EARTH'S ENIGMAS

 A VOLUME OF STORIES BY

 CHARLES G D ROBERTS

 LAMSON WOLFFE AND COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK 1896 _Copyright, 1895_, University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A. 

Author's Note. 

Most of the stories in this collection have already appeared in thepages of English, American, or Canadian periodicals. For kind courtesiesin regard to the reprinting of these stories my thanks are due to theEditors of Harper's Magazine, Longman's Magazine, Scribner's Magazine, The Cosmopolitan, Lippincott's Magazine, The Independent, The TorontoGlobe, Harper's Bazaar, and The Youth's Companion. 

C. G. D. R. 

Fredericton, N. B. 

_January, 1896. _

Contents. 

Do Seek their Meat from God

The Perdu

"The Young Ravens that Call upon Him"

Within Sound of the Saws

The Butt of the Camp

In the Accident Ward

The Romance of an Ox-Team

A Tragedy of the Tides

At the Rough-and-Tumble Landing

An Experience of Jabez Batterpole

The Stone Dog

The Barn on the Marsh

Captain Joe and Jamie

Strayed

The Eye of Gluskāp

Earth's Enigmas. 

Do Seek their Meat from God. 

One side of the ravine was in darkness. The darkness was soft and rich, suggesting thick foliage. Along the crest of the slope tree-tops cameinto view--great pines and hemlocks of the ancient unviolatedforest--revealed against the orange disk of a full moon just rising. Thelow rays slanting through the moveless tops lit strangely the upperportion of the opposite steep, --the western wall of the ravine, barren, unlike its fellow, bossed with great rocky projections, and harsh withstunted junipers. Out of the sluggish dark that lay along the ravine asin a trough, rose the brawl of a swollen, obstructed stream. 

Out of a shadowy hollow behind a long white rock, on the lower edge ofthat part of the steep which lay in the moonlight, came softly a greatpanther. In common daylight his coat would have shown a warm fulvoushue, but in the elvish decolorizing rays of that half hidden moon heseemed to wear a sort of spectral gray. He lifted his smooth round headto gaze on the increasing flame, which presently he greeted with ashrill cry. That terrible cry, at once plaintive and menacing, with anundertone like the fierce protestations of a saw beneath the file, was asummons to his mate, telling her that the hour had come when they shouldseek their prey. From the lair behind the rock, where the cubs werebeing suckled by their dam, came no immediate answer. Only a pair ofcrows, that had their nest in a giant fir-tree across the gulf, woke upand croaked harshly their indignation. These three summers past they hadbuilt in the same spot, and had been nightly awakened to vent the samerasping complaints. 

The panther walked restlessly up and down, half a score of paces eachway, along the edge of the shadow, keeping his wide-open green eyes uponthe rising light. His short, muscular tail twitched impatiently, but hemade no sound. Soon the breadth of confused brightness had spread itselffurther down the steep, disclosing the foot of the white rock, and thebones and antlers of a deer which had been dragged thither and devoured. 

By this time the cubs had made their meal, and their dam was ready forsuch enterprise as must be accomplished ere her own hunger, now grownsavage, could hope to be assuaged. She glided supplely forth into theglimmer, raised her head, and screamed at the moon in a voice asterrible as her mate's. Again the crows stirred, croaking harshly; andthe two beasts, noiselessly mounting the steep, stole into the shadowsof the forest that clothed the high plateau. 

The panthers were fierce with hunger. These two days past their huntinghad been well-nigh fruitless. What scant prey they had slain had for themost part been devoured by the female; for had she not those small blindcubs at home to nourish, who soon must suffer at any lack of hers? Thesettlements of late had been making great inroads on the world ofancient forest, driving before them the deer and smaller game. Hence thesharp hunger of the panther parents, and hence it came that on thisnight they hunted together. They purposed to steal upon the settlementsin their sleep, and take tribute of the enemies' flocks. 

Through the dark of the thick woods, here and there pierced by themoonlight, they moved swiftly and silently. Now and again a dry twigwould snap beneath the discreet and padded footfalls. Now and again, asthey rustled some low tree, a pewee or a nuthatch would give a startledchirp. For an hour the noiseless journeying continued, and ever and anonthe two gray, sinuous shapes would come for a moment into the view ofthe now well-risen moon. Suddenly there fell upon their ears, far offand faint, but clearly defined against the vast stillness of theNorthern forest, a sound which made those stealthy hunters pause andlift their heads. It was the voice of a child crying, --crying long andloud, hopelessly, as if there were no one by to comfort it. The panthersturned aside from their former course and glided toward the sound. Theywere not yet come to the outskirts of the settlement, but they knew of asolitary cabin lying in the thick of the woods a mile and more from thenearest neighbor. Thither they bent their way, fired with fierce hope. Soon would they break their bitter fast. 

Up to noon of the previous day the lonely cabin had been occupied. Thenits owner, a shiftless fellow, who spent his days for the most part atthe corner tavern three miles distant, had suddenly grown disgusted witha land wherein one must work to live, and had betaken himself with hisseven-year-old boy to seek some more indolent clime. During the longlonely days when his father was away at the tavern the little boy hadbeen wont to visit the house of the next neighbor, to play with a childof some five summers, who had no other playmate. The next neighbor was aprosperous pioneer, being master of a substantial frame-house in themidst of a large and well-tilled clearing. At times, though rarely, because it was forbidden, the younger child would make his way by arough wood road to visit his poor little disreputable playmate. Atlength it had appeared that the five-year-old was learning unsavorylanguage from the elder boy, who rarely had an opportunity of hearingspeech more desirable. To the bitter grief of both children, thecompanionship had at length been stopped by unalterable decree of themaster of the frame house. 

Hence it had come to pass that the little boy was unaware of hiscomrade's departure. Yielding at last to an eager longing for thatcomrade, he had stolen away late in the afternoon, traversed withendless misgivings the lonely stretch of wood road and reached the cabinonly to find it empty. The door, on its leathern hinges, swung idlyopen. The one room had been stripped of its few poor furnishings. Afterlooking in the rickety shed, whence darted two wild and hawklikechickens, the child had seated himself on the hacked threshold, andsobbed passionately with a grief that he did not fully comprehend. Thenseeing the shadows lengthen across the tiny clearing, he had grownafraid to start for home. As the dusk gathered, he had crept tremblinginto the cabin, whose door would not stay shut. When it grew quite dark, he crouched in the inmost corner of the room, desperate with fear andloneliness, and lifted up his voice piteously. From time to time hislamentations would be choked by sobs, or he would grow breathless, andin the terrifying silence would listen hard to hear if any one oranything were coming. Then again would the shrill childish wailingsarise, startling the unexpectant night, and piercing the forest depths, even to the ears of those great beasts which had set forth to seek theirmeat from God. 

The lonely cabin stood some distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile, backfrom the highway connecting the settlements. Along this main road a manwas plodding wearily. All day he had been walking, and now as he nearedhome his steps began to quicken with anticipation of rest. Over hisshoulder projected a double-barrelled fowling-piece, from which wasslung a bundle of such necessities as he had purchased in town thatmorning. It was the prosperous settler, the master of the frame house. His mare being with foal, he had chosen to make the tedious journey onfoot. 

The settler passed the mouth of the wood road leading to the cabin. Hehad gone perhaps a furlong beyond, when his ears were startled by thesound of a child crying in the woods. He stopped, lowered his burden tothe road, and stood straining ears and eyes in the direction of thesound. It was just at this time that the two panthers also stopped, andlifted their heads to listen. Their ears were keener than those of theman, and the sound had reached them at a greater distance. 

Presently the settler realized whence the cries were coming. He calledto mind the cabin; but he did not know the cabin's owner had departed. He cherished a hearty contempt for the drunken squatter; and on thedrunken squatter's child he looked with small favor, especially as aplaymate for his own boy. Nevertheless he hesitated before resuming hisjourney. 

"Poor little devil!" he muttered, half in wrath. "I reckon his preciousfather's drunk down at 'the Corners, ' and him crying for loneliness!"Then he reshouldered his burden and strode on doggedly. 

But louder, shriller, more hopeless and more appealing, arose thechildish voice, and the settler paused again, irresolute, and withdeepening indignation. In his fancy he saw the steaming supper his wifewould have awaiting him. He loathed the thought of retracing his steps, and then stumbling a quarter of a mile through the stumps and bog of thewood road. He was foot-sore as well as hungry, and he cursed thevagabond squatter with serious emphasis; but in that wailing was aterror which would not let him go on. He thought of his own little oneleft in such a position, and straightway his heart melted. He turned, dropped his bundle behind some bushes, grasped his gun, and made speedback for the cabin. 

"Who knows, " he said to himself, "but that drunken idiot has left hisyoungster without a bite to eat in the whole miserable shanty? Or maybehe's locked out, and the poor little beggar's half scared to death. _Sounds_ as if he was scared;" and at this thought the settler quickenedhis pace. 

As the hungry panthers drew near the cabin, and the cries of the lonelychild grew clearer, they hastened their steps, and their eyes opened toa wider circle, flaming with a greener fire. It would be thoughtlesssuperstition to say the beasts were cruel. They were simply keen withhunger, and alive with the eager passion of the chase. They were notferocious with any anticipation of battle, for they knew the voice wasthe voice of a child, and something in the voice told them the child wassolitary. Theirs was no hideous or unnatural rage, as it is the customto describe it. They were but seeking with the strength, the cunning, the deadly swiftness given them to that end, the food convenient forthem. On their success in accomplishing that for which nature had soexquisitely designed them depended not only their own, but the lives oftheir blind and helpless young, now whimpering in the cave on the slopeof the moon-lit ravine. They crept through a wet alder thicket, boundedlightly over the ragged brush fence, and paused to reconnoitre on theedge of the clearing, in the full glare of the moon. At the same momentthe settler emerged from the darkness of the wood-road on the oppositeside of the clearing. He saw the two great beasts, heads down and snoutsthrust forward, gliding toward the open cabin door. 

For a few moments the child had been silent. Now his voice rose again inpitiful appeal, a very ecstasy of loneliness and terror. There was anote in the cry that shook the settler's soul. He had a vision of hisown boy, at home with his mother, safe-guarded from even the thought ofperil. And here was this little one left to the wild beasts! "Thank God!Thank God I came!" murmured the settler, as he dropped on one knee totake a surer aim. There was a loud report (not like the sharp crack of arifle), and the female panther, shot through the loins, fell in a heap, snarling furiously and striking with her fore-paws. 

The male walked around her in fierce and anxious amazement. Presently, as the smoke lifted, he discerned the settler kneeling for a secondshot. With a high screech of fury, the lithe brute sprang upon hisenemy, taking a bullet full in his chest without seeming to know he washit. Ere the man could slip in another cartridge the beast was upon him, bearing him to the ground and fixing keen fangs in his shoulder. Withouta word, the man set his strong fingers desperately into the brute'sthroat, wrenched himself partly free, and was struggling to rise, whenthe panther's body collapsed upon him all at once, a dead weight whichhe easily flung aside. The bullet had done its work just in time. 

Quivering from the swift and dreadful contest, bleeding profusely fromhis mangled shoulder, the settler stepped up to the cabin door andpeered in. He heard sobs in the darkness. 

"Don't be scared, sonny, " he said, in a reassuring voice. "I'm going totake you home along with me. Poor little lad, _I'll_ look after you iffolks that ought to don't. "

Out of the dark corner came a shout of delight, in a voice which madethe settler's heart stand still. "_Daddy_, daddy, " it said, "I _knew_you'd come. I was so frightened when it got dark!" And a little figurelaunched itself into the settler's arms, and clung to him trembling. Theman sat down on the threshold and strained the child to his breast. Heremembered how near he had been to disregarding the far-off cries, andgreat beads of sweat broke out upon his forehead. 

Not many weeks afterwards the settler was following the fresh trail of abear which had killed his sheep. The trail led him at last along theslope of a deep ravine, from whose bottom came the brawl of a swollenand obstructed stream. In the ravine he found a shallow cave, behind agreat white rock. The cave was plainly a wild beast's lair, and heentered circumspectly. There were bones scattered about, and on some dryherbage in the deepest corner of the den, he found the dead bodies, nowrapidly decaying, of two small panther cubs. 

The Perdu. 

To the passing stranger there was nothing mysterious about it except theeternal mystery of beauty. To the scattered folk, however, who livedtheir even lives within its neighborhood, it was an object of dimsignificance and dread. 

At first sight it seemed to be but a narrow, tideless, windless bit ofbackwater; and the first impulse of the passing stranger was to ask howit came to be called the "Perdu. " On this point he would get littleinformation from the folk of the neighborhood, who knew not French. Butif he were to translate the term for their better information, theywould show themselves impressed by a sense of its occultappropriateness. 

The whole neighborhood was one wherein the strange and thenot-to-be-understood might feel at home. It was a place where theunusual was not felt to be impossible. Its peace was the peace of oneentranced. To its expectancy a god might come, or a monster, or nothingmore than the realization of eventless weariness. 

Only four or five miles away, across the silent, bright meadows andbeyond a softly swelling range of pastured hills, swept the great river, a busy artery of trade. 

On the river were all the modern noises, and with its current flowed thestream of modern ideas. Within sight of the river a mystery, or anythinguninvestigated, or aught unamenable to the spirit of the age, would haveseemed an anachronism. But back here, among the tall wild-parsnip topsand the never-stirring clumps of orange lilies, life was different, anddreams seemed likely to come true. 

The Perdu lay perpetually asleep, along beside a steep bank clothed withwhite birches and balsam poplars. Amid the trunks of the trees grewelder shrubs, and snake-berries, and the elvish trifoliate plants of thepurple and the painted trillium. The steep bank, and the grove, and thePerdu with them, ran along together for perhaps a quarter of a mile, andthen faded out of existence, absorbed into the bosom of the meadows. 

The Perdu was but a stone's throw broad, throughout its entire length. The steep with its trunks and leafage formed the northern bound of it;while its southern shore was the green verge of the meadows. Along thislow rim its whitish opalescent waters mixed smoothly with the roots andover-hanging blades of the long grasses, with the cloistral archedfrondage of the ferns, and with here and there a strayed spray of purplewild-pea. Here and there, too, a clump of Indian willow streaked thegreen with the vivid crimson of its stems. 

Everything watched and waited. The meadow was a sea of sun mysteriouslyimprisoned in the green meshes of the grass-tops. At wide intervalsarose some lonely alder bushes, thick banked with clematis. Far off, onthe slope of a low, bordering hill, the red doors of a barn glowedruby-like in the transfiguring sun. At times, though seldom, a blueheron winged over the level. At times a huge black-and-yellow bee hummedpast, leaving a trail of faint sound that seemed to linger like aperfume. At times the landscape, that was so changeless, would seem towaver a little, to shift confusedly like things seen through runningwater. And all the while the meadow scents and the many-coloredbutterflies rose straight up on the moveless air, and brooded or droppedback into their dwellings. 

Yet in all this stillness there was no invitation to sleep. It was astillness rather that summoned the senses to keep watch, halfapprehensively, at the doorways of perception. The wide eye notedeverything, and considered it, --even to the hairy red fly alit on thefern frond, or the skirring progress of the black water-beetle acrossthe pale surface of the Perdu. The ear was very attentive--even to thefluttering down of the blighted leaf, or the thin squeak of the bee inthe straitened calyx, or the faint impish conferrings of the moistureexuding suddenly from somewhere under the bank. If a common sound, likethe shriek of a steamboat's whistle, now and again soared over acrossthe hills and fields, it was changed in that refracting atmosphere, andbecame a defiance at the gates of waking dream. 

The lives, thoughts, manners, even the open, credulous eyes of the quietfolk dwelling about the Perdu, wore in greater or less degree thecomplexion of the neighborhood. How this came to be is one of those nicequestions for which we need hardly expect definitive settlement. Whetherthe people, in the course of generations, had gradually keyed themselvesto the dominant note of their surroundings, or whether the neighborhoodhad been little by little wrought up to its pitch of supersensibility bythe continuous impact of superstitions, and expectations, andapprehensions, and wonders, and visions, rained upon it from thepersonalities of an imaginative and secluded people, --this might bediscussed with more argument than conclusiveness. 

Of the dwellers about the Perdu none was more saturated with the magicof the place than Reuben Waugh, a boy of thirteen. Reuben lived in asmall, yellow-ochre-colored cottage, on the hill behind the barn withthe red doors. Whenever Reuben descended to the level, and turned tolook back at the yellow dot of a house set in the vast expanse of paleblue sky, he associated the picture with a vague but haunting conceptionof some infinite forget-me-not flower. The boy had all the chores to doabout the little homestead; but even then there was always time todream. Besides, it was not a pushing neighborhood; and whenever he wouldhe took for himself a half-holiday. At such times he was more thanlikely to stray over to the banks of the Perdu. 

It would have been hard for Reuben to say just why he found the Perdu soattractive. He might have said it was the fishing; for sometimes, thoughnot often, he would cast a timorous hook into its depths and tremblelest he should lure from the pallid waters some portentous and dreadfulprey. He never captured, however, anything more terrifying than catfish;but these were clad in no small measure of mystery, for the white watersof the Perdu had bleached their scales to a ghastly pallor, and theopalescence of their eyes was apt to haunt their captor's reveries. Hemight have said, also, that it was his playmate, little CeliaHansen, --whose hook he would bait whenever she wished to fish, and whosecareless hands, stained with berries, he would fill persistently withbunches of the hot-hued orange lily. 

But Reuben knew there was more to say than this. In a boyish way, andall unrealizing, he loved the child with a sort of love that would oneday flower out as an absorbing passion. For the present, however, important as she was to him, she was nevertheless distinctly secondaryto the Perdu itself with its nameless spell. If Celia was not there, andif he did not care to fish, the boy still longed for the Perdu, and wasmore than content to lie and watch for he knew not what, amid the raptherbage, and the brooding insects, and the gnome-like conspiracies ofthe moisture exuding far under the bank. 

Celia was two years younger than Reuben, and by nature somewhat lessimaginative. For a long time she loved the Perdu primarily for itsassociations with the boy who was her playmate, her protector, and herhero. When she was about seven years old Reuben had rescued her from anangry turkey-cock, and had displayed a confident firmness which seemedto her wonderfully fine. Hence had arisen an unformulated but enduringfaith that Reuben could be depended upon in any emergency. From that dayforward she had refused to be content with other playmates. Against thisuncompromising preference Mrs. Hansen was wont to protest ratherplaintively; for there were social grades even here, and Mrs. Hansen, whose husband's acres were broad (including the Perdu itself), knew wellthat "that Waugh boy" was not her Celia's equal. 

The profound distinction, however, was not one which the children couldappreciate; and on Mrs. Hansen lay the spell of the neighborhood, impelling her to wait for whatever might see fit to come to pass. 

For these two children the years that slipped so smoothly over the Perduwere full of interest. They met often. In the spring, when the Perdu wassullen and unresponsive, and when the soggy meadows showed but a tingeof green through the brown ruin of the winter's frosts, there was yetthe grove to visit. Here Reuben would make deep incisions in the bark ofthe white birches, and gather tiny cupfuls of the faint-flavored sap, which, to the children's palates, had all the relish of nectar. Alittle later on there were the blossoms of the trillium to beplucked, --blossoms whose beauty was the more alluring in that they weresupposed to be poisonous. 

But it was with the deepening of the summer that the spell of the Perdudeepened to its most enthralling potency. And as the little girl grew inyears and came more and more under her playmate's influence, herimagination deepened as the summer deepens, her perception quickened andgrew subtle. Then in a quiet fashion, a strange thing came about. Underthe influence of the children's sympathetic expectancy, the Perdu beganto find fuller expression. Every mysterious element in theneighborhood--whether emanating from the Perdu itself or from thespirits of the people about it--appeared to find a focus in thepersonalities of the two children. All the weird, formlessstories, --rather suggestions or impressions than stories, --that in thecourse of time had gathered about the place, were revived with addedvividness and awe. New ones, too, sprang into existence all over thecountry-side, and were certain to be connected, soon after their origin, with the name of Reuben Waugh. To be sure, when all was said and sifted, there remained little that one could grasp or set down in black andwhite for question. Every experience, every manifestation, wheninvestigated, seemed to resolve itself into something of an epidemicsense of unseen but thrilling influences. 

The only effect of all this, however, was to invest Reuben with aninterest and importance that consorted curiously with his youth. With acertain consciousness of superiority, born of his taste forout-of-the-way reading, and dreaming, and introspection, the boyaccepted the subtle tribute easily, and was little affected by it. Hehad the rare fortune not to differ in essentials from his neighbors, butonly to intensify and give visible expression to the characteristicslatent in them all. 

Thus year followed year noiselessly, till Reuben was seventeen and Celiafifteen. For all the expectancy, the sense of eventfulness even, ofthese years, little had really happened save the common inexplicablehappenings of life and growth. The little that might be counted anexception may be told in a few words. 

The customs of angling for catfish and tapping the birch trees for sap, had been suffered to fall into disuse. Rather, it seemed interesting towander vaguely together, or in the long grass to read together from thebooks which Reuben would borrow from the cobwebby library of the oldschoolmaster. 

As the girl reached up mentally, or perhaps, rather, emotionally, towardthe imaginative stature of her companion, her hold upon himstrengthened. Of old, his perceptions had been keenest when alone, butnow they were in every way quickened by her presence. And now ithappened that the great blue heron came more frequently to visit thePerdu. While the children were sitting amid the birches, they heard the_hush! hush!_ of the bird's wings fanning the pallid water. The bird, did I say? But it seemed to them a spirit in the guise of a bird. It hadgradually forgotten its seclusiveness, and now dropped its long legs ata point right over the middle of the Perdu, alighted apparently on theliquid surface, and stood suddenly transformed into a moveless statue ofa bird, gazing upon the playmates with bright, significant eyes. Thelook made Celia tremble. 

The Perdu, as might have been expected when so many mysteries werecredited to it, was commonly held to be bottomless. It is a very poorneighborhood indeed, that cannot show a pool with this distinction. Reuben, of course, knew the interpretation of the myth. He knew thePerdu was very deep. Except at either end, or close to the banks, nobottom could be found with such fathom-lines as he could command. Tohim, and hence to Celia, this idea of vast depths was thrillinglysuggestive, and yet entirely believable. The palpably impossible hadsmall appeal for them. But when first they saw the great blue birdalight where they knew the water was fathoms deep, they came near beingsurprised. At least, they felt the pleasurable sensation of wonder. Howwas the heron supported on the water? From their green nest the childrengazed and gazed; and the great blue bird held them with the gem-likeradiance of its unwinking eye. At length to Reuben came a vision of thetop of an ancient tree-trunk just beneath the bird's feet, just beneaththe water's surface. Down, slanting far down through the opalineopaqueness, he saw the huge trunk extend itself, to an immemorialroot-hold in the clayey, perpendicular walls of the Perdu. He unfoldedthe vision to Celia, who understood. "And it's just as wonderful, " saidthe girl, "for how did the trunk get there?"

