestly write over the gateway to this story a

warning. I have no Cayenne pepper. No Worcestershire sauce. No cognac.

No cigarettes. No murders. No suicides. No broken hearts. No lovers'

quarrels. No angry father. No pistols and coffee. No arsenic. No

laudanum. No shrewd detectives. No trial for murder. No "heartless

coquette." No "deep-dyed villain with a curling mustache." Now if,

after this warning, you have the courage to go on, I am not

responsible.

Hubert said I might print it if I would disguise the names. It came out

quite incidentally. We were discussing the woman question. I am a

"woman's righter." Hubert--the Rev. Hubert Lee, I should say, pastor of

the "First Church," and, indeed, the only church in Allenville--is not,

though I flatter myself I have made some impression on him. But the

discussion took place in Hubert's own house, and wishing to give a

pleasant turn at the end, I suppose, he told me how, a year and a half

before, he had "used up" one woman's-rights man, who was no other than

old Dr. Hood, the physician that has had charge of the physical health

of Hubert and myself from the beginning. Unlike most of his profession,

the doctor has always been a radical, and even the wealth that has come

in upon him of late years has left him quite as much of a radical, at

least in theory, as ever. Indeed, the old doctor is not very

inconsistent in practice, for he has educated his only daughter,

Cornelia, to his own profession, and I believe she took her M.D. with

honors, though she has lately spoiled her prospects by marrying. But

socially he has become a little aristocratic, seeking an exclusive

association with his wealthy neighbors. And this does not look very

well in one who, when he was poor, was particularly bitter on "a

purse-proud aristocracy." I suppose Hubert felt this. Certainly I did,

and therefore I enjoyed the conversation that he repeated to me all the

more.

It seems that my friend Hubert had been away at the seminary for three

years, and that having at last conquered in his great battle against

poverty, and having gained an education in spite of difficulties, and

having supplied a city church acceptably for some months during the

absence of the pastor in Europe, he came back to our native village to

rest on his laurels a few weeks, and to decide which of three rather

impecunious calls he would accept. When just about to leave he took it

into his head, for some reason, to "drop in" on old Doctor Hood. It was

nine o'clock in the morning, and the doctor's partner was making

morning calls, while the old gentleman sat in his office to attend to

any that might seek his services. This particular morning happened to

be an unfortunate one, for there were no ague-shaken patients to be

seen, and there was not even a case of minor surgery to relieve the

tediousness of the morning office hour. Perhaps it was for this reason,

perhaps it was for the sake of old acquaintance, that he gave Hubert a

most cordial reception, and launched at once into a sea of vivacious

talk. Cornelia, who was in the office, excused herself on the ground

that she was cramming for her final examination, and seated herself at

a window with her book.

"I am afraid I take your time, doctor," said Hubert.

"Oh, no, I am giving up practice to my partner, Dr. Beck, and shall

give it all to him in a year or two."

"To him and Miss Cornelia?" queried Hubert, laughing. For it was

currently reported that the young doctor and Cornelia were to form a

partnership in other than professional affairs.

Either because he wished to attract her attention, or for some other

reason, Hubert soon managed to turn the conversation to the subject of

woman's rights, and the old doctor and the young parson were soon

hurling at each other all the staple and now somewhat stale arguments

about woman's fitness and woman's unfitness for many things. At last,

perhaps because he was a little cornered, Hubert said:

"Now, doctor, there was a queer thing happened to a student in my class

in the seminary. I don't suppose, doctor, that you are much interested

in a love story, but I would just like to tell you this one, because I

think you dare not apply your principles to it in every part. Theories

often fail when practically applied, you know."

"Go on, Hu, go on; I'd like to hear the story. And as for my

principles, they'll bear applying anywhere!" and the old doctor rubbed

his hands together confidently.

"This friend of mine, Henry Gilbert," said Hu, "was, like myself, poor.

A long time ago, when he was a boy, the son of a poor widow, the lot on

which he lived joined at the back the lot on which lived a Mr. Morton,

at that time a thriving merchant, now the principal capitalist in that

part of the country. As there was a back gate between the lots, my

friend was the constant playmate from earliest childhood of Jennie

Morton. He built her playhouses out of old boards, he molded clay

bricks for her use, and carved tiny toys out of pine blocks for her

amusement. As he grew larger, and as Jennie's father grew richer and

came to live in greater style, Henry grew more shy. But by all the

unspoken language of the eyes the two never failed to make their

unchanging regard known to each other.

"Henry went to college early. At vacation time the two met. But the

growing difference in their social position could not but be felt.

Jennie's friends were of a different race from his own. Her parents

never thought of inviting him to their entertainments. And if they had,

a rusty coat and a lack of money to spend on kid gloves would have

effectually kept him away. He was proud. This apparent neglect stung

him. It is true that Jennie Morton was all the more kind. But his quick

and foolish pride made him fancy that he detected pity in her kindness.

And yet all this only made him determined to place himself in a

position in which he could ask her hand as her equal. But you do not

understand, doctor, as I do, how irresistible is this conviction of

duty in regard to the ministry. Under that pressure my friend settled

it that he must preach. And now there was before him a good ten years

of poverty at least. What should he do about it?

"In his extremity he took advice of a favorite theological professor.

The professor advised him not to seek the hand of a rich girl. She

would not be suited to the trials of a minister's life. But finding

that Henry was firm in his opinion that this sound general principle

did not in the least apply to this particular case, the professor

proceeded to touch the tenderest chord in the young man's heart. He

told him that it would be ungenerous, and in some sense dishonorable,

for him to take a woman delicately brought up into the poverty and

trial incident to a minister's life. If you understood, sir, how morbid

his sense of honor is, you would not wonder at the impression this

suggestion made upon him. To give up the ministry was in his mind to be

a traitor to duty and to God. To win her, if he could, was to treat

ungenerously her whose happiness was dearer to him a thousand times

than his own."

"I hope he did not give her up," said the doctor.

"Yes, he gave her up, in a double spirit of mediæval self-sacrifice.

Looking toward the ministry, he surrendered his love as some of the old

monks sacrificed love, ambition, and all other things to conscience.

Looking at her happiness, he sacrificed his hopes in a more than

knightly devotion to her welfare. The knights sometimes gave their

lives. He gave more.

"For three years he did not trust himself to return to his home. But,

having graduated and settled himself for nine months over a church,

there was no reason why he shouldn't go to see his mother again; and

once in the village, the sight of the old schoolhouse and the old

church revived a thousand memories that he had been endeavoring to

banish. The garden walks, and especially the apple trees, that are the

most unchangeable of landmarks, revived the old passion with

undiminished power. He paced his room at night. He looked out at the

new house of his rich neighbor. He chafed under the restraint of his

vow not to think again of Jennie Morton. It was the old story of the

monk who thinks the world subdued, but who finds it all at once about

to assume the mastery of him. I do not know how the struggle might have

ended, but it was all at once stopped from without.

"There reached him a rumor that Jennie was already the betrothed wife

of a Colonel Pearson, who was her father's partner in business. And,

indeed, Colonel Pearson went in and out at Mr. Morton's gate every

evening, and the father was known to favor his suit.