"That's so, " answered Reuben, with his eyes fixed on the bird, --"butthen it's quite possible!"

And at the low sound of their voices the bird winnowed softly away. 

At another time, when the children were dreaming by the Perdu, a far-offdinner-horn sounded, hoarsely but sweetly, its summons to the workers inthe fields. It was the voice of noon. As the children, rising to go, glanced together across the Perdu, they clasped each other with a startof mild surprise. "Did you see that?" whispered Celia. 

"What did you see?" asked the boy. 

"It looked like pale green hand, that waved for a moment over the water, and then sank, " said Celia. 

"Yes, " said Reuben, "that's just what it looked like. But I don'tbelieve it really was a hand! You see those thin lily-leaves all aboutthe spot? Their stems are long, wonderfully long and slender. If one ofthose queer, whitish catfish, like we used to catch, were to take holdof a lily-stem and pull hard, the edges of the leaf might rise up andwave just the way _that_ did! You can't tell what the catfish won't dodown there!"

"Perhaps that's all it was, " said Celia. 

"Though we can't be sure, " added Reuben. 

And thereafter, whensoever that green hand seemed to wave to them acrossthe pale water, they were content to leave the vision but halfexplained. 

It also came to pass, as unexpectedly as anything could come to pass bythe banks of the Perdu, that one dusky evening, as the boy and girl cameslowly over the meadows, they saw a radiant point of light that waveredfitfully above the water. They watched it in silence. As it came to apause, the girl said in her quiet voice, --

"It has stopped right over the place where the heron stands!"

"Yes, " replied Reuben, "it is evidently a will-o'-the-wisp. The queergas, which makes it, comes perhaps from the end of that dead tree-trunk, just under the surface. "

But the fact that the point of light was thus explicable, made it noless interesting and little less mysterious to the dwellers about thePerdu. As it came to be an almost nightly feature of the place, thepeople supplemented its local habitation with a name, calling it "ReubenWaugh's Lantern. " Celia's father, treating the Perdu and all thatpertained to it with a reverent familiarity befitting his right ofproprietorship, was wont to say to Reuben, --

"Who gave you leave, Reuben, to hoist your lantern on my property? Ifyou don't take it away pretty soon, I'll be having the thing put inpound. "

It may be permitted me to cite yet one more incident to illustrate morecompletely the kind of events which seemed of grave importance in theneighborhood of the Perdu. It was an accepted belief that, even in theseverest frosts, the Perdu could not be securely frozen over. Winterafter winter, to be sure, it lay concealed beneath such a covering ofsnow as only firm ice could be expected to support. Yet this fact wasnot admitted in evidence. Folks said the ice and snow were but a film, waiting to yield upon the slightest pressure. Furthermore, it was heldthat neither bird nor beast was ever known to tread the deceptiveexpanse. No squirrel track, no slim, sharp foot-mark of partridge, traversed the immaculate level. One winter, after a light snowfall inthe night, as Reuben strayed into the low-ceilinged kitchen of theHansen farm-house, Mr. Hansen remarked in his quaint, dreamy drawl, --

"What for have you been walking on the Perdu, Reuben? This morning, onthe new snow, I saw foot-marks of a human running right across it. Itmust have been you, Reuben. There's nobody else round here 'd do it!"

"No, " said Reuben, "I haven't been nigh the Perdu these three days past. And then I didn't try walking on it, any way. "

"Well, " continued Celia's father, "I suppose folks would call it queer!Those foot-marks just began at one side of the Perdu, and ended right upsharp at the other. There wasn't another sign of a foot, on the meadowor in the grove!"

"Yes, " assented Reuben, "it looks queer in a way. But then, it's easyfor the snow to drift over the other tracks; while the Perdu lies lowout of the wind. "

The latter days of Reuben's stay beside the banks of the Perdu werefilled up by a few events like these, by the dreams which these evoked, and above all by the growing realization of his love for Celia. Atlength the boy and girl slipped unawares into mutual self-revelations;and for a day or two life seemed so materially and tangibly joyous thatvision and dream eluded them. Then came the girl's naļve account of howher confidences had been received at home. She told of her mother'sobjections, soon overruled by her father's obstinate plea that "ReubenWaugh, when he got to be a man grown, would be good enough for any girlalive. "

Celia had dwelt with pride on her father's championship of their cause. Her mother's opposition she had been familiar with for as long as shecould remember. But it was the mother's opposition that loomed large inReuben's eyes. 

First it startled him with a vague sense of disquiet. Then it filled hissoul with humiliation as its full significance grew upon him. Then heformed a sudden resolve; and neither the mother's relenting cordiality, nor the father's practical persuasions, nor Celia's tears, could turnhim from his purpose. He said that he would go away, after thetime-honored fashion, and seek his fortune in the world. He vowed thatin three or four years, when they would be of a fit age to marry, hewould come back with a full purse and claim Celia on even terms. Thisdid not suit the unworldly old farmer, who had inherited, not in vain, the spiritualities and finer influences of his possession, the Perdu. Hedesired, first of all, his girl's happiness. He rebuked Reuben's pridewith a sternness unusual for him. But Reuben went. 

He went down the great river. Not many miles from the quiet region ofthe Perdu there was a little riverside landing, where Reuben took thesteamer and passed at once into another atmosphere, another world. Thechange was a spiritual shock to him, making him gasp as if he had falleninto a tumultuous sea. There was the same chill, there was a likedifficulty in getting his balance. But this was not for long. His innateself-reliance steadied him rapidly. His long-established habit ofsuperiority helped him to avoid betraying his first sense of ignoranceand unfitness. His receptiveness led him to assimilate swiftly theinnumerable and novel facts of life with which he came all at once incontact; and he soon realized that the stirring, capable crowd, whoseready handling of affairs had at first overawed him, was really inferiorin true insight to the peculiar people whom he had left about the Perdu. He found that presently he himself could handle the facts of life withthe light dexterity which had so amazed him; but through it all hepreserved (as he could see that those about him did not) his sense ofthe relativity of things. He perceived, always, the dependence of thefacts of life upon the ideas underlying them, and thrusting them forwardas manifestations or utterances. With his undissipated energy, hiscurious frugality in the matter of self-revelation, and his instinctiveknowledge of men, he made his way from the first, and the roaring portat the mouth of the great river yielded him of its treasures for theasking. This was in a quiet enough way, indeed, but a way that more thanfulfilled his expectations; and in the height of the blossoming time ofhis fifth summer in the world he found himself rich enough to go back tothe Perdu and claim Celia. He resolved that he would buy property nearthe Perdu and settle there. He had no wish to live in the world; but tothe world he would return often, for the sake of the beneficence of itsfriction, --as a needle, he thought, is the keener for being thrust oftenamid the grinding particles of the emery-bag. He resigned his situationand went aboard an up-river boat, --a small boat that would stop at everypetty landing, if only to put ashore an old woman or a bag of meal, ifonly to take in a barrel of potatoes or an Indian with baskets andbead-work. 

About mid-morning of the second day, at a landing not a score of milesbelow the one whereat Reuben would disembark, an Indian did come aboardwith baskets and bead-work. At sight of him the old atmosphere ofexpectant mystery came over Reuben as subtly as comes the desire ofsleep. He had seen this same Indian--he recognized the unchangingface--on the banks of the Perdu one morning years before, broodingmotionless over the motionless water. Reuben began unconsciously todivest himself of his lately gathered worldliness; his mouth softened, his eyes grew wider and more passive, his figure fell into looser andfreer lines, his dress seemed to forget its civil trimness. When atlength he had disembarked at the old wharf under the willows, had struckacross through the hilly sheep-pastures, and had reached a slopeoverlooking the amber-bright country of the Perdu, he was once more thesilently eager boy, the quaintly reasoning visionary, his spirit waitingalert at his eyes and at his ears. 

Reuben had little concern for the highways. Therefore he struck straightacross the meadows, through the pale green vetch-tangle, between theintense orange lilies, amid the wavering blue butterflies and the warm, indolent perfumes of the wild-parsnip. As he drew near the Perdu thereappeared the giant blue heron, dropping to his perch in mid-water. Inalmost breathless expectancy Reuben stepped past a clump of red willows, banked thick with clematis. His heart was beating quickly, and he couldhear the whisper of the blood in his veins, as he came once more in viewof the still, white water. 

His gaze swept the expanse once and again, then paused, arrested by theunwavering, significant eye of the blue heron. The next moment he wasvaguely conscious of a hand, that seemed to wave once above the water, far over among the lilies. He smiled as he said to himself that nothinghad changed. But at this moment the blue heron, as if disturbed, roseand winnowed reluctantly away; and Reuben's eyes, thus liberated, turnedat once to the spot where he had felt, rather than seen, the vision. Ashe looked the vision came again, --a hand, and part of an arm, thrown outsharply as if striving to grasp support, then dropping back and bearingdown the lily leaves. For an instant Reuben's form seemed to shrink andcower with horror, --and the next he was cleaving with mighty strokes thestartled surface of the Perdu. That hand--it was not pale green, likethe waving hand of the old, childish vision. It was white and the armwas white, and white the drenched lawn sleeve clinging to it. He hadrecognized it, he knew not how, for Celia's. 

Reaching the edge of the lily patch, Reuben dived again and again, groping desperately among the long, serpent-like stems. The Perdu atthis point--and even in his horror he noted it with surprise--wascomparatively shallow. He easily got the bottom and searched itminutely. The edge of the dark abyss, into which he strove in vain topenetrate, was many feet distant from the spot where the vision hadappeared. Suddenly, as he rested, breathless and trembling, on thegrassy brink of the Perdu, he realized that this, too, was but a vision. It was but one of the old mysteries of the Perdu; and it had taken forhim that poignant form, because his heart and brain were so full ofCelia. With a sigh of exquisite relief he thought how amused she wouldbe at his plight, but how tender when she learned the cause of it. Helaughed softly; and just then the blue heron came back to the Perdu. 

Reuben shook himself, pressed some of the water from his drippingclothes, and climbed the steep upper bank of the Perdu. As he reachedthe top he paused among the birch trees to look back upon the water. Howlike a floor of opal it lay in the sun; then his heart leaped into histhroat suffocatingly, for again rose the hand and arm, and waved, anddropped back among the lilies! He grasped the nearest tree, that hemight not, in spite of himself, plunge back into the pale mystery of thePerdu. He rubbed his eyes sharply, drew a few long breaths to steady hisheart, turned his back doggedly on the shining terror, and set forwardswiftly for the farm-house, now in full view not three hundred yardsaway. 

For all the windless down-streaming summer sunshine, there was that inReuben's drenched clothes which chilled him to the heart. As he reachedthe wide-eaved cluster of the farmstead, a horn in the distance blewmusically for noon. It was answered by another and another. But no suchsummons came from the kitchen door to which his feet now turned. Thequiet of the Seventh Day seemed to possess the wide, bright farm-yard. Aflock of white ducks lay drowsing on a grassy spot. A few hens dustedthemselves with silent diligence in the ash-heap in front of the shed;and they stopped to watch with bright eyes the stranger's approach. Fromunder the apple-trees the horses whinnied to him lonesomely. It was verypeaceful; but the peacefulness of it bore down upon Reuben's soul likelead. It seemed as if the end of things had come. He feared to lift thelatch of the well-known door. 

As he hesitated, trembling, he observed that the white blinds were downat the sitting-room windows. The window nearest him was open, and theblind stirred almost imperceptibly. Behind it, now, his intent earcaught a sound of weary sobbing. At once he seemed to see all that wasin the shadowed room. The moveless, shrouded figure, the unrespondinglips, the bowed heads of the mourners, all came before him as clearly asif he were standing in their midst. He leaned against the door-post, andat this moment the door opened. Celia's father stood before him. 

The old man's face was drawn with his grief. Something of bitternesscame into his eyes as he looked on Reuben. 

"You've heard, then!" he said harshly. 

"I know!" shaped itself inaudibly on Reuben's lips. 

At the sight of his anguish the old man's bitterness broke. "You've comein time for the funeral, " he exclaimed piteously. "Oh, Reube, if you'dstayed it might have been different!"

"The Young Ravens that Call upon Him. "

It was just before dawn, and a grayness was beginning to trouble thedark about the top of the mountain. 

Even at that cold height there was no wind. The veil of cloud that hidthe stars hung but a hand-breadth above the naked summit. To eastwardthe peak broke away sheer, beetling in a perpetual menace to the valleysand the lower hills. Just under the brow, on a splintered and crevicedledge, was the nest of the eagles. 

As the thick dark shrank down the steep like a receding tide, and thegrayness reached the ragged heap of branches forming the nest, the youngeagles stirred uneasily under the loose droop of the mother's wings. Sheraised her head and peered about her, slightly lifting her wings as shedid so; and the nestlings, complaining at the chill air that came inupon their unfledged bodies, thrust themselves up amid the warm feathersof her thighs. The male bird, perched on a jutting fragment beside thenest, did not move. But he was awake. His white, narrow, flat-crownedhead was turned to one side, and his yellow eye, under its straight, fierce lid, watched the pale streak that was growing along the distanteastern sea-line. 

The great birds were racked with hunger. Even the nestlings, to meet thepetitions of whose gaping beaks they stinted themselves without mercy, felt meagre and uncomforted. Day after day the parent birds had fishedalmost in vain; day after day their wide and tireless hunting hadbrought them scant reward. The schools of alewives, mackerel, andherring seemed to shun their shores that spring. The rabbits seemed tohave fled from all the coverts about their mountain. 

The mother eagle, larger and of mightier wing than her mate, looked asif she had met with misadventure. Her plumage was disordered. Her eyes, fiercely and restlessly anxious, at moments grew dull as if withexhaustion. On the day before, while circling at her viewless heightabove a lake far inland, she had marked a huge lake-trout, basking nearthe surface of the water. Dropping upon it with half-closed, hissingwings, she had fixed her talons in its back. But the fish had proved toopowerful for her. Again and again it had dragged her under water, andshe had been almost drowned before she could unloose the terrible gripof her claws. Hardly, and late, had she beaten her way back to themountain-top. 

And now the pale streak in the east grew ruddy. Rust-red stains andpurple, crawling fissures began to show on the rocky face of the peak. Apiece of scarlet cloth, woven among the fagots of the nest, glowed likenew blood in the increasing light. And presently a wave of rose appearedto break and wash down over the summit, as the rim of the sun came abovethe horizon. 

The male eagle stretched his head far out over the depth, lifted hiswings and screamed harshly, as if in greeting of the day. He paused amoment in that position, rolling his eye upon the nest. Then his headwent lower, his wings spread wider, and he launched himself smoothly andswiftly into the abyss of air as a swimmer glides into the sea. Thefemale watched him, a faint wraith of a bird darting through the gloom, till presently, completing his mighty arc, he rose again into the fulllight of the morning. Then on level, all but moveless wing, he sailedaway toward the horizon. 

As the sun rose higher and higher, the darkness began to melt on thetops of the lower hills and to diminish on the slopes of the uplandpastures, lingering in the valleys as the snow delays there in spring. As point by point the landscape uncovered itself to his view, the eagleshaped his flight into a vast circle, or rather into a series ofstupendous loops. His neck was stretched toward the earth, in theintensity of his search for something to ease the bitter hunger of hisnestlings and his mate. 

Not far from the sea, and still in darkness, stood a low, round hill, orswelling upland. Bleak and shelterless, whipped by every wind that theheavens could let loose, it bore no bush but an occasional juniperscrub. It was covered with mossy hillocks, and with a short grass, meagre but sweet. There in the chilly gloom, straining her ears to catchthe lightest footfall of approaching peril, but hearing only the hushedthunder of the surf, stood a lonely ewe over the lamb to which she hadgiven birth in the night. 

Having lost the flock when the pangs of travail came upon her, theunwonted solitude filled her with apprehension. But as soon as the firstfeeble bleating of the lamb fell upon her ear, everything was changed. Her terrors all at once increased tenfold, --but they were for her young, not for herself; and with them came a strange boldness such as her hearthad never known before. As the little weakling shivered against herside, she uttered low, short bleats and murmurs of tenderness. When anowl hooted in the woods across the valley, she raised her head angrilyand faced the sound, suspecting a menace to her young. When a mousescurried past her, with a small, rustling noise amid the withered mossesof the hillock, she stamped fiercely, and would have charged had theintruder been a lion. 

When the first gray of dawn descended over the pasture, the ewe feastedher eyes with the sight of the trembling little creature, as it lay onthe wet grass. With gentle nose she coaxed it and caressed it, tillpresently it struggled to its feet, and, with its pathetically awkwardlegs spread wide apart to preserve its balance, it began to nurse. Turning her head as far around as she could, the ewe watched its everymotion with soft murmurings of delight. 

And now that wave of rose, which had long ago washed the mountain andwaked the eagles spread tenderly across the open pasture. The lambstopped nursing; and the ewe, moving forward two or three steps, triedto persuade it to follow her. She was anxious that it should as soon aspossible learn to walk freely, so they might together rejoin the flock. She felt that the open pasture was full of dangers. 

The lamb seemed afraid to take so many steps. It shook its ears andbleated piteously. The mother returned to its side, caressed it anew, pushed it with her nose, and again moved away a few feet, urging it togo with her. Again the feeble little creature refused, bleating loudly. At this moment there came a terrible hissing rush out of the sky, and agreat form fell upon the lamb. The ewe wheeled and charged madly; but atthe same instant the eagle, with two mighty buffetings of his wings, rose beyond her reach and soared away toward the mountain. The lamb hunglimp from his talons; and with piteous cries the ewe ran beneath, gazingupward, and stumbling over the hillocks and juniper bushes. 

In the nest of the eagles there was content. The pain of their hungerappeased, the nestlings lay dozing in the sun, the neck of one restingacross the back of the other. The triumphant male sat erect upon hisperch, staring out over the splendid world that displayed itself beneathhim. Now and again he half lifted his wings and screamed joyously at thesun. The mother bird, perched upon a limb on the edge of the nest, busily rearranged her plumage. At times she stooped her head into thenest to utter over her sleeping eaglets a soft chuckling noise, whichseemed to come from the bottom of her throat. 

But hither and thither over the round bleak hill wandered the ewe, calling for her lamb, unmindful of the flock, which had been moved toother pastures. 

Within Sound of the Saws. 

Lumber had gone up, and the big mill on the Aspohegan was workingovertime. 

Through the range of square openings under the eaves the sunlightstreamed in steadily upon the strident tumult, the confusion of sun andshadow, within the mill. The air was sweet with the smell of freshsawdust and clammy with the ooze from great logs just "yanked" up thedripping slides from the river. One had to pitch his voice with peculiarcare to make it audible amid the chaotic din of the saws. 

In the middle of the mill worked the "gang, " a series of upright sawsthat rose and fell swiftly, cleaving their way with a pulsating, viciousclamor through an endless and sullen procession of logs. Here and there, each with a massive table to itself, hummed the circulars, large andsmall; and whensoever a deal, or a pile of slabs, was brought in contactwith one of the spinning discs, upon the first arching spirt of sawdustspray began a shrieking note, which would run the whole vibrant andintolerable gamut as the saw bit through the fibres from end to end. Inthe occasional brief moments of comparative silence, when several of thesaws would chance to be disengaged at the same instant, might be heard, far down in the lower story of the mill, the grumbling roar of the twogreat turbine wheels, which, sucking in the tortured water from thesluices, gave life to all the wilderness of cranks and shafts above. 

That end of the mill which looked down river stood open, to a height ofabout seven feet, across the whole of the upper story. From this openingran a couple of long slanting ways each two feet wide and about ahundred feet in length, raised on trestles. The track of these "slides, "as they are technically termed, consisted of a series of wooden rollers, along which the deals raced in endless sequence from the saws, to dropwith a plunge into a spacious basin, at the lower end of which they weregathered into rafts. Whenever there was a break in the procession ofdeals, the rollers would be left spinning briskly with a cheerfulmurmur. There was also a shorter and steeper "slide, " diverging to thelumber yard, where clapboards and such light stuff were piled till theycould be carted to the distant station. 

In former days it had been the easy custom to dump the sawdust into thestream, but the fish-wardens had lately interfered and put a stop to thepractice. Now, a tall young fellow, in top boots, gray homespun trousersand blue shirt, was busy carting the sawdust to a swampy hollow near thelower end of the main slides. 

Sandy MacPherson was a new hand. Only that morning had he joined theforce at the Aspohegan Mill; and every now and then he would pause, remove his battered soft felt from his whitish yellow curls, mop his redforehead, and gaze with a hearty appreciation at the fair landscapespread out beyond the mill. With himself and with the world in generalhe felt on fairly good terms--an easy frame of mind which would havebeen much jarred had he been conscious of the fact that from a corner inthe upper story of the mill his every movement was watched with avindictive and ominous interest. 

In that corner, close by the head of one of the main slides, stood atable whose presiding genius was a little swinging circular. Thecircular was tended by a powerful, sombre-visaged old mill-hand called'Lije Vandine, whose office it was to trim square the ragged ends of the"stuff" before it went down the slide. At the very back of the tablehummed the saw, like a great hornet; and whenever Vandine got two orthree deals in place before him he would grasp a lever above his head, and forward through its narrow slit in the table would dart the littlesaw, and scream its way in a second through the tough white spruce. Every time he let the saw swing back, Vandine would drop his eyes to theblue-shirted figure below, and his harsh features would work withconcentrated fury. These seven years he had been waiting for the daywhen he should meet Sandy MacPherson face to face. 

Seven years before, 'Lije Vandine had been working in one of the millsnear St. John, New Brunswick, while his only daughter, Sarah, was livingout at service in the city. At this time Sandy MacPherson was employedon the city wharves, and an acquaintance which he formed with the prettyhousemaid resulted in a promise of marriage between the two. Vandine andhis wife were satisfied with the girl's account of her lover, and themonths slipped by swiftly without their making his acquaintance. Amongthe fishing and lumbering classes, however, it not seldom happens thatbetrothal brings with it rather more intimate privileges than proprietycould sanction, whence it came to pass that one evening Sarah returnedto her parents unexpectedly, having been dismissed from her situation indisgrace. Vandine, though ignorant, was a clear-seeing man, whounderstood his own class thoroughly; and after his first outburst ofwounded indignation he had forgiven and comforted his daughter no lesstenderly than her mother had done. He knew perfectly that the girl wasno wanton. He went at once into the city, with the intention of fetchingSandy out and covering up the disgrace by an immediate marriage. Hevisited the wharves, but the young man was not there. With growingapprehension he hastened to his boarding-house, only to learn thatMacPherson had left the place and was departing for the States by thenext train, having been married the previous evening. The man's pain andfury at this revelation almost choked him, but he mastered himselfsufficiently to ask a boy of the house to accompany him to the stationand point out the betrayer. If the train had not gone, he would be intime to avenge his poor girl. The boy, however, took alarm at somethingin Vandine's face, and led him by a roundabout way, so that just as hedrew near the station the Western Express rolled out with increasingspeed. On the rear platform stood a laughing young woman bedecked inmany colors, and beside her a tall youth with a curly yellow head, whomthe boy pointed out as Sandy MacPherson. He was beyond the reach ofvengeance for the time. But his features stamped themselves ineffaceablyon the avenger's memory. As the latter turned away, to bide his time ingrim silence, the young woman on the platform of the car said to herhusband, "I wonder who that was, Sandy, that looked like he was going torun after the cars! Didn't you see? His arms kind o' jerked out, likethat; but he didn't start after all. There he goes up the hill, with onepant-leg in his boot. He looked kind of wild. I'm just as glad he didn'tget aboard!"

"He's one of your old fellers as you've give the go-by to, I kind ofsuspicion, Sis, " replied the young man with a laugh. And the trainroared into a cutting. 

About a year after these events Vandine's wife died, and Vandinethereupon removed, with Sarah and her baby, to the interior of theprovince, settling down finally at Aspohegan Mills. Here he builthimself a small cottage, on a steep slope overlooking the mill; and hereSarah, by her quiet and self-sacrificing devotion to her father and herchild, wiped out the memory of her error and won the warm esteem of thesettlement. As for the child, he grew into a handsome, blue-eyed, sturdyboy, whom his grandfather loved with a passionate tenderness intensifiedby a subtle strain of pity. As year by year his daughter and the boytwined themselves ever closer about his heart, Vandine's hate againstthe man who had wronged them both kept ever deepening to a keeneranguish. 

But now at last the day had come. When first he had caught sight ofMacPherson in the yard below, the impulse to rush down and throttle himwas so tremendous that as he curbed it the blood forsook his face, leaving it the color of ashes, and for a few seconds he could not tendhis saw. Presently, when the yelping little demon was again at workbiting across the timbers, the foreman drew near, and Vandine asked him, "Who's the new hand down yonder?"

"Oh!" said the foreman, leaning a little over the bench to followVandine's pointing, "yon's one Sandy MacPherson, from over on theKennebec. He's been working in Maine these seven year past, but says hekind of got a hankering after his own country, an' so he's come back. Good hand!"

"_That_ so!" was all Vandine replied. 

All the long forenoon, amid the wild, or menacing, or warning, orcomplaining crescendos and diminuendos of the unresting saws, the man'sbrain seethed with plans of vengeance. After all these years of waitinghe would be satisfied with no common retribution. To merely kill thebetrayer would be insufficient. He would wring his soul and quench hismanhood with some strange unheard-of horror, ere dealing the finalstroke that should rid earth of his presence. Scheme after scheme burnedthrough his mind, and at times his gaunt face would crease itself in adreadful smile as he pulled the lever that drove his blade through thedeals. Finding no plan altogether to his taste, however, he resolved topostpone his revenge till night, at least, that he might have the moretime to think it over, and to indulge the luxury of anticipation withrealization so easily within his grasp. 

At noon Vandine, muttering to himself, climbed the steep path to thelittle cottage on the hillside. He ate his dinner in silence, withapparently no perception of what was being set before him. His daughterdared not break in upon this preoccupation. Even his idolized Steviecould win from him no notice, save a smile of grim triumph thatfrightened the child. Just as he was leaving the cottage to return tothe mill, he saw Sarah start back from the window and sit down suddenly, grasping at her bosom, and blanching to the lips as if she had seen aghost. Glancing downward to the black road, deep with rotted sawdust, hesaw MacPherson passing. 

"Who is it?" he asked the girl. 

"It's Sandy, " she murmured, flushing scarlet and averting her face. 

Her father turned away without a word and started down the hill. Presently the girl remembered that there was something terrifying in theexpression of his face as he asked the curt question. With a suddenvague fear rising in her breast, she ran to the cottage door. 

"Father!" she cried, "father!" But Vandine paid no heed to her calls, and after a pause she turned back into the room to answer Stevie'sdemand for a cup of milk. 

Along about the middle of the afternoon, while Sandy MacPherson wasstill carting sawdust, and Vandine tending his circular amid thebewildering din, Stevie and some other children came down to play aroundthe mill. 

The favorite amusement with these embryo mill-hands, stream-drivers, andlumbermen, was to get on the planks as they emerged from the upper storyof the mill, and go careering swiftly and smoothly down the slides, till, just before coming to the final plunge, they would jump off, andfall on the heap of sawdust. This was a game that to strangers lookedperilous enough; but there had never been an accident, so at AspoheganMills it had outgrown the disapproval of the hands. To Sandy MacPherson, however, it was new, and from time to time he eyed the sportapprehensively. And all the while Vandine glared upon him from hiscorner in the upper story, and the children raced shouting down theslides, and tumbled with bright laughter into the sawdust. 

Among the children none enjoyed more than Stevie this racing down theslides. His mother, looking out of the window on the hillside, saw themerry little figure, bareheaded, the long yellow curls floating outbehind him, as he half knelt, half sat on the sliding plank ready tojump off at the proper moment. She had no thought of danger as sheresumed her housework. Neither had Stevie. At length it happened, however, that just as he was nearing the end of the descent, an eaglecame sailing low overhead, caught the little fellow's eye, and divertedhis attention for a moment. It was the fatal moment. Just as he lookeddown again, gathering himself to jump, his heart sprang into his throat, and the plank with a sickening lurch plunged into the churning basin. The child's shrill, frightened shriek was not half uttered ere thewaters choked it. 

Vandine had just let the buzzing little circular slip back into itsrecess, when he saw MacPherson spring from his cart and dash madly downto the shore. 

At the same instant came that shrill cry, so abruptly silenced. Vandine's heart stood still with awful terror, --he had recognized thechild's voice. In a second he had swung himself down over thescaffolding, alighting on a sawdust heap. 

"Hold back the deals!" he yelled in a voice that pierced the din. It wasnot five seconds ere every one in the mill seemed to know what hadhappened. Two men sprang on the slides and checked the stream of deals. Then the great turbines ceased to grumble, and all the clamor of thesaws was hushed. The unexpected silence was like a blow, and sickenedthe nerves. 

And meanwhile--Stevie? The plank that bore his weight clingingdesperately to it, plunged deeper than its fellows, and came up somewhatfurther from the slide, but not now with Stevie upon it. The child hadlost his hold, and when he rose it was only to strike against thebottoms of three or four deals that lay clustered together. 

This, though apparently fatal, was in reality the child's salvation, forduring the half or three-quarters of a minute that intervened before theslides could be stopped, the great planks kept dropping and plunging andcrashing about him; and had it not been for those very timbers that cuthim off from the air he was choking to breathe, he would have beencrushed and battered out of all human semblance in a second. As it was, ere he had time to suffocate, MacPherson was on the spot. 

In an instant the young man's heavy boots were kicked off, and withoutpausing to count the odds, which were hideously against him, he spranginto the chaos of whirling timbers. All about him pounded the fallingdeals, then ceased, just as he made a clean dive beneath that littlecluster that covered Stevie. As Vandine reached the shore, and wascasting desperate glances over the basin in search of some clue to guidehis plunge, MacPherson reappeared at the other side of the deals, andStevie's yellow curls were floating over his shoulder. The young manclung rather faintly to the supporting planks, as if he had overstrainedhimself; and two or three hands, who had already shoved off a "bateau, "pushed out and picked him up with his burden. 

Torn by a convulsion of fiercely antagonized passions, Vandine sat downon the edge of the bank and waited stupidly. About the same moment Sarahlooked out of the cottage door in wonder to see why the mill had stoppedso suddenly. 

In all his dreams, Vandine had never dreamed of such chance as that hisenemy should deserve his gratitude. In his nature there had grown up onething stronger than his thirst for vengeance, and that one thing was hislove for Stevie. In spite of himself, and indeed to his furiousself-scorn, he found his heart warming strangely to the man who, atdeadliest risk, had saved the life of his darling. At the same time hewas conscious of a fresh sense of injury. A bitter resentment throbbedup in his bewildered bosom, to think that MacPherson should thus haverobbed him of the sweets of that revenge he had so long anticipated. Thefirst clear realization that came to him was that, though he must killthe man who had wronged his girl, he would nevertheless be tortured withremorse for ever after. A moment more, and--as he saw Sandy step out ofthe "bateau" with the boy, now sobbing feebly, in his arms--he knew thathis vengeance had been made for ever impossible. He longed fiercely tograsp the fellow's hand, and make some poor attempt to thank him. But hemastered the impulse--Sarah must not be forgotten. He strode down thebank. One of the hands had taken Stevie, and MacPherson was leaningagainst a pile of boards, panting for breath. Vandine stepped up to him, his fingers twitching, and struck him a furious blow across the mouthwith his open hand. Then he turned aside, snatched Stevie to his bosom, and started up the bank. Before going two paces, however, he paused, asif oppressed by the utter stillness that followed his astounding act. Bending a strange look on the young man, he said, in a voice as harsh asthe saw's:--

"I _was_ going to kill you to-night, Sandy MacPherson. But now afterthis day's work of yourn, I guess yer safe from me from this out. " Heshut his mouth with a snap, and strode up through the piles of sawdusttoward the cottage on the hill. 

As for MacPherson, he was dumbfounded. Though no boaster, he knew he haddone a magnificently heroic thing, and to get his mouth slapped for itwas an exigency which he did not know what to do with. He had staggeredagainst the boards from the force of the stroke, but it had not occurredto him to resent it, though ordinarily he was hot-blooded and quick in aquarrel. He stared about him sheepishly, bewildered and abashed, andunspeakably aggrieved. In the faces of the mill-hands who were gatheredabout him, he found no solution of the mystery. They looked asastonished as himself, and almost equally hot and ashamed. Presently heejaculated, "Well, I swan!" Then one of the men who had taken out the"bateau" and picked him up, found voice. 

"I'll be gosh-darned ef that ain't the damnedest, " said he, slowly. "Why, so, I'd thought as how he was a-goin' right down on hisprayer-handles to ye. That there kid is the apple of his eye. "

"An' he was sot on _killin'_ me to-night, was he?" murmured MacPhersonin deepest wonderment. "What might his name be, anyhow?"

"'Lije Vandine, " spoke up another of the hands. "An' that's hisgrandchild, Stevie. I reckon he must have a powerful grudge agin you, Sandy, or he'd never 'a' acted that way. "

MacPherson's face had grown suddenly serious and dignified. "Is theboy's father and mother livin'?" he inquired. 

"Sarah Vandine's living with the old man, " answered the foreman, "and asfine a girl as there'll be in Aspohegan. Don't know anything about thelad's father, nor don't want to. The man that'd treat a girl like SarahVandine that way--hangin 's too good for 'im. "

MacPherson's face flushed crimson, and he dropped his eyes. 

"Boys, " said he, huskily, "ef 'Lije Vandine had 'a' served me as heintended, I guess as how I'd have only got my deserts. I reckon as how_I'm_ the little lad's father!"

The hands stared at each other. Nothing could make them forget whatMacPherson had just done. They were all daring and ready in emergency, but each man felt that he would have thought twice before jumping intothe basin when the deals were running on the slides. The foreman couldhave bitten his tongue out for what he had just said. He tried to mendmatters. 

"I wouldn't have thought you was that sort of a man, to judge from whatI've just seen o' you, " he explained. "Anyhow, I reckon you've more'nmade up this day for the wrong you done when you was younger. But SarahVandine's as good a girl as they make, an' I don't hardly see how youcould 'a' served her that trick. "

A certain asperity grew in the foreman's voice as he thought of it; for, as his wife used to say, he "set a great store by 'Lije's girl, nothavin' no daughter of his own. "

"It was lies as done it, boys, " said MacPherson. "As for _whose_ lies, why _that_ ain't neither here nor there, now--an' she as did themischief's dead and buried--and before she died she told me all aboutit. That was last winter--of the grippe--and I tell you I've felt badabout Sarah ever since. An' to think the little lad's mine! _Boys_, butain't he a beauty?" And Sandy's face began to beam with satisfaction atthe thought. 

By this time all the hands looked gratified at the turn affairs were, tothem, so plainly taking. Every one returned to work, the foremanremarking aside to a chum, "I reckon Sarah's all right. " And in a minuteor two the saws were once more shrieking their way through the logs andslabs and deals. 

On the following morning, as 'Lije Vandine tended his vicious littlecircular, he found its teeth needed resetting. They had been tried by alot of knotty timber. He unshipped the saw and took it to the foreman. While he was waiting for the latter to get him another saw, SandyMacPherson came up. With a strong effort Vandine restrained himself fromholding out his hand in grateful greeting. There was a lull in theuproar, the men forgetting to feed their saws as they watched theinterview. 

Sandy's voice was heard all over the mill:--

"'Lije Vandine, I saved the little lad's life, an' _that_, counts for_something_; but I know right well I ain't got no right to expect you orSarah ever to say a kind word to me. But I swear, so help me God, Ihadn't no sort of idee what I was doin'. My wife died las' winter, overon the Kennebec, an' afore she died she told me everything--as I'd takeit kindly ef you'd let _me_ tell _you_, more particular, another time. An' as I was wantin' to say now, I'd take it kind ef you'd let me go upalong to your place this evenin', and maybe Sarah'd let me jest talk tothe boy a little. Ef so be ez I could persuade her by-and-by to forgetan' forgive--and you'd trust me after what I'd done--I'd lay out tomarry her the minute she'd say the word, fur there ain't no other womanI've ever set such store by as I do now by her. An' then ther'sStevie----"

"Stevie and the lass hez both got a good home, " interrupted Vandine, roughly. 

"An' I wouldn't want a better for 'em, " exclaimed MacPherson, eagerly, catching the train of the old man's thought. "What I'd want would be, efmaybe you'd let me come in along with them and you. "

By this time Vandine had got his new saw, and he turned away withoutreplying. Sandy followed him a few paces, and then turned backdejectedly to attend his own circular--he having been moved into themill that morning. All the hands looked at him in sympathy, and manywere the ingenious backwoods oaths which were muttered after Vandine forhis ugliness. The old man paid little heed, however, to the tide ofunpopularity that was rising about him. Probably, absorbed in his ownthoughts, he was utterly unaware of it. All the morning long he swungand fed his circular, and when the horn blew for twelve his mind wasmade up. In the sudden stillness he strode over to the place whereMacPherson worked, and said in a voice of affected carelessness--

"You better come along an' have a bite o' dinner with us, Sandy. You'llbe kinder expected, I reckon, for Stevie's powerful anxious to see you. "

Sandy grabbed his coat and went along. 

The Butt of the Camp. 

He was a mean-looking specimen, this Simon Gillsey, and the Gornish Campwas not proud of him. His neck was long, his mouth was long andprotruding, like a bird's beak, his hair was thin and colorless, hisshoulders sloped in such a manner that his arms, which were long andlean, seemed to start from somewhere near his waist. 

His body started forward from the hips, and he used his hands in adeprecating fashion that seemed to beseech so much recognition as mightbe conveyed in a passing kick. 

He was muscular to a degree that would never be guessed from hismake-up, but the camp was possessed with a sense of shame at toleratinghis presence, and protected its self-respect by reminding himcontinually that he was considered beneath contempt. 

Simon seemed quite unconscious of the difference between the truth and alie. It was not that he lied from malice--the hands said he hadn't"spunk" enough to know what malice was--but sheer mental obliquity ledhim to lie by preference, unless he saw reason to believe that the truthwould conciliate his comrades. 

He used to steal tobacco and other trifles whenever he found a goodopportunity, and when he was caught his repentance was that of fearrather than of shame. 

At the same time, the poor wretch was thoroughly courageous in the faceof some physical and external dangers. The puniest man in camp could cowhim with a look, yet none was prompter than he to face the grave perilsof breaking a log-jam, and there was no cooler hand than his in therisky labors of stream-driving. Altogether he was a disagreeable problemto the lumbermen, --who resented any element of pluck in one so unmanlyand meagre-spirited as he was. 

In spite of their contempt, however, they could ill have done withoutthis cringing axeman. He did small menial services for his fellows, wasordered about at all times uncomplainingly, and bore the blame foreverything that went wrong in the Gornish Camp. 

When one of the hands was in a particularly bad humor, he could alwaysfind some relief for his feelings by kicking Gillsey in the shins, atwhich Gillsey would but smile an uneasy protest, showing the conspicuousabsence of his upper front teeth. 

Then again the Gornish Camp was waggishly inclined. The hands were muchaddicted to practical jokes. It was not always wholesome to play theseon each other, but Gillsey afforded a safe object for the ingenuity ofthe backwoods wit. 

For instance, whenever the men thought it was time to "chop a fellowdown, " in default of a greenhorn from the older settlements they wouldselect Gillsey for the victim, and order that reluctant scarecrow up tothe tree-top. This was much like the hunting of a tame fox, as far asexhilaration and manliness were concerned; but sport is sport, and themen would have their fun, with the heedless brutality of primitivenatures. 

This diversion, though rough and dangerous, is never practised on anybut green hands or unwary visitors; but all signs fail in dry weather, and for Gillsey no traditions held. 

When he had climbed as high as his tormentors thought advisable--whichusually was just as high as the top of the tree--a couple of vigorouschoppers would immediately attack the tree with their axes. 

As the tall trunk began to topple with a sickening hesitation, Gillsey'seyes would stick out and his thin hair seem to stand on end, for to thistorture he never grew accustomed. Then, as the men yelled with delight, the mass of dark branches would sweep down with a soft, windy crash intothe snow, and Gillsey, pale and nervous, but adorned with that unfailingtoothless smile, would pick himself out of the _débris_ and slink off tocamp. 

The men usually consoled him after such an experience with a couple ofplugs of "black-jack" tobacco, --which seemed to him ample compensation. 

In camp at night, when the hands had all gone to bed, two or threewakeful ones would sometimes get up to have a smoke in the fire-light. Such a proceeding almost always resulted in skylarking, of which Simonwould be the miserable object. Perhaps the arch-conspirator would go tothe cook's flour-barrel, fill his mouth with dry flour, and then, climbing to the slumbering Simon's bunk, would blow the dusty stuff in asoft, thin stream all over the sleeper's face and hair and scraggybeard. This process was called "blowing him, " and was counted a hugediversion. 

On soft nights, when the camp was hot and damp, it made, of course, asufficiently nasty mess in the victim's hair, but Gillsey, by contrast, deemed rather to enjoy it. It never woke him up. 

If the joker's mood happened to be more boisterous, the approvedprocedure was to softly uncover Gillsey's feet, and tie a long bit ofsalmon twine to each big toe. After waking all the other hands, theconspirators would retire to their bunks. 

Presently some one would give a smart tug on one of the strings, andpass it over hastily to his neighbor. Gillsey would wake up with anervous yell, and grabbing his toe, seek to extricate it from the loop. Then would come another and sharper pull at the other toe, divertingGillsey's attention to that member. 

The game would be kept up till the bunks were screaming with laughter, and poor Gillsey bathed in perspiration and anxiety. Then the boss wouldinterfere, and Gillsey would be set free. 

These are only instances of what the butt was made to endure, though hewas probably able to thrash almost any one of his tormentors, and had hemustered spirit to attempt this, all the camp would have seen that hegot fair play. 

At last, however, it began to be suspected that Gillsey was stealingfrom the pork barrels and other stores. This was serious, and the menwould not play any more jokes upon the culprit. Pending proof, he wasleft severely to himself, and enjoyed comparative peace for nearly aweek. 

This peace, strange to say, did not seem to please him. The strangecreature hated to be ignored, and even courted further indignities. Noone would notice him, however, till one night when he came in late, andundertook to sleep on the "deacon-seat. "

A word of explanation is needed here. The "deacon-seat"--why so called Icannot say--is a raised platform running alongside of the stove, betweenthe chimney and the tier of bunks. It is, of course, a splendid place tosleep on a bitter night, but no one is allowed so to occupy it, becausein that position he shuts off the warmth from the rest. 

The hands were all apparently asleep when Gillsey, after a long solitarysmoke, reached for his blanket, and rolled himself up on the coveted"deacon-seat, " with his back to the glowing fire. After a deprecatinggrin directed toward the silent bunks, he sank to sleep. 

Soon in the bunks arose a whispered consultation, as a result of whichstalwart woodsmen climbed down, braced their backs against the lowertier, doubled up their knees, and laid their sock feet softly againstthe sleeper's form. At a given signal the legs all straightened out withtremendous force, and poor Gillsey shot right across the "deacon-seat"and brought up with a thud upon the stove. 

With a yell, he bounced away from his scorching quarters and plungedinto his bunk, not burnt, but very badly scared. After that he eschewedthe "deacon-seat. "

At last the unfortunate wretch was caught purloining the pork. It becameknown in the camp, somehow, that he was a married man, and father of afamily as miserable and shiftless as himself. Here was an explanation ofhis raids upon the provisions, for nobody in the camp would for a momentimagine that Gillsey could, unaided, support a family. 

One Sunday night he was tracked to a hollow about a mile from camp, where he was met by a gaunt, wild, eccentric-looking girl, who wasclearly his daughter. The two proceeded to an old stump concealed undersome logs in a thicket, and out of the hollow, of the stump Gillseyfished a lump of salt pork, together with a big bundle of "hard-tack, "and a parcel or two of some other kind of provender. 

The girl threw herself upon the food like a famishing animal, devouredhuge mouthfuls, and then, gathering all promiscuously into her scantyskirt, darted off alone through the gloom. As soon as she haddisappeared with her stores, Gillsey was captured and dragged back tocamp. 

At first he was too helpless with terror to open his mouth; but whenformally arraigned before the boss he found his tongue. He imploredforgiveness in the most piteous tones, while at the same time he flatlydenied every charge. He even declared he was not married, that he had nofamily, and that he knew no one at all in the Gornish district or thatpart of the province. 

But the boss knew all about him, even to his parentage. He lived aboutten miles from the camp, across the mountains, on the Gornish Riveritself. As for his guilt, there was no room for a shadow of uncertainty. 

A misdemeanor of this sort is always severely handled in the lumbercamps. But every man, from the boss down, was filled with profoundcompassion for Gillsey's family. A family so afflicted as to own Gillseyfor husband and sire appeared to them deserving of the tenderest pity. 

It was the pathetic savagery and haggardness of the young girl that hadmoved the woodmen to let her off with her booty; and now, the bossdeclared, if Gillsey were dismissed without his wages--as was customary, in addition to other punishment--the family would surely starve, cut offfrom the camp pork-barrel. It was decided to give the culprit his wagesup to date. Then came the rough-and-ready sentence of thecamp-followers. The prisoner was to be "dragged"--the most humiliatingpunishment on the woodmen's code. 

Gillsey's tears of fright were of no avail. He was wrapped in a sort ofwinding-sheet of canvas, smeared from head to foot with grease to makehim slip smoothly, and hitched by the fettered wrists to a pair ofhorses. The strange team was then driven, at a moderate pace, for abouthalf a mile along the main wood-road, the whole camp following inprocession, and jeering at the unhappy thief. 

When the man was unhitched, unbound, and set upon his feet, --notphysically the worse for his punishment save that, presumably, hiswrists ached somewhat, --he was given a bundle containing his scantybelongings, and told to "streak" for home. As he seemed reluctant toobey, he was kicked into something like alacrity. 

When he had got well out of sight the woodmen returned to their camp. Asfor the wretched Gillsey, after the lamentations wherewith he enlivenedhis tramp had sunk to silence, he began to think his bundle remarkablyheavy. He sat down on a stump to examine it. To his blank amazement hefound a large lump of pork and a small bag of flour wrapped up in hisdilapidated overalls. 

The snow was unusually deep in the woods that winter, and toward springthere came a sudden, prolonged, and heavy thaw. The ice broke rapidlyand every loosened brook became a torrent. Past the door of the camp, which was set in a valley, the Gornish River went boiling and roaringlike a mill-race, all-forgetful of its wonted serene placidity. 

From the camp to Gillsey's wretched cabin was only about ten milesacross the mountain, but by the stream, which made a great circuit toget around a spur of the hills, it was hardly less than three times asfar. 

To Gillsey, in his log hut on a lofty knoll by the stream, the winterhad gone by rather happily. The degradation of his punishment hardlytouched him or his barbarous brood; and his wages had brought him foodenough to keep the wolf from the door. He had nothing to do but to sitin his cabin and watch the approach of spring, while his lean boyssnared an occasional rabbit. 

At last, on a soft moonlight night, when the woods were full of thesounds of melting and settling snow, a far-off, ominous roaring smotehis ear and turned his gaze down to the valley. Down the stream, on thestill night, came the deadly, rushing sound, momently increasing involume. The tall girl, she who had carried off the pork, heard thenoise, and came to her father's side. 

"Hackett's dam's bust, shore!" she exclaimed in a moment. 

Gillsey turned upon her one of his deprecating, toothless smiles. "'Taint a-goin' ter tech us here, " said he; "but I'm powerful glad ter beouter the Gornish Camp ter night. Them chaps be a-goin' ter ketch it, blame the'r skins!"

The girl--she was a mere overgrown child of fourteen or fifteen--lookedthoughtful a moment, and then darted toward the woods. 

"Whar yer goin', sis?" called Gillsey, in a startled voice. 

"Warn 'em!" said the girl, laconically, not stopping her pace. 

"Stop! stop! Come back!" shouted her father, starting in pursuit. Butthe girl never paused. 

"Blame the'r skins! Blame the'r skins!" murmured Gillsey to himself. Then, seeing that he was not gaining on the child, he seemed to gulpsomething down in his throat, and finally he shouted:--

"_I'll_ go, sis, _honest_ I'll go. Yer kaint do it yerself. Come backhome!"

The girl stopped, turned round, and walked back, saying to her father, "They've kep' us the winter. Yer _must_ git thar in time, dad!"

Gillsey went by the child, at a long trot, without answering, anddisappeared in the woods; and at the same moment the flood went throughthe valley, filling it half-way up to the spot where the cabin stood. 

That lanky youngster's word was law to the father, and she had set histhoughts in a new channel. He felt the camp must be saved, if he diedfor it. The girl said so. He only remembered now how easily the men hadlet him off, when they might have half-killed him; and their jests andjeers and tormentings he forgot. His loose-hung frame gave him a longstride, and his endurance was marvellous. Through the gray and silverglades, over stumps and windfalls, through thickets and black valleysand treacherous swamps, he went leaping at almost full speed. 

Before long the tremendous effort began to tell. At first he would notyield; but presently he realized that he was in danger of giving out, sohe slackened speed a little, in order to save his powers. But as he cameout upon the valley and neared the camp, he caught once more a whisperof the flood, and sprang forward desperately. Could he get there intime? The child had said he _must_. He _would_. 

His mouth was dry as a board, and he gasped painfully for breath, as hestumbled against the camp-door; and the roar of the flood was in hisears. Unable to speak at first, he battered furiously on the door withan axe, and then smashed in the window. 

As the men came jumping wrathfully from their bunks, he found voice toyell:--

"The water! Dam broke! Run! Run!"

But the noise of the onrushing flood was now in their startled ears, andthey needed no words to tell them their awful peril. Not staying aninstant, every man ran for the hillside, barefooted in the snow. Erethey reached a safe height, Gillsey stumbled and fell, utterlyexhausted, and for a moment no one noticed his absence. 

Then the boss of the camp looked back and saw him lying motionless inhis tracks. Already the camp had gone down under the torrent, and theflood was about to lick up the prostrate figure; but the boss turnedback with tremendous bounds, swung Gillsey over his shoulder like a sackof oats, and staggered up the slope, as the water swelled, with asobbing moan, from his ankles to his knees. 

Seeing the situation of the boss, several more of the hands, who hadclimbed to a level of safety, rushed to the rescue. They seized him andhis burden, while others formed a chain, laying hold of hands. With ashout the whole gang surged up the hill, --and the river saw its preydragged out of its very teeth. 

After a rest of a few moments, Gillsey quite recovered, and began mostabject apologies for not getting to camp sooner, so as to give the boystime to save something. 

The demonstrative hand-shakings and praises and gratitude of the menwhom he had snatched from a frightful death seemed to confuse him. Hetook it at first for chaff, and said, humbly, that "Bein' as sis wantedhim to git thar in time, he'd did his best. " But at length it dawnedupon him that his comrades regarded him as a man, as a hero, who haddone a really splendid and noble thing. He began to feel their gratitudeand their respect. 

Then it seemed as if a transformation was worked upon the poor cringingfellow, and he began to believe in himself. A new, firmer, manlier lightwoke in his eye, and he held himself erect. He presently began to moveabout among the woodsmen as their equal, and their enduring gratitudegave his new self-confidence time to ripen. From that day Simon Gillseystood on a higher plane. In that one act of heroism he had found hisslumbering manhood. 

In the Accident Ward. 

The grass was gray, of a strange and dreadful pallor, but long and soft. Unbroken, and bending all one way, as if to look at something, itcovered the wide, low, rounded hill that rose before me. Over the hillthe sky hung close, gray and thick, with the color of a parchedinterminable twilight. Dew or a drop of rain could not be thought of ascoming from such a sky. 

Along the base of the low hill ran a red road of baked clay, blood red, and beaten with nameless and innumerable feet. I stood in the middle ofthis road and prepared to ascend the hill obliquely by a narrowfootpath, red as blood, which divided the soft gray bending of thegrasses. Behind me the road made a sharp turn, descending out of thickclouds into a little blood-red hollow, where it was crossed by an opengate. In this gate, through which I had somehow come, stood two grayleopards and a small ape. The beasts stood on tip-toe and eyed me with adreadful curiosity; and from somewhere in the little hollow I heard aword whispered which I could not understand. But the beasts heard it, and drew away through the open gate, and disappeared. 

Between the footpath (which all the time gleamed redly through theover-gathering grasses) and the rounded brink of the gulf there seemedto be a fence of some sort, so fine that I could not quite distinguishit, but which I knew to be there. 

I turned my eyes to the low summit of the hill. There I saw a figure, all gray, cleaving the grasses in flight as swift as an arrow. Behind, in pursuit, came another figure, of the color of the grasses, tall andterrible beyond thought. This being, as it seemed to me, was the SecondDeath, and my knees trembled with horror and a sort of loathing. Then Isaw that he who fled made directly for me; and as they sped I could heara strange hissing and rustling of their garments cleaving the grasses. When the fleeing ghost reached me, and fell at my feet, and clasped myknees in awful fear, I felt myself grow strong, and all dread left mysoul. I reached forth my right hand and grasped the pursuing horror bythe throat. 

I heard the being laugh, and the iron grip of my own strong andimplacable fingers seemed to close with a keen agony upon my own throat, and a curtain seemed to fall over my eyes. Then I gasped for breath, anda warm pungent smell clung in my nostrils, and a white light swam intomy eyes, and I heard a voice murmuring far off, but in an accentstrangely familiar and commonplace, "He's coming round all right now. "

I opened my eyes with a dim wonder, and found myself surrounded by theinterested faces of the doctors and the clean white walls of thehospital ward. I heard a sound of some one breathing hoarsely near by, and a white-capped nurse with kind eyes stepped up to my pillow, and Iperceived that the heavy breather was myself. I was lying with my headand neck swathed in bandages, and a sharp pain at my throat. Thenflashed across my memory the crash and sickening upheaval of thecollision. I wondered feebly how it had fared with my fellow-passengers, and again I saw that instant's vision of wild and startled faces as thecrowded car rose and pitched downward, I knew not whither. With a senseof inexpressible weariness, my brain at once allowed the terrible sceneto slip from its grasp, and I heard a doctor, who was standing at thebedside watch in hand, say, quietly, "He'll sleep now for a couple ofhours. "

The Romance of an Ox-Team. 

The oxen, lean and rough-haired, one of them carroty red, the otherbrindle and white, were slouching inertly along the narrow backwoodsroad. From habit they sagged heavily on the yoke, and groaned huge windysighs, although the vehicle they were hauling held no load. Thisstructure, the mere skeleton of a cart, consisted of two pairs ofclumsy, broad-tired wheels, united by a long tongue of ash, whose tipwas tied with rope to the middle of the forward axle. The road lookedinnocent of even the least of the country-road-master's well-meaningattempts at repair, --a circumstance, indeed, which should perhaps be setto its credit. It was made up of four deep, parallel ruts, the twooutermost eroded by years of journeying cart-wheels, the inner ones wornby the companioning hoofs of many a yoke of oxen. Down the centre ran ahigh and grassy ridge, intolerable to the country parson and the countrydoctor, compelled to traverse this highway in their one-horse wagons. From ruts and ridges alike protruded the imperishable granite boulder, which wheels and feet might polish but never efface. On either side ofthe roadway was traced an erratic furrow, professing to do duty for adrain, and at intervals emptying a playful current across the track towander down the ruts. 

Along beside the slouching team slouched a tall, lank, stoop-shoulderedyouth, the white down just beginning to stiffen into bristles on hislong upper lip. His pale eyes and pale hair looked yet paler by contrastwith his thin, red, wind-roughened face. In his hand he carried along-handled ox-whip, with a short goad in the butt of it. 

"Gee, Buck!" he drawled, prodding the near ox lightly in the ribs. Andthe team lurched to the right to avoid a markedly obtrusive boulder. "Haw, Bright!" he ejaculated a minute later, flicking with his whip theoff shoulder of the farther ox. And with sprawling legs and swaying ofhind-quarters the team swerved obediently to the left, shunning amire-hole that would have taken in the wheel to the hub. Presently, coming to a swampy spot that stretched all the way across the road, theyouth seated himself sidewise on the narrow tongue connecting the foreand hind axles, and drove his team dry-shod. 

It was a slow and creaking progress; but there seemed to be no hurry, and the youth dreamed gloomily on his jolting perch. His eyes took nonote of the dark-mossed, scrubby hillocks, the rough clearings blackenedwith fire, the confused and ragged woods, as they crept past in sombreprocession. But suddenly, as the cart rounded a turn in the road, therecame into view the figure of a girl travelling in the same direction. The young man slipped from his perch and prodded up the oxen to a briskwalk. 

As the noise of the team approached her, the girl looked around. She wasgood to see, with her straight, vigorous young figure in its blue-grayhomespun gown. Her hair, in color not far from that of the red ox, wasrich and abundant, and lay in a coil so gracious that not even thetawdry millinery of her cheap "store" hat could make her head look quitecommonplace. Her face was freckled, but wholesome and comely. A shade ofdispleasure passed over it as she saw who was behind her, and shehastened her steps perceptibly. But presently she remembered that shehad a good five miles to go ere she would reach her destination; and sherealized that she could not hope to escape by flight. With a pout ofvexation she resigned herself to the inevitable, and dropped back intoher former pace. Immediately the ox-team overtook her. 

As the oxen slowed up she stepped to the right to let them pass, andthen walked on, thus placing the cart between herself and her undesiredcompanion. The youth looked disconcerted by these tactics, and for a fewmoments could find nothing to say. Then, dropping his long white lashessheepishly, he murmured, "Good-day, Liz. "

"Well, Jim-Ed!" replied the girl, coolly. 

"Won't ye set on an' let me give ye a lift home?" he asked, withentreaty in his voice. 

"No, " she said, with finality: "I'd ruther walk. "

Not knowing how to answer this rebuff, he tried to cover hisembarrassment by exclaiming authoritatively, "Haw, Bright!" whereuponthe team slewed to the left and crowded him into the ditch. 

Soon he began again. 

"Ye _might_ set on, Liz, " he pleaded. 

"Yes, I _might_, " said she, with what she considered rather witheringsmartness; "but I ain't a-goin' to. "

"Ye'll be tired afore ye git home, " he persisted, encouraged by findingthat she would talk back at him. 

"James-Ed A'ki'son, " she declared, with emphasis, "if ye think I'ma-goin' to be beholden to _you_ fer a lift home, ye're mistaken, that'sall. "

After this there was silence for some time, broken only by the rattlingand bumping of the cart, and once by the whir of a woodcock thatvolleyed across the road. Young Atkinson chewed the cud of gloomybewilderment. At length he roused himself to another effort. 

"Liz, " said he, plaintively, "y' ain't been like ye used to, sence yecome back from the States. "

"Ain't I?" she remarked, indifferently. 

"No, Liz, ye ain't, " he repeated, with a sort of pathetic emphasis, asif eager to persuade himself that she had condescended to rebut hisaccusation. "Y' ain't been like ye used to at all. Appears like as if yethought us folks in the Settlement wasn't good enough fer ye now. "

At this the girl tossed her head crossly. 

"It appears like as if ye wanted to be back in the States ag'in, " hecontinued, in a voice of anxious interrogation. 

"My lands, " exclaimed the girl, "but ye're green!"

To the young man this seemed such an irrelevant remark that he wassilent for some time, striving to fathom its significance. As his headsank lower and lower, and he seemed to lose himself completely injoyless revery, the girl shot occasional glances at him out of thecorners of her eyes. She had spent the preceding winter in a factory ina crude but stirring little New England town, and had come back to NovaScotia ill content with the monotony of life in the backwoods seclusionof Wyer's Settlement. Before she went away she had been, to use thevernacular of the Settlement, "keepin' company with Jim-Ed A'ki'son;"and now, to her, the young man seemed to unite and concentrate in hisperson all that she had been wont to persuade herself she had outgrown. To be sure, she not seldom caught herself dropping back comfortably intothe old conditions. But these symptoms stirred in her heart an uneasyresentment, akin to that which she felt whenever--as would happen attimes--she could not help recognizing that Jim-Ed and his affairs werenot without a passing interest in her eyes. 

Now she began to grow particularly angry at him because, as she thought, "he hadn't nothing to say fer himself. " Sadly to his disadvantage, shecompared his simplicity and honest diffidence with the boldself-assertion and easy familiarity of the young fellows with whom shehad come in contact during the winter. Their impertinences had offendedher grievously at the time, but, woman-like, she permitted herself toforget that now, in order to accentuate the deficiencies of the man whomshe was unwilling to think well of. 

"My lands!" she reiterated to herself, with accumulated scorn, "but_ain't_ he green? He--why, he wouldn't know a 'lectric car from awaterin'-cart. An' _soft_, too, takin' all my sass 'thout givin' me nolip back, no more 'n if I was his mother!"

But the young man presently broke in upon these unflatteringreflections. With a sigh he said slowly, as if half to himself, --

"Lands, but I used to set a powerful store by ye, Liz!"

He paused; and at that "used to" the girl opened her eyes with angryapprehension. But he went on, --

"An' I set still more store by ye now, Liz, someways. Seems like I jestcouldn't live without ye. I always did feel as how ye was too good, asight too good, fer me, an' you so smart; an' now I feel it more 'never, bein' 's ye've seen so much of the world like. But, Liz, I _don't_allow as it's right an' proper fer even you to look down the way ye doon the place ye was born in an' the folks ye was brung up with. "

"My!" thought the girl to herself, "he's got some spunk, after all, togit off such a speech as that, an' to rake me over the coals, too!"

But aloud she retorted, "Who's a-lookin' down on anybody, Jim-EdA'ki'son? An', anyways, _you_ ain't the whole of Wyer's Settlement, beye?"

The justice of this retort seemed to strike the young man with greatforce. 

"That's so, " he acknowledged, gloomily. "'Course I ain't. An' I s'pose Ihadn't oughter said what I did. "

Then he relapsed into silence. For half a mile he slouched on without asyllable, save an occasional word of command addressed to the team. Coming to another boggy bit of road, he seated himself dejectedly on thecart, and apparently would not presume to again press unwelcomeassistance upon his fellow-way-farer. Quite uncertain whether tointerpret this action as excess of humility or as a severe rebuke, thegirl picked her way as best she could, flushed with a sense of injury. 

When the mud was passed, the young man absent-mindedly, kept his seat. Beginning to boil with indignation, the girl speedily lost her confidentsuperiority, and felt humiliated. She did not know exactly what to do. She could not continue to walk humbly beside the cart. The situation wasprofoundly altered by the mere fact that the young man was riding. Shetried to drop behind; but the team had an infinite capacity forloitering. At last, with head high in the air, she darted ahead of theteam, and walked as fast as she could. Although she heard no ordersgiven by their driver, she knew at once that the oxen had quickenedtheir pace, and that she was not leaving them behind. 

Presently she found herself overtaken; whereupon, with swelling heartand face averted, she dropped again to the rear. She was drawingperilously near the verge of that feminine cataclysm, tears, when Fatestepped in to save her from such a mortification. 

Fate goes about in many merry disguises. At this juncture she presentedherself under the aspect of two half-tipsy commercial travellers drivinga single horse in a light open trap. They were driving in from theSettlement, in haste to reach the hotel at Bolton Corners beforenightfall. The youth hawed his team vigorously till the nigh wheels wereon the other side of the ditch, leaving a liberal share of the road forthem to pass in. 

But the drummers were not satisfied with this. After a glance at thebashful face and dejected attitude of the young man on the ox-cart, theydecided that they wanted the whole road. When their horse's head almosttouched the horns of the off ox, they stopped. 

"Get out of the way there!" cried the man who held the reins, insolently. 

At any other time Jim-Ed would have resented the town man's tone andwords; just now he was thinking about the way Liz had changed. 

"I've gi'n ye the best half o' the road, mister, " he said, deprecatingly, "'n' I can't do no better fer ye than that. "

"Yes, you can, too, " shouted the driver of the trap; "you can give usthe whole road. It won't hurt your old cart to go out in the stumps, but_we_ ain't going to drive in the ditch, not by a jugful. Get over, Itell you, and be quick about it. "

To this the youth made no immediate reply; but he began to forget aboutthe girl, and to feel himself growing hot. As for the girl, she hadstepped to the front, resolved to "show off" and to make very manifestto the city men her scorn for her companion. Her cheeks and eyes wereflaming, and the drummers were not slow to respond to the challengewhich she flashed at them from under her drooped lids. 

"Ah, there, my beauty!" said the driver, his attention for a momentdiverted from the question of right of way. His companion, a smallishman in striped trousers and fawn-colored overcoat, sprang lightly out ofthe trap, with the double purpose of clearing the road and amusinghimself with Liz. The saucy smile with which she met him turned into afrown, however, as he began brutally kicking the knees of the oxen tomake them stand over. 

The patient brutes crowded into the ditch. 

"Whoa, there! Gee, Buck! gee, Bright!" ordered the youth, and the teamlurched back into the road. At the same time he stepped over thecart-beam and came forward on the off side of the team. 

"Ye'd better quit that, mister!" he exclaimed, with a threatening notein his voice. 

"Give the lout a slap in the mouth, and make him get out of the way, "cried the man in the trap. 

But the man in the fawn-colored overcoat was busy. Liz was much to histaste. 

"Jump in and take a ride with us, my pretty, " said he. 

But Liz shrank away, regretting her provocative glances now that she sawthe kind of men she had to do with. 

"Come, come, " coaxed the man, "don't be shy, my blooming daisy. We'lldrive you right in to the Corners and set up a good time for you. " And, grasping her hand, he slipped an arm about her waist and tried to kissher lips. As she tore herself fiercely away, she heard the man in thetrap laugh loud approval. She struck at her insulter with clenched hand;but she did not touch him, for just then something happened to him. Thelong arm of the youth went out like a cannon-ball, and the drummersprawled in the ditch. He nimbly picked himself up and darted upon hisassailant, while the man in the trap shouted to him encouragingly, --

"Give it to him pretty, Mike. "

But the young countryman caught him by the neck with long, vise-likefingers, inexorable, and, holding him thus helpless at arm's length, struck him again heavily in the ribs, and hurled him over the ditch intoa blueberry thicket, where he remained in dazed discretion. 

Though of a lamb-like gentleness on ordinary occasions, the youngcountryman was renowned throughout the Settlement for the astonishingstrength that lurked in his lean frame. At this moment he was wellaroused, and Liz found herself watching him with a consuming admiration. He no longer slouched, and his pale eyes, like polished steel, shot amenacing gleam. He stepped forward and took the horse by the bridle. 

"Now, " said he to the driver, "I've gi'n ye half the road, an' if yecan't drive by in that I'm a-going to lead ye by, 'thout no morenonsense. "

"Let go that bridle!" yelled the driver, standing up and lashing at himwith the whip. 

One stroke caught the young man down the side of the face, and stung. Itwas a rash stroke. 

"Hold the horse's head, Liz, " he cried; and, leaping forward, he reachedinto the trap for his adversary. Heeding not at all the butt end of thewhip which was brought down furiously upon his head, he wrenched thedriver ignominiously from his seat, spun him around, shook him as if hishad been a rag baby, and hurled him violently against a rotten stump onthe other side of the ditch. The stump gave way, and the drummersplashed into a bog hole. 

Nothing cows a man more quickly than a shaking combined with a ducking. Without a word the drummer hauled himself out of the slop and walkedsullenly forward. His companion joined him; and Liz, leading the horseand trap carefully past the cart, delivered them up to their owners witha sarcastic smile on her lips. Then she resumed her place beside thecart, the young man flicked the oxen gently, and the team once more gotslowly under way. 

As the discomfited drummers climbed into their trap, the girl, in theardor of her suddenly adopted hero-worship, could not refrain fromturning around again to triumph over them. When the men were fairlyseated, and the reins gathered up for prompt departure, the smaller manturned suddenly and threw a large stone, with vindictive energy anddeadly aim. 

"Look out!" shrieked the girl; and the young countryman turned asidejust in time to escape the full force of the missile. It grazed the sideof his head, however, with such violence as to bring him to his knees, and the blood spread throbbing out of the long cut like a scarlet veil. The drummers whipped their horse to a gallop, and disappeared. 

The girl first stopped the team, with a true country-side instinct; andshe was at the young man's side, sobbing with anxious fear, just as hestaggered blindly to his feet. Seating him on the cart, she proceeded tostanch the bleeding with the edge of her gown. Observing this, heprotested, and declared that the cut was nothing. But she would not begainsaid, and he yielded, apparently well content under her hands. Then, tearing a strip from her colored cotton petticoat, she gently bound upthe wound, not artistically, perhaps, but in every way to hissatisfaction. 

"If ye hadn't gi'n me warnin', Liz, that there stun'd about fixed me, "he remarked. 

The girl smiled happily, but said nothing. 

After a long pause he spoke again. 

"Seems to me ye're like what ye used to, Liz, " said he, "only nicer, asight nicer; an' y' used to be powerful nice. I allow there couldn't_be_ another girl so nice as you, Liz. An' what ever's made ye quitlookin' down on me, so sudden like?"

"Jim-Ed, " she replied, in a caressing tone, "ef y' _ain't_ got no papercollar on, ner no glas' di'mon' pin, I allow ye're a _man_. An'maybe--maybe ye're the _kind_ of man I _like_, Jim-Ed. "

To even such genuine modesty as Jim-Ed's this was comprehensible. Shylyand happily he reached out his hand for hers. They were both seated verycomfortably on the cart-beam, so he did not consider it necessary tomove. Side by side, and hand in hand, they journeyed homeward in aglorified silence. The oxen appeared to guide themselves very fairly. The sunset flushed strangely the roadside hillocks. The nighthawksswooped in the pale zenith with the twang of smitten chords. And from athick maple on the edge of a clearing a hermit-thrush fluted slowly overand over his cloistral ecstasy. 

A Tragedy of the Tides. 

This is the story of the fate that befell Lieutenant Henry Crewe andMargaret Neville, his betrothed, who disappeared from the infant city ofHalifax on the afternoon of September 18th, 1749. The facts weregathered by one Nicholas Pinson from the mouths of Indians more or lessconcerned, from members of the Neville family, and from much sagaciousconjecture; and woven, with an infinite deal of irrelevant detail, intoa narrative which has been rigorously condensed in the presentrendering. The industrious Pinson's manuscript, with all its attenuatedold French characters, its obscure abbreviations, and its well-bredcontempt for orthographical accuracy, might perhaps be found even yet inthe Provincial archives at Halifax. At least, if any one be curious toexamine this story in the original, just as M. Pinson wrote it, he maysearch the archives of Halifax with a reasonable surety that themanuscript is as likely to be found there as anywhere else. 

There was a faint, opaline haze in the afternoon air, and in the stillwaters of the harbor the low hills, with their foliage lightly touchedin bronze and amethyst and amber, were faithfully reproduced. Into ahollow between two knolls wooded with beech trees, ran a shallow cove, its clear waters edged with sand of a tender, greenish gray. Close tothe water's edge stood the lovers, and across the silence they couldhear, pulsating dimly, the hammers of them that were building the city. 

"Listen, " said the man, as he drew the girl closely to him and kissedher on the forehead; "those are the strokes that are making a home for_us_. "

The girl lifted her lips for a kiss that never reached them. The man wasseized from behind, a dark hand covered his mouth; and Lieutenant HenryCrewe, his sword unstirred in its scabbard, found himself pinioned handand foot, ere he had time to realize that other arms were about him thanthose of the woman he loved. With her it fared in like fashion, savethat before they covered her mouth she found time for one long piercingcry. It was heard by those who were working on the city palisades; butno man could tell the direction whence it came. Presently a search partyset out for the thick woods lying a little north of west from the city;but in the mean time the Indians had carried their captivesnortheastward to the lakes, and were making all speed on the Fundy coastby way of the Shubenacadie trail. 

Henry Crewe was a tall man, and well sinewed, and for a brief space hestrove so fiercely with his bonds that his fair skin flushed well-nighpurple, and his lips, under the yellow mustache, curled apart terribly, like those of a beast at bay. Unable to endure the anguish of hiseffort, Margaret averted her eyes, for she knew the hopelessness of it. Like all the Nevilles of Nova Scotia to this day, the girl was somewhatspare of form and feature, with dark hair, a clear, dark skin, and eyesof deep color that might be either gray or green. Her terrible cry hadbeen far less the utterance of a blind terror than a deliberate signalto the garrison at the fort, and so complete was her self-control thatwhen Crewe presently met her gaze his brain grew clearer, he forgot thederision in the Indians' painted faces, ceased his vain struggles, andbent all his thought to the task of finding means of deliverance. 

The captives were thrown into canoes and paddled swiftly to the head ofthe long basin which runs inland for miles from the head of the harbor. At the beginning of the portage their feet were unbound, and theirmouths set free from the suffocating gags. 

"Oh, Margaret! Margaret! To think I should have brought you to this!"exclaimed Crewe in a harsh voice, the moment his lips were free. 

The girl had confidence in her lover's power to find some way ofprotecting her, in case no help should come from the city. Her solethought now was to show herself brave, and in no way to embarrass hisjudgment. Before she could answer, however, the leader of the bandstruck Crewe across the mouth with the flat of his hatchet, as a hintthat he should keep silence. Had Crewe been alone, bound as he was, hewould have felled his assailant with a blow of the foot; but forMargaret's sake he forced himself to endure the indignity tamely, thoughhis blue eyes flamed with so dangerous a light that the Indian raisedhis hatchet again in menace. The girl's heart bled under the stroke andat sight of the wounded mouth, but she prudently abstained from speech. Only she spoke one word in a low voice that said all things to herlover's ear, the one word "Beloved!"

To the chief now spoke one of the band in the Micmac tongue:--

"Why not let the paleface talk to his young squaw? It will be the morebitter for them at the last!"

"No, " said the chief, grinning; "it is as death to the palefaces to keepsilence. But they shall have time to talk at the last. "

Throughout the long journey, which was continued till midnight under thestrong light of a moon just at the full, the lovers held no conversesave in the mute language of eye and gesture, and that only during therough marches from one lake to another. The greater part of the journeywas by canoe. At night they were lashed to trees some way apart, andseparated by the camp-fire. Crewe dared not address a word to Margaretlest he should anger his captors into doing him some injury that mightlessen his powers of thought or action, and the girl, seeing that noimmediate gain could be had from speech, dreaded to be smitten on themouth in a way that might disfigure her in her lover's eyes. Only attimes, when a wind would blow the smoke and flame aside, she lookedacross the camp-fire into the young man's face, and in the look and inthe smile of the steady lips he read not only an unswerving courage, butalso a confidence in his own resourceful protection, which pierced hisheart with anguish. All night he pondered schemes of rescue or escape, until his brain reeled and his soul grew sick before the unsolvableproblem. He could move neither hand nor foot, and just before dawn hesank to sleep in his bonds. Then for the waking girl the lonelinessbecame unspeakable, and her lips grew ashen in the first light of thedawn. 

Late on the following day the band drew up their canoes on the banks ofthe Shubenacadie, where its waters began to redden with the tide, andstruck through the woods by a dark trail. The next day the captives weretortured by the sight of a white steeple in the distance, belonging toan Acadian settlement. Crewe judged this to be the village ofBeaubassin. The surmise was confirmed when, a few hours later, after awide detour to avoid the settlement, the flag of France was seen wavingover the foliage that clothed a long line of heights. By this time theband was traversing a vast expanse of salt marshes, and after crossing alittle tidal stream near its head, they turned sharply southwestwardtoward the sea. Presently the raw red earthworks of Beauséjour rose intoview some seven or eight miles distant across the marshes. There, amonghis bitter enemies, Crewe knew he might find sure succor, if only thegallant Frenchmen could be made aware of what was passing so near them. He saw Margaret's eyes fixed with terrible appeal upon the hostileworks, wherein for her and for her lover lay safety; and agonized tofeel his utter helplessness, he raised a long and ringing shout which, as it seemed to him, must reach the very souls of those behind theramparts. Margaret's heart leaped with hope, which flickered out as shesaw the Indians laugh grimly at the foolish effort. To be within sightof help, and yet so infinitely helpless! For the first time the girlyielded to complete despair, and her head sank upon her breast. In theJournal of the Sieur Carré, at this time a lieutenant at Beauséjour, occurs this entry, under date of September 20, 1749:--

"Noted this morning a small party of natives moving down the shores ofthe river Tintamarre. Too far off to distinguish whether it was a warparty or not, but this their order of march seemed to suggest. "

After skirting for perhaps an hour a red and all but empty channel, which Crewe recognized by hearsay as the bed of the Tantramar (or_Tintamarre_, "water of hubbub"), the savages suddenly led theircaptives down the steep, gleaming abyss of mud to the edge of theshallow current, which now, at low tide, clattered shrilly seaward overclods of blue clay and small stones rolled down from the uplands. 

Margaret awoke from her despair enough to shudder disdainfully, as herfeet sank more than ankle deep in the clinging ooze, and to wonder whythe Indians should halt in such a place. She met her lover's glance, andsaw that he was singularly disturbed. 

The place was like a hideous gaping pit. A double winding of the channelclosed it in above and below. Some forty or fifty feet over their heads, against a pure sky of loveliest blue, waved a shaggy fringe of saltgrasses, yellowing in the autumn air. This harsh and meagre herbageencircled the rim of the chasm, and seemed to make the outer world ofmen infinitely remote. The sun, an hour or two past noon, glared downwhitely into the gulf, and glistened, in a myriad of steely reflections, from the polished but irregular steeps of slime. There was something sostrange and monstrous in the scene that Margaret's dull misery wasquickened to a nameless horror. Suddenly a voice, which she hardlyrecognized as that of her lover, said slowly and steadily:--

"Margaret, this is the end of our journey; we have come to the end. "

Looking up she met Crewe's eyes fastened upon her with a gaze whichseemed to sustain her and fill her nerves with strength. With the end ofhis uncertainty his will became clear, and his resolution perfect astempered steel. An Indian had brought two stakes and thrown them on themud at the leader's feet. Margaret looked at the rough-trimmed saplings, at the tide-mark far up the dreadful slope, then again into her lover'sface. She understood; but she gave no sign, save that her skin blanchedto a more deathly pallor, and she exclaimed in a voice of poignantregret: "Have we kept silence all these long hours only for this? And Ihad so much to say to you!"

"There will be time, " he said gently, and his voice was a caress. "Theflood tide has not yet begun, and it will take some hours. And it waswell, dear, that we could not speak; for so you had hope till the lastto support you, while I had none, having heard the Indians say we wereto die, though they said not in my hearing when or how. Had you knownyou might not have had this high courage of yours, that now gives _me_strength to endure the utmost. Dear, your heroic fortitude has beeneverything to me. "

A faint flush of pride rose into the girl's face, and she stretched outher pinioned arms to him, and cried: "You shall not be deceived in me. Iwill be worthy of you, and will not shame our race before these beasts. "

By this time the stakes were driven into the strong clay. They wereplaced some way up the slope, and one a little space above the other. Tothe lower stake they fastened Crewe. As the girl was being bound to theother, her arms were freed for a moment that the savages might the morereadily remove her upper garments, and by a swift movement she loosenedher hair so that it fell about her to her knees, --the splendid Nevillehair, still famous in the Province. There was no bounty then on Englishscalps, and the horror of the scalping knife was not threatened them. When the savages had made their task complete, they laughed in theirvictims' faces and retreated up the steep and over the grassy rim. 

"Are they gone?" asked the girl. 

"No, they are lying in wait to watch us, " answered Crewe; and as heceased speaking a muffled sound was heard, and with a sudden hubbub thatfilled the chasm with clamor, the first of the flood-tide came foaminground the curve, and the descending current halted as if in fear of themeeting. The next moment the bed of the stream was hidden by a boilingreddish torrent, racing up the channel; and the tide was creeping byinches toward the captives' feet. For an hour or more the bright gulf ofdeath was so loud with this turmoil and with the echoes from the redwalls of mud, and the yellow eddies of foam whirled and swept so dizzilypast their eyes, that the captives' senses were dulled in a measure, asif by some crude anodyne or vast mesmeric influence. When, however, thechannel was about one-third full and the water now beginning to coverCrewe's feet, the flood became more quiet and equable, spreadingsmoothly over freer spaces. Presently there was a frightful silence, intensified by the steady sunlight, and broken only by the stealthy, soft rush and snake-like hiss of the tide. Then, as Margaret's braingrew clear in the stillness, a low cry, which tortured Crewe's features, forced itself from her lips. She realized for the first time why thestake to which she was bound had been set higher than her lover's. Shewould watch the cruel colored water creep over Crewe's mouth, then coverhis eyes, and hide at last the brave head she had longed to kiss, ere itclimbed to ease her own lips of life. She said: "Love, I will lay myface down in the water as soon as it is near enough, and I shall _not_be far behind you. "

A wide-winged gray gull, following the tide up the channel, gave astartled cry as he came upon the silent figures, and rose higher, withsudden flapping, as he turned his flight away across the marshes. 

 * * * * *

In the Journal of the Sieur Carré, in Beauséjour, there is a secondentry under the date of September 20, 1749. It was added on a succeedingday. Translated fully it runs thus:--

"In the afternoon took a guard and marched across the Tintamarre to seewhat mischief the redskins had been at, having observed them to leavetwo of their number in the channel, and to linger long on the brink, asif watching something in the stream. It was within an hour of high tidewhen we reached the spot, the savages disappearing on our approach. Sawon the further shore a piteous sight, whereat our hearts burned tofollow the redskins and chastise their devilish malice. A woman wasbound to a stake, her face fallen forward in the water, and a wonderfulluxuriance of dark hair spread about her and floating on the current. Swam across the river, with those of my men following who could, and, plunging beneath the tide, cut her bonds. But found the life had fled, at which we wondered; for had she held her head erect the water wouldnot yet have been within a little of her chin. But presently we found, beneath the water, the body of a young man, bound likewise to a stake;and it seemed to us we thereupon understood why the poor lady had beenin such haste to die. The lovers, for so we deemed them, were plainlyEnglish, and we took them with us back to the Beauséjour, purposing togive them Christian burial, --and more than ever cursing the hardnecessity which forces us to make alliance with the natives. "

At the Rough-and-Tumble Landing. 

The soft smell of thawing snow was in the air, proclaiming April to thesenses of the lumbermen as unmistakably as could any calendar. 

The ice had gone out of the Big Aspohegan with a rush. There was an airof expectation about the camp. Everything was ready for a startdown-stream. The hands who had all winter been chopping and hauling inthe deep woods were about to begin the more toilsome and perilous taskof "driving" the logs down the swollen river to the great booms andunresting mills about its mouth. One thing only remained to be done erethe drive could get under way. The huge "brow" of logs over-hanging thestream had yet to be released. To whom would fall the task ofaccomplishing its release, was a question still undecided. 

The perils of "stream-driving" on a bad river have been dwelt upon, Isuppose, by every writer who has occupied his pen at all with the lifeof the lumber-camps. But to the daring backwoodsman there seldom falls atask more hazardous than that of cutting loose a brow of logs when thelogs have been piled in the form of what is called a "rough-and-tumblelanding. " Such a landing is constructed by driving long timbers into themud at the water's edge, below a steep piece of bank. Along the innerside of these are laid horizontally a certain number of logs, to form awater front; and into the space behind are tumbled helter-skelter fromthe tops of the bank the logs of the winter's chopping. It is a verysimple and expeditious way of storing the logs. But when the ice has runout, and it is time to start the lumber down-stream, then comes trouble. The piles sustaining the whole vast weight of the brow have to be cutaway, and the problem that confronts the chopper is how to escape theterrific rush of the falling logs. 

Hughey McElvey, the boss of the Aspohegan camp, swinging an axe (ratheras a badge of office than because he thought he might want to chopanything), sauntered down to the water's edge and took a final officialglance at the brow of logs. Its foundations had been laid while McElveywas down with a touch of fever, and he was ill satisfied with them. Forperhaps the fiftieth time, he shook his head and grumbled, "It's goin'to be a resky job gittin' them logs clear. " Then he rejoined the littlecluster of men on top of the bank. 

As he did so, a tall girl with splendid red hair came out of the campand stepped up to his side. This was Laurette, the boss's only daughter, who had that morning driven over from the settlements in the backcountry, to bring him some comforts of mended woollens and to bid "thedrive" God-speed. From McElvey the girl inherited her vivid hair and hersuperb proportions; and from her mother, who had been one LauretteBeaulieu, of Grande Anse, she got her mirthful black eyes and hersmooth, dusky complexion, which formed so striking a contrast to herradiant tresses. A little conscious of all the eyes that centred uponher with varying degrees of admiration, love, desire, or self-abasingdevotion, she felt the soft color deepen in her cheeks as she playfullytook possession of McElvey's axe. 

"_You're_ not goin' to do it, father, I reckon!" she exclaimed. 

"No, sis, " answered the boss, smiling down at her, "leastways, notunless the hands is all scared. "

"Well, who _is_ goin' to?" she inquired, letting her glance sweeprapidly over the stalwart forms that surrounded her. A shrewd observermight have noted that her eyes shyly avoided one figure, that stood alittle apart from the rest, --the figure of a strongly-built man ofmedium size, who looked small among his large-moulded fellows. As forJim Reddin, who was watching the girl's every movement, his hearttightened with a bitter pang as her eyes thus seemed to pass him over. Having, for all his forty years, a plentiful lack of knowledge of thefeminine heart and its methods, he imagined himself ignored. And yet hadhe not Laurette's promise that none other than he should have theprivilege of driving her home to the settlements that afternoon?

"That's what we're just a-goin' to decide, " said McElvey, in answer toLaurette's question. "But first, " he continued, with a sly chuckle, "hadn't you better pick out the feller that's goin' to drive you home, sis? We're goin' to be powerful well occupied, all hands, when we git astart on them logs, I tell you!"

At this suggestion a huge young woodsman who was standing behind some ofthe others, out of Laurette's range of vision, started eagerly forward. Bill Goodine was acknowledged to be the best-looking man on the BigAspohegan, --an opinion in which he himself most heartily concurred. Hewas also noted as a wrestler and fighter. He was an ardent admirer ofLaurette; but his passion had not taught him any humility, and he feltconfident that in order to gain the coveted honor of driving the girlhome he had nothing to do but apply for it. He felt that it would hardlybe the "square thing" to put Laurette to the embarrassment of invitinghim right there before all the hands. Before he could catch her eye, however, Laurette had spoken what surely the devil of coquetry must havewhispered in her ear. Undoubtedly, she had promised Jim Reddin that heshould drive her home. But "let him show that he appreciates the favor, "she thought to herself; and aloud, with a toss of her head, sheexclaimed, "I'll take the one that cuts out the logs, --if he wants tocome!"

The effect of this speech was instantaneous. Fully half the handsstepped forward, exclaiming, "I'll do it!--I'll do it, boss!--I'm yourman, Mr. McElvey!" But Bill Goodine sprang to the front with a vigorthat brushed aside all in his path. Thrusting himself in front of thelaughing McElvey, he shouted, "I spoke first! I claim the job!" And, snatching up an axe, he started down the bank. 

"Hold on!" shouted McElvey; but Goodine paid no attention. "Come back, Itell you!" roared the boss. "The job's yours, so hold on!" Upon thisBill came swaggering back, and gazed about him triumphantly. 

"I guess _I'm_ your teamster, eh, Laurette?" he murmured. But, to hisastonishment, Laurette did not seem to hear him. She was casting quickglances of anger and disappointment in the direction of Jim Reddin, wholeaned on a sled-stake and appeared to take no interest in theproceedings. Goodine flushed with jealous wrath, and was about to flingsome gibe at Reddin, when McElvey remarked, --

"That's all very well, sis; and has kinder simplified matters a lot. ButI'm thinkin' you'd better have another one of the boys to fall back on. This 'ere's an onusual ticklish job; and the feller as does it'll belucky if he comes off with a whole skin. "

At these words so plain an expression of relief went over Laurette'sface that Bill Goodine could not contain himself. 

"Jim Reddin _dasn't_ do it, " he muttered to her, fiercely. 

The girl drew herself up. "I never said he dast, " she replied. "An'what's Jim Reddin to me, I'd like to know?" And then, being furious atJim, at herself, and at Goodine, she was on the point of telling thelatter that _he_ shouldn't drive her home, anyway, when she reflectedthat this would excite comment, and restrained herself. But Reddin, whoimagined that the whole thing was a scheme on Laurette's part forgetting out of her promise to him, and who felt, consequently, as if theheavens were falling about his ears, had caught Goodine's mention of hisname. He stepped up and asked sharply, "What's that about Jim Reddin?"

Laurette was gazing at him in a way that pierced his jealous pain andthrilled his heart strangely; and as he looked at her he began to forgetBill Goodine altogether. But Goodine was not to be forgotten. 

"I said, " he cried, in a loud voice, "that you, Jim Reddin, jest_dasn't_ cut out them logs. You think yourself some punkins, you do; butye're a coward!" And, swinging his great form round insolently, Goodinepicked up his axe and sauntered down the bank. 

Now, Laurette, as well as most of the hands, looked to see this insultpromptly resented in the only way consistent with honor. Reddin, thoughtender-hearted and slow to anger, was regarded as being, with thepossible exception of Goodine, the strongest man in that section of thecountry. He had proved his daring by many a bold feat in the rapids andthe jams; and his prowess as a fighter had been displayed more than oncewhen a backwoods bully required a thrashing. But now he gave theAspohegan camp a genuine surprise. First, the blood left his face, hiseyes grew small and piercing, and his hands clenched spasmodically as hetook a couple of steps after Goodine's retreating figure. Then his faceflushed scarlet, and he turned to Laurette with a look of absolutelypiteous appeal. 

"I _can't_ fight him, " he tried to explain, huskily. "You don'tunderstand. I ain't _afeard_ of him, nor of any man. But I vowed to hismother I'd be good to the lad, and--"

"Oh, I reckon I quite understand, Mr. Reddin, " interrupted the girl, ina hard, clear voice; and, seeing the furious scorn in her face, Reddinsilently turned away. 

Laurette's scorn was sharpened by a sense of the bitterestdisappointment. She had allowed herself to give her heart to a coward, whom she had fancied a hero. As she turned to her father, big tearsforced themselves into her eyes. But the episode had passed quickly; andher distress was not observed, as all attention now turned to Goodineand his perilous undertaking. Only McElvey, who had suspected the girl'ssentiments for some time, said in an undertone, "Jim Reddin ain't nocoward, and don't you forget it, sis. But it _is_ queer the way he'lljust take anything at all from Bill Goodine. It's somethin' we don'tnone of us understand. "

"I reckon he does well to be scared of him, " said Laurette, with herhead very high in the air. 

By this time Goodine had formed his plans, and had got to work. At firsthe called in the assistance of two other axemen, to cut certain of thepiles which had no great strain upon them. This done, the assistantsreturned to safe quarters; and then Bill warily reviewed the situation. "He knows what he's about, " murmured McElvey, with approbation, as Billattacked another pile, cut it two-thirds through, and left it so. Thenhe severed completely a huge timber far on the left front of thelanding. There remained but two piles to withstand the main push of thelogs. One of these was in the centre, the other a little to theright, --on which side the chopper had to make his escape when the logsbegan to go. This latter pile Goodine now cut half-way through. Feelinghimself the hero of the hour, he handled his axe brilliantly, and soonforgot his indignation against Laurette. At length he attacked thecentre pile, the key to the whole structure. 

Everybody, at this point, held his breath. Loud sounded the measuredaxe-strokes over the rush of the swollen river. No one moved but Reddin, and no one but Laurette noticed his movement. His skilled eye haddetected a danger which none of the rest perceived. He drew close to thebrow, and moved a little way down the bank. 

"What can he be up to?" wondered Laurette; and then she sniffed angrilybecause she had thought about him at all. 

Goodine dealt a few cautious strokes upon the central pile, paused amoment or two to reconnoitre, and then renewed his attack. Reddin becamevery fidgety. He watched the logs, and shouted earnestly, --

"Better come out o' that right now and finish on this 'ere nigh pile. "

Goodine looked up, eyed first his adviser, then very narrowly the logs, and answered, tersely, "Go to h--ll!"

"That's just like the both of 'em, " muttered McElvey, as Goodine turnedand resumed his chopping. 

At this moment there came a sullen, tearing sound; and the top of thenear pile, which had been half cut through, began to lean slowly, slowly. A yell of desperate warning arose. Goodine dropped his axe, turned like lightning, and made a tremendous leap for safety. He gainedthe edge of the landing-front, slipped on an oozy stone, and fell backwith a cry of horror right beneath the toppling mass of logs. 

As his cry re-echoed from every throat, Jim Reddin dropped beside him asswiftly and almost miraculously as a sparrow-hawk flashes upon its prey. With a terrific surge he swung Goodine backward and outward into theraging current, but away from the face of the impending avalanche. Then, as the logs all went with a gathering roar, he himself sprang outward ina superb leap, splashed mightily into the stream, disappeared, and cameup some yards below. Side by side the two men struck out sturdily forshore, and in a couple of minutes their comrades' eager hands weredragging them up the bank. 

"Didn't I _tell_ you Jim Reddin wasn't no coward?" said McElvey, withglistening eyes, to Laurette; and Laurette, having no other way torelieve her excitement and give vent to her revulsion of feelings, satdown on a sled and cried most illogically. 

As the two dripping men approached the camp, she looked up to see areconciliation. Presently Goodine emerged from a little knot of hiscompanions, approached Reddin, and held out his hand. 

"I ask yer pardon, " said he. "You're a man, an' no mistake. It is mylife I owe to you; an' I'm proud to owe it to sech as you!"

But Reddin took no notice of the outstretched hand. The direct andprimitive movements of the backwoodsman's mind may seem to thesophisticated intelligence peculiar; but they are easy to comprehend. Jim Reddin quite overlooked the opportunity now offered for a display ofexalted sentiment. In a harsh, deliberate voice he said, --

"An' now, Bill Goodine, you've got to stand up to me, an' we'll seewhich is the better man, you or me. Ever sence you growed up to be a manyou've used me just as mean as you knowed how; an' now we'll fight itout right here. "

At this went up a chorus of disapproval: and Goodine said, "I'll be d--dif I'm a-goin to strike the man what's jest saved my life!"

"You needn't let _that_ worry you, Bill, " replied Reddin. "We're quitsthere. I reckon you forget as how your mother, God bless her, saved mylife, some twenty year back, when you was jest a-toddlin'. An' I vowedto her I'd be good to you the very best I knowed how. An' I've kep' myvow. But now I reckon I'm quit of it; an' if you ain't a-goin' to giveme satisfaction now my hands is free, then you ain't no man at all, an'I'll try an' find some way to _make_ you fight!"

"Jim's right!--You've got to fight, Bill!--That's fair!" and many moreexclamations of like character, showed the drift of popular sentiment soplainly that Goodine exclaimed, "Well, if you sez so, it's got to be!But I don't want to hurt you, Jim Reddin; an' lick you I kin, every dayin the week, an' you know it!"

"You're a liar!" remarked Jim Reddin, in a business-like voice, as thehands formed a ring. 

At this some of the hands laughed, and Goodine, glancing around, caughtthe ghost of a smile on Laurette's face. This was all that was needed. The blood boiled up to his temples, and with an oath under his breath hesprang upon his adversary. 

Smoothly and instantaneously as a shadow Reddin eluded the attack. Andnow his face lost its set look of injury and assumed a smile of cheerfulinterest. Bill Goodine, in spite of his huge bulk, had the elasticityand dash of a panther; but his quickness was nothing to that of Reddin. Once or twice the latter parried, with seeming ease, his mostdestructive lunges, but more often he contented himself with movingaside like a flash of light. Presently Goodine cried out, --

"Why don't yer _fight_, like a man, stidder skippin' out o' the roadlike a flea?"

"'Cause I don't want to hurt you, " laughed Reddin. 

But that little boastful laugh delayed his movements, and Goodine wasupon him. Two or three terrible short-arm blows were exchanged, and thenthe two men grappled. 

"Let 'em be, " ordered McElvey. "They'd better wrastle than fight. "

For a second or two, nay, for perhaps a whole minute, it looked to thespectators as if Reddin must be crushed helpless in Bill's tremendousembrace. Then it began to dawn on them that Reddin had captured the moredeadly hold. Then the dim rumors of Reddin's marvellous strength beganto gather credence, as it was seen how his grip seemed to dominate thatof his great opponent. 

For several minutes the straining antagonists swayed about the ring. Then suddenly Reddin straightened himself, and Bill's hold slipped foran instant. Before he could recover it Reddin had stooped, secured alower grip, and in a moment hurled his adversary clear over hisshoulder. A roar of applause went up from the spectators; and Goodine, after trying to rise, lay still and groaned, "I'm licked, Jim. I've hadenough. "

The boss soon pronounced that Bill's shoulder was dislocated, and thathe'd have to go back to the settlements to be doctored. This being thecase, Laurette said to him benevolently, after her horse was harnessedto the pung, "I'm sorry I can't ask you to drive me home, though you_did_ cut out the logs, Bill. But I reckon it'll be the next best thingfur you if _I_ drive _you_ home. An' Jim Reddin'll come along, maybe, tokind of look after the both of us. "

To which proposition poor Bill grinned a rather ghastly assent. 

An Experience of Jabez Batterpole. 

One February afternoon a tremendous snow-storm was raging about the campon the Upper Keswick. The air was so thick with driving flakes that onecould scarcely see five feet ahead of him. It fell dark in the woods bythe middle of the afternoon, and the chopping and the hauling came to anend. Lamps were soon lighted in camp, and the lumbermen, in theirsteaming homespuns, gathered about the roaring stove to sing, smoke, swap yarns and munch gingerbread. The wind screamed round the gables ofthe camp, rattled at the door and windows, and roared among thetree-tops like the breaking of great waves on an angry coast. From thestables close by came ever and anon the neighing of a nervous horse. 

Andy Mitchell had been detailing with tireless minuteness the virtues ofhis magnificent team of stallions, Tom and Jerry, and had described (aswas his wont on all possible occasions) the manner in which they hadonce saved his life when he was attacked by a tremendous Indian Devil. This Indian Devil (as the Northern Panther is called in Canada) had beenliterally pounded to pieces under the hoofs of the angry stallions. AsMitchell concluded, there came a voice from the other side of the stove, and a tall Woodstocker spoke up. This was a chopper very popular in thecamp, and known by the name of Jabe. His real name, seldom used excepton Sundays, was Jabez Ephraim Batterpole. 

"_I'll_ tell yez a leetle yarn, boys, " said Jabe, "about a chap ezwarn't _eg_zackly an Injun Devil, but he was half Injun, an' I'ma-thinkin t' other half must 'a' been a devil. I run agin him las' June, three year gone, an' he come blame near a-doin' fur me. I haint soteyes on him sence, fur which the same I ain't a-goin' to complain. 

"I'd been up to the Falls, an' was a-takin' a raft down the river furGibson. Sandy Beale was along o' me, an' I dunno ez ever I enjoyedraftin' more 'n on the first o' thet trip. Doubtless yez all knows whatpurty raftin' it is in them parts. By gum, it kinder makes a chap lickhis lips when he rickolecks it, a-slidin' along there in the sun, nottoo hot an' not too cold, a-smokin' very comfortable, with one's backbraced agin a saft spruce log, an' smellin' the leetle catspaws whatcomes blowin' off the shores jest ez sweet an' saft ez a gal's currlsa-brushin' of a feller's face. "

"_What_ gal's currls be you referrin' to Jabe?" interrupted AndyMitchell. 

"Suthin' finer 'n horse-hair, anyways!" was the prompt retort; and alaugh went round the camp at Andy's expense. Then Batterpolecontinued:--

"When we come to Hardscrabble it was sundown, so we tied up the raft an'teetered up the hill to Old Man Peters's fur the night. Yez all knowsOld Man Peters's gal Nellie, ez there ain't no tidier an honester slipon the hull river. Nellie was purty glad to see Sandy an' me, ef I doessay it that shouldn't; an' she chinned with us so ez she didn't hev notime to talk to some other chaps ez was puttin' up there that night. An'this, ez I mighty soon ketched onter, didn't seem nohow to suit one ofthe fellers. He was a likely-lookin' chap enough, but verydark-complected an' sallow-like, with a bad eye, showin' a lot o' thewhite. An eye like that's a bad thing in a horse, an' I reckon 't ain'ta heap better in a man. 

"Sez I to Nellie, sez I: 'Nellie, who's yer yaller friend over there bythe windy, which looks like he'd like to make sassage-meat o' my head?'

"Nellie's eyes flashed, an' she answered up right sharp: ''T ain't nofriend of mine. 'T ain't no sort of a _man_ at all. It's only somethin'the freshet left on the shore, an' the pigs wouldn't eat nohow. '

"You bet I laffed, an' so did Sandy. Ez I heern later on, the chap hadben a-botherin' roun' Nellie all winter, fur all she'd gin him themitten straight an' sent him about his bizness heaps o' times. I reckonthe feller suspicioned we was a-laffin' at him, fur he squinted at meblacker 'n ever. 

"Purty soon Nellie got fussin' roun' the room, over nigh to where theyaller chap was a-settin', an' he spoke to her, saft-like, so ez wecouldn't hear what he was a-gittin' at. Nellie she jest sniffed kinderscornful; an' then, _what_ would yez suppose that chap done? He reachedout suddent, grabbed her leetle wrist so hard 'at she cried out, an'_slapped_ her--yes, slapped her right across the mouth. Nellie jeststood there white, like a image, an' never said one word; an' I seed thered marks o' the blackguard's fingers come out acrost her cheek. Nextminit yaller face jumped fur the door, --an' me arter him, you kin betyer life! He was a-makin' tracks purty lively, but I kin run a leetlemyself, an' I was onter him 'gin Sandy an' the rest was outer the door. An' didn't I whale him, now? I twisted his knife outer his hand, an' Ilaced him till I was clean tuckered out. But the feller was grit, an'never hollered oncet. When I quit he laid still a bit. Then he riz upslowly, started to walk away, turned half round, an' hissed at me jestlike a big snake er 'n old sassy gander:--

"'I'll--pay--_you_!'

"'Git!' sez I, an' he purceeded to git, joggin' along towards Woodstock. 

"Well, now, how thet Nellie did look at me, proud an' grateful like, when I come back to the house; an' sez I to myself, 'Jabez Ephraim, you've ben an' gone an' put in the big licks there, old feller!' But Inever sed nuthin' about it at all to Nellie, nor Nellie didn't to me. Now yer a-smilin', boys, so I may remark jest here, to save yez frominterruptin' hereafter, thet I've ben to Old Man Peters's sence, onseveral occasions; an' nex' summer I hope to see yez all acceptin' thehospitality of Mrs. Jabez E. Batterpole! But _thet_ ain't no part o'this here story!

"Nex' day Sandy an' me hed a fine run down by Woodstock. The old raftrid kinder loose, however, an' we blamed up _an'_ down the fellers ezhad pinned her together to the Falls. Howsumever, we tightened her up abit, an' calc'lated she'd hold through. 

"Ez we come in hearin' of the Meductic, Sandy sez to me, sez he: 'Jabe, old 'Ductic is a-hoopin' her up to-day. There's a big head o' water on, an' I'm thinkin' we'll hev to keep our eyes peeled. It'll take someskittish steerin', fur ef the old raft jest teches the rocks she'll goall to slivers. '

"'Right you be!' sez I. An' we braced up. 

"Now, ez we soon seen, old 'Ductic _was_ jest a-rearin'. The big raftshivered like a skeered filly ez she ketched the first nip of themcross-currents, an' she commenced ter bulge an' sag like a nonsense. Sandy was on the forrard sweep, but obsarvin' thet, ez the currents wasa-settin', he warn't no use forrard, I called him aft to help me. Ez Iturned my head a leetle mite to holler to him I ketched a squint o' thatyaller chap a-steppin' in behind a tree on the bluff. 

"There warn't no time to be a-considerin' of yaller chaps, fur the raftwas settin' dead onter the big rocks in the middle o' the rapid, an'Sandy an' me was a-heavin' an' a gruntin' on them sweeps to swing hercl'ar. 'She'll make it, ' sez Sandy, 't last--an' that very minit therecomes a ringin' shot from the bluff, an' I feels like it was a dash o'scaldin' water 'long the tip o' my shoulder-blade. Yez'll notice, I wasleanin' forrard at the time. 

"'I'm shot!' sez I; an' then I sees Sandy's sweep swing round, an' Sandydrops on the logs. 

"I jumped cl'ar over to where he laid, but straightways he hops up an'yells, 'It's only me arm! Look out for the raft, Jabe!'

"_I_ looked out, boys, you bet! But she was jest sheerin roun' onterthem rocks, an' no man's arm could 'a' stopped her. I looked up at thebluff, an' ketched a sight o' the yaller blackguard standin' there ezcool ez ye please, mind yez, a-loadin' up fur a fresh shot. 

"I hadn't no time fur another squint at him, fur next minit the old raftstruck the rocks. She jest tumbled to pieces like a box o' matches. Ihustled Sandy out to the tail o' the raft jest in time, an' told him tojump an' strike out fur all was in him, an' I'd see him through er elsewe'd kinder shuffle off together. 

"'Correct!' sez Sandy, chipper ez ye please; an' then we both jumped, mewith a grip like grim death onter Sandy's belt. 

"_Boys_, but it was a caution to see them waves, an' cross-currents, an'chutes, an' big ripples, an' eddies, an' whirlpools, how they jestsucked us down an' slapped us up an' smothered us an' chucked us roun'like chips. I jes kep' my mouth shet an' said my pray'rs fur all was inme. An' ez for swallerin' water--I must 'a' tuk in half a bar'l. How wewas kep' cl'ar of the rocks was a miracle, _out_ an' out. A queer lightgot ter dancin' an' shiftin' front o' my eyes, an' the singin' in myears was gittin' kind o' pleasant like, an' I calc'late that yaller chapmust a gone away purty well satisfied; when, on the suddent, a sortershock brung me to, an' I felt my feet tech bottom. There was a sight o'life left in Jabez Ephraim yet, ye can bet yer pile. 

"I straightened up an' found 'at we was in a quiet eddy, at the foot o'the rapids, on the furder side o' the stream. The water warn't up to mearm-pits, neether. Ez for Sandy, the starch was clean knocked out o'_him_, so I jest hauled him ashore an' spread him out on the rocks todry while I hev a leetle o' thet water off my stummick. In half a minitI felt better, an' then I went an' tumbled Sandy roun' till he wasconsiderable lighter in the hold. Presently he come to an' opened hiseyes. 

"I swan, boys, we didn't hurry noane. We jest laid there in the sun amatter of an hour er so, kinder recooperatin'. Then we pinted up river. When the folks heerd what had tuk place, yez'll allow there was lots o'the boys out lookin' for the yaller chap. But he'd got scarce, an'what's more, he's stayed scarce. Any of yez fellers ever seen him?"

"Ef ever _I_ runs agin him, " exclaimed Andy Mitchell, in a burst ofgenerous enthusiasm, "I'll feed him to my team fur Injun Devil. "

The Stone Dog. 

It was drawing towards sunset, and I had reached the outskirts of thecity, which here came to an abrupt end upon the very edge of themarshes. The marshes stretched before me bare and gray, with here andthere a flush of evening color, serving but to emphasize their utternessof desolation. Here and there, also, lay broad pools, their shore andwater gradually intermerging through a sullen fringe of reeds. Theriver, which had been my day-long companion--a noisy stream flowingthrough breezy hills, and villages, and vineyards--having loitered todraw its circle about the city walls, had fallen under a spell. It metme here a featureless, brimming ditch, and wound away in torpid coils tothe monotonous horizon. And now this shrunken city, its edges dead andfallen to decay, these naked levels, where not even a bittern's voicehad courage to startle the stillness, filled me, in spite of myself, with a vague apprehensiveness. Just as one who is groping in profounddarkness feels his eyes dilate in the effort to catch the least glimmerof light, I found my senses all on the strain, attentive to their veryutmost. Though the atmosphere was heavy and deadening, my eyes were sowatchful that not even the uprising of some weeds, trodden down, perhaps, hours before by a passing foot, escaped their notice. Mynostrils were keenly conscious of the sick metallic odor from themarshes, of the pleasanter perfume of dry reed panicles, of the chill, damp smell of mouldering stone-work, and of a strangely disagreeablehaunting essence from a certain dull-colored weed, whose leaves, whichshot up within tempting reach of my hand, I had idly bruised in passing. My ears, for all their painful expectancy, heard at first no sound savethe rustle of a frightened mouse in the dead grass near; but at lengththey detected the gurgle of running water, made audible by a faint straywind which breathed in my direction. 

Instinctively I turned and followed the sound. On my right a hugefragment of the wall jutted into the marsh, and passing this I sawbefore me, brightened by the sunset, a narrow stretch of dry, bakedsoil, raised somewhat above the level of the pools, and strewn withshattered bricks and scraps of tiling and potsherds. The musical lapsingof the water now fell upon my ears distinctly, and I saw a little wayoff a quaint old fountain, standing half a stonecast clear of the wall. With the sunlight bathing it, the limpid water sparkling away from itsbase, it was the only cheerful object in the landscape; yet I felt anunaccountable reluctance to approach it. The evil enchantment whichseemed to brood over the place, the weird fantasies chasing each otherthrough my unconsenting brain, annoyed me greatly, for I profess to holdmy imagination pretty well under control, and to have but small concernfor ghostly horrors. Shaking aside my nervousness, I began to whistlesoftly as I strolled up to examine the old fountain. But on noticing howlugubrious, how appropriate to the neighborhood and my feelings was theair that came to my lips, I laughed aloud. At the sudden sound of myvoice I felt both startled and somewhat abashed. Laughter here wasclearly out of place; and besides, the echo that followed wasobtrusively and unpleasantly distinct, appearing to come both from adeep-arched doorway in the wall near by, and from the vaulted hollow ofthe basin of the fount, which lay just beneath the dog's jaws. As Ishould have said before, the fountain was a great cube of darkish stone, along the top of which a stone dog crouched; and the water gushed frombetween its carved fore-paws into a deep basin, the side of which wascleft two thirds of the way to its base. Through this break, which I sawto be an old one from the layers of green film lining it, the streambubbled out and ran off among barren heaps of débris, to sink itself inthe weeds of some stagnant pool. The head of the dog was thrust forwardand rested upon the fore-paws as if the brute were sleeping; but itshalf-open eyes seemed to watch the approaches to the doorway in thewall. As a piece of sculpture, the animal was simply marvellous. In itsgathered limbs, though relaxed and perfectly at rest, a capacity forswift and terrible action seemed to hold itself in reserve, and a breathalmost appeared to come from the half-opened jaws, momentarily dimmingthe crystal that smoothly gushed beneath. No scrap of vegetation couldthe rill persuade out of the inexorable sterility around, saving forsome curdled greenish mosses that waved slowly from the sides of thebasin, or pointed from root-hold on brick and shard, where the smallcurrent loitered a little. I am not a taker of notes, nor, for all myvagrant and exploring tendencies, am I a very close observer. Nevertheless, though it is now a year and a half since what I am tellingof took place, the minutest details of that strange fountain, and of thescene about it, are as definitely before me as if I had been there butyesterday. I am not going to inflict them all upon my reader, yet woulddo so without a spark of compunction, if by such means I could dim theall too vivid remembrance. The experiences that befell me by thisfountain have shaken painfully the confidence I once enjoyed as to thefulness of my knowledge of the powers of things material. I cannot saythat I have become credulous; but I have ceased to regard as necessarilyabsurd whatever I find it difficult to explain. 

From the fountain it was not a score of paces to the doorway in thewall, which was sunk below the surface of the ground, so that thecrumbling arch surmounting it was scarcely on a level with my feet. Steep narrow stairs of brick work, consisting, I think, of seven steps, led down to it. The doorway had once been elaborately ornamented withmouldings in yellow stucco, most of which had fallen, and all but chokedthe stairs. The crude pale color of these fragments jarred harshlyagainst the olive of the damp stone foundations and the stained brown ofthe mouldy brick. After my usual fashion, I set myself to explore thisdoorway, in my interest half forgetting my apprehensions. As I descendedthe steps the sound of the running water faded out, with a suddennesswhich caught my ear, though failing to fix my attention. But as I madeto grasp the great rusty iron doorhandle, which was curiously wrought oftwo dragons intertwisted neck and tail, again my every sense sprang onthe alert, and a chill of terror crept tingling through my frame. Mystraining ears could detect not the slightest sound from the fountain, which was within plain view behind me. I felt as if some eye were fixedupon me. I faced sharply about and set foot on the steps to ascend. AndI saw the water at that very moment burst forth afresh between the feetof the dog, from whose eye a dull white glow seemed just vanishing. Itmust be borne in mind that the beast's flank was toward the doorway, and, in consequence, only one of its half-closed eyes visible from whereI stood. I ascended and went straight to the fountain. I grasped thegreat stone head and gave it a wrench, but found it just as immovable asit looked. Vexed at my idiotic fears, I vowed to take my fill ofinvestigating that doorway, and to find out if there lay anything ofinterest beyond it. I knew this part of the city was quite deserted, andthat no outraged householder in the flesh was likely to confront mytrespassings. But the last of the daylight was now upon me, and Ithought best to postpone my enterprise till the morrow. As I betookmyself back toward humanity and lodgings, I felt that eye piercing metill I rounded the buttress of the wall; but I denied my follypermission to look back. 

The following morning was spent among the curious old cafés, theunexpected squares, and the gorgeous but dilapidated churches of theinhabited city. All these things, however, failed to interest me. Withmore time on my hands than I quite knew what to do with, I yet felt asif my time were being wasted. The spell of the dead outskirts, of theshadowless dead marshes, of that mysterious and inscrutable dog, clungto me with unrelenting persistence. And the early afternoon found mestanding again by the fountain. 

Familiarly I scooped up the cool water and drank it from my palm. Iscattered it over the parched bricks and clay, which instantly soaked itin. I dashed a few drops also, playfully, upon the image of the dog, which had taken, the evening before, such fantastic liberties with myoverwrought fancy. But these drops gathered themselves up nimbly intolittle shining balls, and fled off to the ground like so muchquicksilver. I looked out upon the wan pools and marshes, whence agreenish mist steamed up, and seemed to poison the sunlight streamingthrough it. It is possible that this semblance of an unwholesome mistwas not so much the fault of the marshes as a condition of theatmosphere, premonitory of the fierce electric storms and the earthquakewhich visited the city that same night. The greenish light beat full onthe sunken doorway, so that only the lowermost steps remained in shadow. However unattractive the temporary complexion of the sun, I was glad ofhis company as I descended the steps. The twisting dragons of thedoorhandle attracted me as I drew near. As for the dog, I had exorcisedit from my imagination with those nimble drops of water; and for the olddoor, it looked as if a little persuasion would make it yield whateversecret it might chance to have in keeping. But certainly, if I mightcredit my ears, which had once more grown abnormally attentive, thesound of the water had ceased. My flesh began to creep a little, thoughI told myself the fading of the sound was entirely due to myposition, --that the walls of the stairway intercepted it. At the sametime I felt that eye watching me, and a chilly sweat broke out upon mylimbs; but I execrated my folly, and refused to turn my head. Meanwhile, so alert had become my hearing that the escape of some gases, bubblingup from the bottom of a pool far out in the marsh, resounded as if closebeside me. I tried to force the bolt back, but in vain; and I had justcome to the conclusion that a sharp wrench would break away bolt, socket, and all, when an uncontrollable instinct of fear turned me aboutto see what peril threatened. The head of the dog was facing directlytoward me, and its eyes, now wide open, flamed upon me with strange andawful whiteness. I sprang up the steps and was at the beast's side in aninstant; but I found the head, as before, resting upon the paws, theeyes half closed and dull, the water gushing down into the basin. 

As I bathed my shaking hands and clammy forehead, I laughed with deepirritation. I said then to myself that the ignorant could hardly beblamed for even the wildest superstitions, when a cool-headed andenlightened modern like myself was so wrought upon by the fictions ofhis brain. I philosophized for some time, however, before I got thebetter of my repugnance to that doorway. I humorously assured myselfthat, at the worst, this incomprehensible beast was securely anchored tohis fountain; and that if anything terrible were at the other side ofthe door which I was going to open, it surely could not be capable ofmuch, good or ill, after its century or so of imprisonment. Then Iwalked firmly straight to the doorway and down the seven steps; and Iknew that first one eye was turned upon me, then both; the water wassilent before I had gone ten paces. 

It was useless trying to conquer the creeping of my skin, the fear thatpricked along my nerves; so, bidding my reason ignore these minordiscomforts, I busied myself with the problem of loosening thebolt-socket. It occurred to me at the time that there might be an easierentrance at the other side of the wall, as nothing in this neighborhoodwas in good enough repair to boast of more than three walls standing;but no, that would have been a concession to my illusions. I chippedaway at the soft stone with my knife. I jerked hard upon the bolt, whichgave a little, with clatter of falling stucco; and on the instant Ifaced around like lightning, in an indescribable horror. There, at thevery top of the steps, crouched the dog, its head thrust down close tomy face. The stone jaws were grinning apart. A most appalling menace wasin the wide, white eyes. I know I tugged once more upon the bolt, for agreat piece of the door and arch crumbled and came away; and I thought, as the head closed down, that I made a wild spring to get past thecrouching form. Then reason and consciousness forsook me. 

When sense returned, I found myself lying on a pile of rags, in adarkish, garlicky hut, with the morning sunlight streaming in throughthe open door. I sat up, with the memory of my horror vivid upon me, andwondered, with a sigh of relief at the change, what sort of a place Ihad got to. I was in a very different quarter of the city from theneighborhood of the fountain. Here were still the ruined outskirts, still the desolate marshes, but the highlands backing the city on thenorth began to rise just beyond the hut's door. I got up, but found myright shoulder almost disabled. I could not lift my arm without greatpain. Yet my clothing was not torn, and bore no marks save of dust andtravel. I was about to uncover and examine the damaged shoulder, when incame the owner of the hut, an honest-looking, heavy-set muleteer, whoshowed all his teeth in his gratification at observing my recovery. 

As I gathered from my host, he had had occasion to pass what he calledthe "Fonte del Cano" near sunset of the afternoon preceding. He hadfound me lying in a stupor, face down, across the basin of the fount, and directly beneath the jaws of the dog, which he piously crossedhimself on mentioning. Not stopping to look for explanations, though hesaw the old door was partly broken away, he had put me on his mule andmade haste homeward, in fear of the coming of twilight in that grimplace. There had come up a great storm in the night, and then anearthquake, shaking down many old walls that had long been toppling totheir fall. After sunrise, being a bold fellow, he had gone again to theplace, in hope of finding some treasure revealed by the disturbance. Report said there was treasure of some kind hidden within the wall; butnone had dared to look for it since the day, years before his birth, when two men undertaking the search had gone mad, with the great whiteeyes of the dog turned terribly upon them. There were other strangethings said about the spot, he acknowledged reluctantly, which, however, he would not talk of even in daylight; and for himself, in truth, heknew but little of them. Now, he continued, in place of anything havingbeen laid bare, the whole top of the wall had fallen down and buriedsteps and doorway in masses of ruin. But the fountain and the dog wereuntouched, and he had not cared to go nearer than was necessary. 

Having reached my lodgings, I rewarded the honest fellow and sent himaway in high feather, all-forgetful of the treasure which the earthquakehad failed to unearth for him. Once alone in my room, I made haste toexamine my shoulder. I found it green and livid. I found also, with asick feeling which I shall not soon forget, that it was bruised oneither side with deep prints of massive teeth. 

The Barn on the Marsh. 

It had not always stood on the marsh. When I was a little boy of seven, it occupied the rear of our neighbor's yard, not a stone's throw fromthe rectory gate, on one of the windy, sunshiny spurs of South Mountain. A perpetual eyesore to the rector; but I cannot help thinking, as I viewit now in the concentrated light of memory, that it did artistic servicein the way of a foil to the loveliness of the rectory garden. Thisgarden was the rector's delight, but to my restless seven years it was asort of gay-colored and ever-threatening bugbear. 

Weeding, and especially such thorough, radical weeding as alone wouldsatisfy the rector's conscience, was my detestation; and, moreover, justat the time of being called upon to weed, there was sure to be somethingelse of engrossing importance which my nimble little wits had setthemselves upon doing. 

But I never found courage to betray my lack of sympathy in all itsiciness. The sight of the rector's enthusiasm filled me ever with asense of guilt, and I used to weed quite diligently, at times. 

One morning the rector had lured me out early, before breakfast, whilethe sun yet hung low above the shining marshes. We were workingcheerfully together at the carrot-beds. The smell of the moist earth andof the dewy young carrot-plants, bruised by my hasty fingers, comesvividly upon my senses even now. 

Suddenly I heard the rector cry, "Bother!" in a tone which spokevolumes. I saw he had broken his hoe short off at the handle. I stoppedwork with alacrity, and gazed with commiserating interest, while I beganwiping my muddy little fingers on my knickerbockers in brightanticipation of some new departure which should put a pause to theweeding. 

In a moment or two the vexed wrinkles smoothed themselves out of therector's brow, and he turned to me with the proposal that we should goover to our neighbor's and repair the damage. 

One end of the barn, as we knew, was used for a workshop. We crossed theroad, let down the bars, put to flight a flock of pigeons that werefeeding among the scattered straw, and threw open the big barn doors. 

There, just inside, hung the dead body of our neighbor, his facedistorted and purple. And, while I stood sobbing with horror, the rectorcut him down with the draw-knife which he had come to borrow. 

Soon after this tragedy, the barn was moved down to the marsh, to beused for storing hay and farm implements. And by the time the scene hadfaded from my mind, the rector gave up the dear delights of his garden, and took us off to a distant city parish. Not until I had reachedeighteen, and the dignity of college cap and gown, did I revisit thesalty breezes of South Mountain. 

Then I came to see friends who were living in the old rectory. About twomiles away, by the main road, dwelt certain other friends, with whom Iwas given to spending most of my evenings, and who possessed somestrange charm which would never permit me to say good-night at anythinglike a seasonable hour. 

The distance, as I said, to these friends was about two miles, if youfollowed the main road; but there was a short cut, a road across themarsh, used chiefly by the hay-makers and the fishermen, not pleasant totravel in wet weather, but good enough for me at all times in the frameof mind in which I found myself. 

This road, on either hand, was bordered by a high rail fence, alongwhich rose, here and there, the bleak spire of a ghostly and perishingLombardy poplar. This is the tree of all least suited to thosewind-beaten regions, but none other will the country people plant. Closeup to the road, at one point, curved a massive sweep of red dike, andfurther to the right stretched the miles on miles of naked marsh, tillthey lost themselves in the lonely, shifting waters of the Basin. 

About twenty paces back from the fence, with its big doors openingtoward the road, a conspicuous landmark in all my nightly walks, stoodthe barn. 

I remembered vividly enough, but in a remote, impersonal sort of way, the scene on that far-off sunny summer morning. As, night after night, Iswung past the ancient doors, my brain in a pleasant confusion, I nevergave the remembrance any heed. Finally, I ceased to recall it, and therattling of the wind in the time-warped shingles fell on utterlycareless ears. 

One night, as I started homeward upon the verge of twelve, the marshseemed all alive with flying gleams. The moon was past the full, whiteand high; the sky was thick with small black clouds, streaming dizzilyacross the moon's face, and a moist wind piped steadily, in from thesea. 

I was walking swiftly, not much alive to outward impressions, scarcenoticing even the strange play of the moon-shadows over the marshes, andhad got perhaps a stone's throw past the barn, when a creeping sensationabout my skin, and a thrill of nervous apprehension made me stopsuddenly and take a look behind. 

The impulse seized me unawares, or I should have laughed at myself andgone on without yielding to such a weakness. But it was too late. Mygaze darted unerringly to the barn, whose great doors stood wide open. There, swaying almost imperceptibly in the wind, hung the body of ourneighbor, as I had seen it that dreadful morning long ago. 

For a moment I could hear again my childish sobs, and the remembrance ofthat horror filled me with self-pity. Then, as the roots of my hairbegan to stir, my feet set themselves instinctively for flight. Thisinstinct, however, I promptly and sternly repressed. I knew all aboutthese optical illusions, and tried to congratulate myself on thisopportunity for investigating one so interesting and vivid. At the sametime I gave a hasty side-thought to what would have happened had I beenone of the superstitious farmhands or fishermen of the district. Ishould have taken to my heels in desperate terror, and been ever afterfaithfully persuaded of having looked upon a veritable ghost. 

I said to myself that the apparition, if I looked upon it steadfastly, would vanish as I approached, or, more probably, resolve itself intosome chance combination of moonlight and shadows. In fact, my reason wasperfectly satisfied that the ghostly vision was due solely to theassociation of ideas, --I was fresh from my classes in philosophy, --aidedand abetted by my own pretty vivid imagination. Yet the natural man, this physical being of mine, revolted in every fibre of the flesh fromany closer acquaintance with the thing. 

I began, with reluctant feet, to retrace my steps; but as I did so, thevision only grew so much the clearer; and a cold perspiration broke outupon me. Step by step I approached, till I stood just outside the fence, face to face with the apparition. 

I leaned against the fence, looking through between the rails; and now, at this distance, every feature came out with awful distinctness--all sohorrible in its distortion that I cannot bear to describe it. 

As each fresh gust of wind hissed through the chinks, I could see thebody swing before it, heavily and slowly. I had to bring all myphilosophy to bear, else my feet would have carried me off in a frenzyof flight. 

At last I reached the conclusion that since my sight was so helplesslydeceived, I should have to depend upon the touch. In no other way couldI detect the true basis of the illusion; and this way was a hard one. Bymuch argument and self-persuasion I prevailed upon myself to climb thefence, and with a sort of despairing doggedness to let myself down onthe inside. 

Just then the clouds thickened over the face of the moon, and the lightfaded rapidly. To get down inside the fence with that thing was, for amoment, simply sickening, and my eyes dilated with the intensity of mystare. Then common-sense came to the rescue, with a revulsion offeeling, and I laughed--though not very mirthfully--at the thoroughnessof my scare. 

With an assumption of coolness and defiance I walked right up to theopen doors; and when so close that I could have touched it with mywalking-stick, the thing swayed gently and faced me in the light of there-appearing moon. 

Could my eyes deceive me? It certainly was our neighbor. 

Scarcely knowing what I did, I thrust out my stick and touched it, shrinking back as I did so. What I touched, plain instantly to my sight, was a piece of wood and iron, --some portion of a mowing-machine orreaper, which had been, apparently, repainted and hung up across thedoor-pole to dry. 

It swayed in the wind. The straying fingers of the moonbeams through thechinks pencilled it strangely, and the shadows were huddled black behindit. But now it hung revealed, with no more likeness to a human body thanany average well-meaning farm-implement might be expected to have. 

With a huge sigh of relief I turned away. As I climbed the fence oncemore I gave a parting glance toward the yawning doorway of the barn onthe marsh. There, as plain as before I had pierced the bubble, swung thebody of my neighbor. And all the way home, though I would not turn myhead, I felt it at my heels. 

Captain Joe and Jamie. 

How the wind roared in from the sea over the Tantramar dike!

It was about sunset, and a fierce orange-red gleam, thrusting itselfthrough a rift in the clouds that blackened the sky, cast a strange glowover the wide, desolate marshes. A mile back rose the dark line of theuplands, with small, white farmhouses already hidden in shadow. 

Captain Joe Boultbee had just left his wagon standing in the dike road, with his four-year-old boy on the seat. He was on the point of crossingthe dike, to visit the little landing-place where he kept his boat, whenabove the rush and whistle of the gale he heard Jamie's voice. Hehurried back a few paces before he could make out what the little fellowwas saying. 

"Pap, " cried the child, "I want to get out of the wagon. 'Fraid Billgoin' to run away!"

"Oh, nonsense!" answered Captain Joe. "Bill won't run away. He doesn'tknow how. You stay there, and don't be frightened, and I'll be rightback. "

"But, pap, the wind blows me too hard, " piped the small voice, pleadingly. 

"Oh, all right, " said the father, and returning to the wagon he liftedthe child gently down and set him on his feet. "Now, " he continued, "it's too windy for you out on the other side of the dike. You run overand sit on that big stick, where the wind can't get at you; and wait forme. And be sure you don't let Bill run away. "

As he spoke the Captain noticed that the horse, ordinarily one of themost stolid of creatures, seemed to-night peculiarly uneasy; with hishead up in the air he was sniffing nervously, and glancing from side toside. As Jamie was trudging through the long grass to the seat which hisfather had shown him, the Captain said, "Why, Bill _does_ seem scary, after all; who'd have thought this wind would scare _him_?"

"Bill don't like it, " replied Jamie; "it blows him too hard. " And, gladto be out of the gale, which took his breath away, the little fellowseated himself contentedly in the shelter of the dike. Just then therewas a clatter of wheels and a crash. Bill had whirled sharply about inthe narrow road, upsetting and smashing the light wagon. 

Now, utterly heedless of his master's angry shouts, he was galloping inmad haste back toward the uplands, with the fragments of the wagon athis heels. The Captain and Jamie watched him flying before the wind, ared spectre in the lurid light. Then, turning away once more to see tohis boat, the Captain remarked, "Well, laddie, I guess we'll have tofoot it back when we get through here. But Bill's going to have alicking for this!"

Left to himself, Jamie crouched down behind the dike, a strange, solitary little figure in the wide waste of the marshes. Though the fullforce of the gale could not reach him, his long fair curls were blownacross his face, and he clung determinedly to his small, round hat. Fora while he watched the beam of red light, till the jagged fringe ofclouds closed over it, and it was gone. Then, in the dusk, he began tofeel a little frightened; but he knew his father would soon be back, andhe didn't like to call him again. He listened to the waves washing, surging, beating, roaring, on the shoals beyond the dike. Presently heheard them, every now and then, thunder in against the very dike itself. Upon this he grew more frightened, and called to his father severaltimes. But of course the small voice was drowned in the tumult of windand wave, and the father, working eagerly on the other side of the dike, heard no sound of it. 

Close by the shelter in which Jamie was crouching there were severalgreat tubs, made by sawing molasses-hogsheads into halves. These tubs, in fishing season, were carried by the fishermen in their boats, to holdthe shad as they were taken from the net. Now they stood empty and dry, but highly flavored with memories of their office. Into the nearest tubJamie crawled, after having shouted in vain to his father. 

To the child's loneliness and fear the tub looked "cosey, " as he calledit. He curled up in the bottom, and felt a little comforted. 

Jamie was the only child of Captain Joe Boultbee. When Jamie was abouttwo years old, the Captain had taken the child and his mother on avoyage to Brazil. While calling at Barbadoes the young mother had caughtthe yellow fever. There she had died, and was buried. After that voyageCaptain Joe had given up his ship, and retired to his father's farm atTantramar. There he devoted himself to Jamie and the farm, but to Jamieespecially; and in the summer, partly for amusement, partly for profit, he was accustomed to spend a few weeks in drifting for shad on the wildtides of Chignecto Bay. Wherever he went, Jamie went. If the weather wastoo rough for Jamie, Captain Joe stayed at home. As for the child, petted without being spoiled, he was growing a tough and manly littlesoul, and daily more and more the delight of his father's heart. 

Why should he leave him curled up in his tub on the edge of the marshes, on a night so wild? In truth, though the wind was tremendous, and nowgrowing to a veritable hurricane, there was no apparent danger or greathardship on the marshes. It was not cold, and there was no rain. 

Captain Joe, foreseeing a heavy gale, together with a tide higher thanusual, had driven over to the dike to make his little craft more secure. 

He found the boat already in confusion; and the wind, when once he hadcrossed out of the dike's shelter, was so much more violent than he hadexpected, that it took him some time to get things "snugged up. " He feltthat Jamie was all right, as long as he was out of the wind. He was onlya stone's throw distant, though hidden by the great rampart of the dike. But the Captain began to wish that he had left the little fellow athome, as he knew the long walk over the rough road, in the dark and thefurious gale, would sorely tire the sturdy little legs. Every now andthen, as vigorously and cheerfully he worked in the pitching smack, theCaptain sent a shout of greeting over the dike to keep the little ladfrom getting lonely. But the storm blew his voice far up into theclouds, and Jamie, in his tub, never heard it. 

By the time Captain Joe had put everything shipshape, he noticed thathis plunging boat had drifted close to the dike. He had never beforeseen the tide reach such a height. The waves that were rocking thelittle craft so violently, were a mere back-wash from the great seaswhich, as he now observed with a pang, were thundering in a littlefurther up the coast. Just at this spot the dike was protected from thefull force of the storm by Snowdons' Point. "What if the dike shouldbreak up yonder, and this fearful tide get in on the marshes?" thoughtthe Captain, in a sudden anguish of apprehension. Leaving the boat todash itself to pieces if it liked, he clambered in breathless haste outon to the top of the dike, shouting to Jamie as he did so. There was noanswer. Where he had left the little one but a half-hour back, the tidewas seething three or four feet deep over the grasses. 

Dark as the night had grown, it grew blacker before the father's eyes. For an instant his heart stood still with horror, then he sprang downinto the flood. The water boiled up nearly to his arm-pits. With hisfeet he felt the great timber, fastened in the dike, on which his boyhad been sitting. He peered through the dark, with straining eyes grownpreternaturally keen. He could see nothing on the wide, swirling surfacesave two or three dark objects, far out in the marsh. These herecognized at once as his fish-tubs gone afloat. Then he ran up the diketoward the Point. "Surely, " he groaned in his heart, "Jamie has climbedup the dike when he saw the water coming, and I'll find him along thetop here, somewhere, looking and crying for me!"

Then, running like a madman along the narrow summit, with a band of irontightening about his heart, the Captain reached the Point, where thedike took its beginning. 

No sign of the little one; but he saw the marshes everywhere laid waste. Then he turned round and sped back, thinking perhaps Jamie had wanderedin the other direction. Passing the now buried landing-place, he sawwith a curious distinctness, as if in a picture, that the boat wasturned bottom up, and glued to the side of the dike. 

Suddenly he checked his speed with a violent effort, and threw himselfupon his face, clutching the short grasses of the dike. He had justsaved himself from falling into the sea. Had he had time to think, hemight not have tried to save himself, believing as he did that the childwho was his very life had perished. But the instinct ofself-preservation had asserted itself blindly, and just in time. Beforehis feet the dike was washed away, and through the chasm the waves werebreaking furiously. 

Meanwhile, what had become of Jamie?

The wind had made him drowsy, and before he had been many minutes curledup in the tub, he was sound asleep. 

When the dike gave way, some distance from Jamie's queer retreat, therecame suddenly a great rush of water among the tubs, and some werestraightway floated off. Then others a little heavier followed, one byone; and, last of all, the heaviest, that containing Jamie and hisfortunes. The water rose rapidly, but back here there came no waves, andthe child slept as peacefully as if at home in his crib. Little theCaptain thought, when his eyes wandered over the floating tubs, that theone nearest to him was freighted with his heart's treasure! And well itwas that Jamie did not hear his shouts and wake! Had he done so, hewould have at once sprung to his feet and been tipped out into theflood. 

By this time the great tide had reached its height. Soon it began torecede, but slowly, for the storm kept the waters gathered, as it were, into a heap at the head of the bay. All night the wind raged on, wrecking the smacks and schooners along the coast, breaking down thedikes in a hundred places, flooding all the marshes, and drowning manycattle in the salt pastures. All night the Captain, hopeless and mute inhis agony of grief, lay clutching the grasses on the dike-top, notnoticing when at length the waves ceased to drench him with their spray. All night, too, slept Jamie in his tub. 

Right across the marsh the strange craft drifted before the wind, nevergetting into the region where the waves were violent. Such motion asthere was--and at times it was somewhat lively--seemed only to lull thechild to a sounder slumber. Toward daybreak the tub grounded at the footof the uplands, not far from the edge of the road. The waters graduallyslunk away, as if ashamed of their wild vagaries. And still the childslept on. 

As the light broke over the bay, coldly pink and desolately gleaming, Captain Joe got up and looked about him. His eyes were tearless, but hisface was gray and hard, and deep lines had stamped themselves across itduring the night. 

Seeing that the marshes were again uncovered, save for great shallowpools left here and there, he set out to find the body of his boy. Afterwandering aimlessly for perhaps an hour, the Captain began to study thedirection in which the wind had been blowing. This was almost exactlywith the road which led to his home on the uplands. As he noticed this, a wave of pity crossed his heart, at thought of the terrible anxiety hisfather and mother had all that night been enduring. Then in an instantthere seemed to unroll before him the long, slow years of the desolationof that home without Jamie. 

All this time he was moving along the soaked road, scanning the marsh inevery direction. When he had covered about half the distance, he wasaware of his father, hastening with feeble eagerness to meet him. 

The night of watching had made the old man haggard, but his face lit upat sight of his son. As he drew near, however, and saw no sign of Jamie, and marked the look upon the Captain's face, the gladness died out asquickly as it had come. When the two men met, the elder put out his handin silence, and the younger clasped it. There was no room for words. Side by side the two walked slowly homeward. With restless eyes, everdreading lest they should find that which they sought, the father andson looked everywhere, --except in a certain old fish-tub which theypassed. The tub stood a little to one side of the road. Just at thistime a sparrow lit on the tub's edge, and uttered a loud and startledchirp at sight of the sleeping child. As the bird flew offprecipitately, Jamie opened his eyes, and gazed up in astonishment atthe blue sky over his head. He stretched out his hand and felt the roughsides of the tub. Then, in complete bewilderment, he clambered to hisfeet. Why, there was his father, walking away somewhere without him! Andgrandpapa, too! Jamie felt aggrieved. 

"Pap!" he cried, in a loud but tearful voice, "where you goin' to?"

A great wave of light seemed to break across the landscape, as the twomen turned and saw the little golden head shining, dishevelled, over theedge of the tub. The Captain caught his breath with a sort of sob, andrushed to snatch the little one in his arms; while the grandfather fellon his knees in the road, and his trembling lips moved silently. 

Strayed. 

In the Cabineau Camp, of unlucky reputation, there was a young ox ofsplendid build, but of a wild and restless nature. 

He was one of a yoke, of part Devon blood, large, dark-red, all muscleand nerve, and with wide magnificent horns. His yoke-fellow was a docilesteady worker, the pride of his owner's heart; but he himself seemednever to have been more than half broken in. The woods appeared to drawhim by some spell. He wanted to get back to the pastures where he hadroamed untrammelled of old with his fellow-steers. The remembrance wasin his heart of the dewy mornings when the herd used to feed together onthe sweet grassy hillocks, and of the clover-smelling heats of June whenthey would gather hock-deep in the pools under the green willow-shadows. He hated the yoke, he hated the winter; and he imagined that in the wildpastures he remembered it would be for ever summer. If only he could getback to those pastures!

One day there came the longed-for opportunity; and he seized it. He wasstanding unyoked beside his mate, and none of the teamsters were near. His head went up in the air, and with a snort of triumph he dashed awaythrough the forest. 

For a little while there was a vain pursuit. At last the lumbermen gaveit up. "Let him be!" said his owner, "an' I rayther guess he'll turn upagin when he gits peckish. He kaint browse on spruce buds an'lung-wort. "

Plunging on with long gallop through the snow he was soon miles fromcamp. Growing weary he slackened his pace. He came down to a walk. Asthe lonely red of the winter sunset began to stream through the openingsof the forest, flushing the snows of the tiny glades and swales, he grewhungry, and began to swallow unsatisfying mouthfuls of the long mosswhich roughened the tree-trunks. Ere the moon got up he had filledhimself with this fodder, and then he lay down in a little thicket forthe night. 

But some miles back from his retreat a bear had chanced upon hisfoot-prints. A strayed steer! That would be an easy prey. The bearstarted straightway in pursuit. The moon was high in heaven when thecrouched ox heard his pursuer's approach. He had no idea what wascoming, but he rose to his feet and waited. 

The bear plunged boldly into the thicket, never dreaming of resistance. With a muffled roar the ox charged upon him and bore him to the ground. Then he wheeled, and charged again, and the astonished bear was beatenat once. Gored by those keen horns he had no stomach for furtherencounter, and would fain have made his escape; but as he retreated theox charged him again, dashing him against a huge trunk. The bear draggedhimself up with difficulty, beyond his opponent's reach; and the oxturned scornfully back to his lair. 

At the first yellow of dawn the restless creature was again upon themarch. He pulled more mosses by the way, but he disliked them the moreintensely now because he thought he must be nearing his ancient pastureswith their tender grass and their streams. The snow was deeper abouthim, and his hatred of the winter grew apace. He came out upon ahillside, partly open, whence the pine had years before been stripped, and where now grew young birches thick together. Here he browsed on thearomatic twigs, but for him it was harsh fare. 

As his hunger increased he thought a little longingly of the camp he haddeserted, but he dreamed not of turning back. He would keep on till hereached his pastures, and the glad herd of his comrades licking salt outof the trough beside the accustomed pool. He had some blind instinct asto his direction, and kept his course to the south very strictly, thedesire in his heart continually leading him aright. 

That afternoon he was attacked by a panther, which dropped out of a treeand tore his throat. He dashed under a low branch and scraped hisassailant off, then, wheeling about savagely, put the brute to flightwith his first mad charge. The panther sprang back into his tree, andthe ox continued his quest. 

Soon his steps grew weaker, for the panther's cruel claws had gone deepinto his neck, and his path was marked with blood. Yet the dream in hisgreat wild eyes was not dimmed as his strength ebbed away. His weaknesshe never noticed or heeded. The desire that was urging him absorbed allother thoughts, --even, almost, his sense of hunger. This, however, itwas easy for him to assuage, after a fashion, for the long, gray, unnourishing mosses were abundant. 

By and by his path led him into the bed of a stream, whose waters couldbe heard faintly tinkling on thin pebbles beneath their coverlet of iceand snow. His slow steps conducted him far along this open course. Soonafter he had disappeared, around a curve in the distance there came thepanther, following stealthily upon his crimsoned trail. The crafty beastwas waiting till the bleeding and the hunger should do its work, and theobject of its inexorable pursuit should have no more heart left forresistance. 

This was late in the afternoon. The ox was now possessed with hisdesire, and would not lie down for any rest. All night long, through thegleaming silver of the open spaces, through the weird and checkeredgloom of the deep forest, heedless even of his hunger, or perhaps driventhe more by it as he thought of the wild clover bunches and tendertimothy awaiting him, the solitary ox strove on. And all night, laggingfar behind in his unabating caution, the panther followed him. 

At sunrise the worn and stumbling animal came out upon the borders ofthe great lake, stretching its leagues of unshadowed snow away to thesouth before him. There was his path, and without hesitation he followedit. The wide and frost-bound water here and there had been swept clearof its snows by the wind, but for the most part its covering layunruffled; and the pale dove-colors, and saffrons, and rose-lilacs ofthe dawn were sweetly reflected on its surface. 

The doomed ox was now journeying very slowly, and with the greatestlabor. He staggered at every step, and his beautiful head drooped almostto the snow. When he had got a great way out upon the lake, at theforest's edge appeared the pursuing panther, emerging cautiously fromthe coverts. The round tawny face and malignant green eyes were raisedto peer out across the expanse. The laboring progress of the ox waspromptly marked. Dropping its nose again to the ensanguined snow, thebeast resumed his pursuit, first at a slow trot, and then at a long, elastic gallop. By this time the ox's quest was nearly done. He plungedforward upon his knees, rose again with difficulty, stood still, andlooked around him. His eyes were clouding over, but he saw, dimly, thetawny brute that was now hard upon his steps. Back came a flash of theold courage, and he turned, horns lowered, to face the attack. With thelast of his strength he charged, and the panther paused irresolutely;but the wanderer's knees gave way beneath his own impetus, and his hornsploughed the snow. With a deep bellowing groan he rolled over on hisside, and the longing, and the dream of the pleasant pastures, fadedfrom his eyes. With a great spring the panther was upon him, and theeager teeth were at his throat, --but he knew nought of it. No wildbeast, but his own desire, had conquered him. 

When the panther had slaked his thirst for blood, he raised his head, and stood with his fore-paws resting on the dead ox's side, and gazedall about him. 

To one watching from the lake shore, had there been any one to watch inthat solitude, the wild beast and his prey would have seemed but a speckof black on the gleaming waste. At the same hour, league upon leagueback in the depth of the ancient forest, a lonely ox was lowing in hisstanchions, restless, refusing to eat, grieving for the absence of hisyoke-fellow. 

The Eye of Gluskāp. 

I. 

It was close upon high tide, and the creek that wound in through thediked marshes was rapidly filling to the brim with the swirling, cold, yellow-gray waters of Minas. The sun, but half risen, yet lingered onthe wooded crest of the Gaspereau hills; while above hung a dappled skyof pink and pale amber and dove-color. A yellow light streamed sharplydown across the frost-whitened meadows, the smouldering ruins of GrandPré village, and out upon the glittering expanse of Minas Basin. Thebeams tinged brightly the cordage and half-furled sails of two shipsthat rode at anchor in the Basin, near the shore. With a pitilesslyrevealing whiteness the rays descended on the mournful encampment at thecreek's mouth, where a throng of Acadian peasants were getting ready toembark for exile. 

 "Late grew the year, and stormy was the sea. "

Already had five ships sailed away with their sorrowful freight, disappearing around the towering front of Blomidon, from the strainingeyes of friends and kinsfolk left behind. Another ship would sail outwith the next ebb, and all was sad confusion and unwilling haste tillthe embarkation should be accomplished. The ship's boats were loadeddown with rude household stuff, and boxes full of homespun linens andwoollens. 

Children were crying with the cold, and a few women were weepingsilently; but the partings which had succeeded each other at intervalsthroughout the last few weeks had dulled the edge of anguish, and mostof the Acadians wore an air of heavy resignation. The New Englandsoldiers on guard gave what help they could, but sullenly; for they wereweary of the misery that they had so long been forced to watch. 

The people were huddled on a little patch of marsh within a curve of thedike. Beyond the dike there spread a stretch of reddish brownsalt-flats, covered with water only at the highest spring-tides, and nowmeagrely sprinkled with sharp-edged blades and tufts of the graysalt-grasses. The flats were soft between the bunches of the grass, anda broad track was trampled into mire by the passing down of many feetfrom the dike's edge to the boats. 

In a work like this there are always a thousand unlooked-for delays, andbefore half the embarkation was effected the tide had reached the full, and paused and turned to ebb. As the strip of shining red mud began towiden between the grasses and the water's edge, the bustle and confusionincreased. Sometimes a woman who had already stepped into the boat, thinking that her people had preceded her, would spring over the sideinto the shallow water, and rush, sobbing with anxious fear, back to theencampment. Sometimes a child would lose sight of its father or motherin the press, and lift its shrill voice in a wail of desolation whichfound piteous echo in every Acadian heart. 

Lower and lower fell the tide. The current was now thick and red withthe mud which it was dragging from the flats to re-deposit on somecrescent shoal at the mouth of the Canard or Piziquid. Over the dike anddown toward the waiting boats came an old man, bent with years, supported by his son and his son's wife a middle-aged couple. Thedecrepit figure in its quaint Acadian garb was one to be remembered. OldRemi Corveau was a man of means among the Acadian peasants. His feetwere incased in high-top moccasins of vividly embroidered moose-hide, and his legs in gaiters, or _mitasses_, of dark blue woollen homespun, laced with strips of red cloth. His coat was a long and heavy garment ofhomespun blanket, dyed to a yellowish brown with many decoctions of aplant which the country-folk now know as "yaller-weed. " A cap of coarsesealskin covered his head, and was tied beneath his chin with a woollenscarf of dull red. The old man clutched his stick in his mittened righthand, muttering to himself, and seemed but half aware of what was goingon. When he came to the edge of the wet, red clay, however, hestraightened himself and looked about him. He gazed at the boats and atthe anchored ships beyond. A light of sudden intelligence flashed intohis feeble eyes. He turned half round and looked back upon the ruinedvillage, while his son and daughter paused respectfully. 

"Hurry along there now, " exclaimed one of the guards, impatiently; andthe Acadian couple, understanding the tone and gesture, pulled at theirfather's arms to lead him into the boat. The old man's eyes flamedwildly, and crying, "_J'ne veux pas! j'ne veux pas!_" he broke from themand struggled back toward the dike. Instantly his son overtook him, picked him up in his arms, and carried him, now sobbing feebly, down tothe boat, where he laid him on a pile of blankets. As the laden craftmoved slowly toward the ship the old man's complainings ceased. Whenthey went to hoist him over the ship's side they discovered that he wasdead. 

And now the very last boatload was well-nigh ready to start. The parishpriest, who was staying behind to sail with the next and final ship, wasbidding his sad farewells. A young woman drew near the boat, but hardlyseemed to see the priest's kind face of greeting, so anxiously was shefumbling in the depths of a small bag which she carried on her arm. 

The bag was of yellow caribou-skin, worked by Indian fingers inmany-colored designs of dyed porcupine quills. 

"What's the matter, Marie, my child?" inquired the priest, gently. "Hastthou lost something more, besides thy country and thy father's house?"

As he spoke the girl, whose name was Marie Beaugrand, looked up with asigh of relief, and turned to him affectionately. 

"I have found it, Father! _V'la!_" she exclaimed, holding up a giganticamethyst of marvellous brilliancy. "Pierrot gave it to me to keep forhim, you know, " she added timidly, "because of the bad luck that goeswith it when a _man_ has it!"

This was no time to chide the girl for her belief in the superstitionwhich he knew was connected with the wondrous jewel. The priest merelysmiled and said: "Well, well, guard it carefully, my little one; and maythe Holy Saints enable it to mend the fortunes of thee and thy Pierrot!Farewell; and God have thee ever in his keeping, my dear child!"

Hardly were the words well past his lips when the girl gave a scream ofdismay, and sprang forward down the slippery red incline. She haddropped the amethyst, by some incomprehensible mischance. The priestbeheld the purple gleam as it flashed from between the girl's fingers. Her high cap of coarse undyed French linen fell away from her blacklocks as she stooped to grope passionately in the ooze which hadswallowed up her treasure. In a moment the comely picture of her darkblue sleeves, gray petticoat, and trim red stockings was sadlydisfigured by the mud. The girl's despair was piercing; but theimpatient guards, who knew not what she had lost, were on the point oftaking her forcibly to the boat, when Colonel Winslow, who stood nearby, checked them peremptorily. 

Seeing the priest gird up his cassock and step forward to help thesobbing girl in her search; Colonel Winslow questioned of theinterpreter as to what the damsel had lost to cause such lament. 

"A toy, a mere gaud, your Excellency, " said the shrewd interpreter, giving Winslow a title which he would not have employed had there beenany one present of higher rank than the New England Colonel. "A meregaud of a purple stone; but they do say it would be worth a thousandpounds if one had it in London. These poor folk call it the 'WitchStone, ' because, they say, it brings bad luck to the man that has it. The more learned sort smile at such a superstition, and call the stone'The Star' by reason of its surpassing beauty, --Pierrot Desbarat's star, they call it now, since that youth picked it up last spring on Blomidon, where it had once before been found and strangely lost again. They saythe youth gave the jewel to his betrothed yonder to keep for him, if soshe might ward off the evil fortune. "

The New England colonel's high-arched eyebrows went up into his foreheadat this tale. His round and ruddy face softened with sympathy for thepoor girl's despair. Winslow was convinced of the wisdom and justice ofthe orders which he was carrying out so firmly; but he wished the taskof removing the Acadians had been confided to any other hands than his. "This affair is more grievous to me, " he wrote to a friend about thistime, "than any service I was ever employed in. "

Presently, remarking that the girl's efforts were fruitless, and thetide ebbing rapidly, Winslow ordered several of his soldiers down intothe mud to assist her search. Veiling their reluctance the men obeyed, and the ooze was explored to the very water's edge. At length, realizingthat the departure could not safely be longer delayed, Winslow orderedthe quest to cease. 

As the girl turned back to the boat the colonel caught sight of thedespair upon her face; and reddening in the folds of his double chin heslipped some gold pieces into the muddy hand of the priest. 

"Be good enough, sir, to give the damsel these, " he said, stiffly. "Tellher I will have the search continued. If the stone is found she shallhave it. If any one steals it I will hang him. "

As the priest, leaning over the boat-side, slipped the pieces into thebuckskin bag, Colonel Winslow turned away, and rather roughly orderedthe bespattered soldiers back to camp to clean themselves. 

After the priest had bid farewell to the still weeping Marie and thelittle company about her, he stood waiting to receive the other boatwhich was now returning from the ship. He saw that something unexpectedhad taken place. His old parishioner was lying back in the stern, covered with a blanket, while his son and daughter lamented over himwith the unrestraint of children. On the following day, under the sternguard of the Puritan soldiers, there was a funeral in the littlecemetery on the hillside, and the frozen sods were heaped upon the lastAcadian grave of Grand Pré village. Remi Corveau had chosen death ratherthan exile. 

And what was the jewel whose loss had caused such grief to MarieBeaugrand? For generations the great amethyst had sparkled in the frontof Blomidon, visible at intervals in certain lights and from certainstandpoints, and again unseen for months or years together. The Indianscalled it "The Eye of Gluskāp, " and believed that to meddle with it atall would bring down swiftly the vengeance of the demigod. Fixed high onthe steepest face of the cliff, the gem had long defied the search ofthe most daring climbers. It lurked, probably, under some over-hangingbrow of ancient rock, as in a fit and inviolable setting. At length, some years before the date of the events I have been describing, aFrench sailor, fired by the far-off gleaming of the gem, had succeededin locating the spot of splendor. Alone, with a coil of rope, he madehis way to the top of the ancient cape. A few days later his bruised andlifeless body was found among the rocks below the height, and taken forburial to the little hillside cemetery by the Gaspereau. The fellow hadevidently succeeded in finding the amethyst and dislodging it from itsmatrix, for when next the elfin light gleamed forth it was seen to comefrom a point far down the cliff, not more than a hundred feet above thetide. 

Here it had been found by Pierrot Desbarats, who, laughing to scorn thesuperstitious fears of his fellow-villagers, had brought it home intriumph. It was his purpose to go, at some convenient season, toHalifax, and there sell the matchless crystal, of whose value the priesthad been able to give him some idea. But that very spring ill luck hadcrossed the threshold of Pierrot's cabin, a threshold over which he waseven then preparing to lead Marie Beaugrand as his bride. Two of hisoxen died mysteriously, his best cow slipped her calf, his horse got astrain in the loins, and his apple blossoms were nipped by a frost whichpassed by his neighbors' trees. Thereupon, heeding the words of an oldMicmac squaw, who had said that the spell of the stone had no power upona woman, Pierrot had placed his treasure in Marie's keeping till suchtime as it could be transformed into English gold--and from that day theshadow of ill-fate had seemed to pass from him, until the edict ofbanishment came upon Grand Pré like a bolt out of a cloudless heaven. 

From the ship, on whose deck he awaited her coming, Pierrot saw theapparently causeless accident which had befallen the gem, and watchedwith dry lips and burning eyes the vain endeavors of the search. Hishands trembled and his heart was bitter against the girl for a fewmoments; but as the boat drew near, and he caught the misery andfathomless self-reproach on her averted face, his anger melted away inpity. He took Marie's hand as she came over the bulwarks, and whisperedto her: "Don't cry about it, '_Tite Chérie_, it would have brought usbad luck anywhere we went. Let's thank the Holy Saints it's gone. "

As the ship forged slowly across the Basin and came beneath the shadowof the frown of Blomidon, Pierrot pointed out first the perilous ledgeto which he had climbed for the vanished "star, " and then thetide-washed hollow under the cliff, where they had picked up the body ofthe luckless sailor from St. Malo. "Who knows, Marie, " continuedPierrot, "if thou hadst not lost that evil stone thou might'st one dayhave seen _me_ in such a case as that sailor came unto!" And then, notbecause she was at all convinced by such reasoning, but because herlover's voice was kind, the girl looked up into Pierrot's face and madeshift to dry her tears. 

II. 

Late in December the last ship sailed away. Then the last roof-tree ofGrand Pré village went down in ashes; and Winslow's lieutenant, Osgood, with a sense of heavy duty done, departed with his New England troops. Winslow himself had gone some weeks before. 

For five years after the great exile the Acadian lands lay deserted, andthe fogs that gathered morning by morning on the dark top of Blomidonlooked down on a waste where came and went no human footstep. All thewhile the fated amethyst lay hidden, as far as tradition tells, beneaththe red ooze and changing tides of the creek. 

Then settlers began to come in, and the empty fields were taken up bymen of English speech. Once more a village arose on Grand Pré, andcider-presses creaked on the hills of Gaspereau. Of the Acadians, tokeep their memory green on the meadows they had captured from the sea, there remained the interminable lines of mighty dike, the old appleorchards and the wind-breaks of tall poplars, and some gaping cellarsfull of ruins wherein the newcomers dug persistently for treasure. 

By and by certain of the settlers, who occupied the higher grounds backof the village, began to talk of a star which they had seen, gleamingwith a strange violet radiance from a patch of unreclaimed salt marsh bythe mouth of the creek. In early evening only could the elfin light bediscerned, and then it was visible to none but those who stood upon theheights. Soon, from no one knew where, came tales of "The Eye ofGluskāp, " and "The Witch's Stone, " and "_L'Etoile de Pierrot Desbarat_, "and the death of the sailor of St. Malo, and the losing of the gem onthe day the ship sailed forth. Of the value of the amethyst the mostfabulous stories went abroad, and for a season the good wives of thesettlers had but a sorry time of it, cleansing their husbands' garmentsfrom a daily defilement of mud. 

While the vain search was going on, an old Scotchman, shrewder than hisfellows, was taking out his title-deeds to the whole expanse ofsalt-flats, which covered perhaps a score of acres. Having quietly madehis position secure at Halifax, Dugald McIntyre came down on hisfellow-villagers with a firm celerity, and the digging and the defilingof garments came suddenly to an end by Grand Pré Creek. Soon a line ofnew dike encompassed the flats, the spring tides swept no more acrossthose sharp grasses which had bent beneath the unreturning feet of theAcadians, and the prudent Scot found himself the richer by twenty acresof exhaustlessly fertile meadow, worth a hundred dollars an acre anyday. Moreover, he felt that _he had the amethyst_. Could he not see italmost any evening toward sundown by merely climbing the hillside backof his snug homestead? How divinely it gleamed, with long, pale, steadyrays, just inside the lines of circumvallation which he had so cunninglydrawn about it! In its low lurking-place beside the hubbub of therecurring ebb and flow, it seemed to watch, like an unwinking eye, forthe coming of curious and baleful fates. 

But it never fell to the Scotchman's fortune to behold his treasureclose at hand. To the hill-top he had to go whenever he would gloat uponits beauty. To the most diligent and tireless searching of every inch ofthe marsh's surface it refused to yield up its implacably virginallustre. Sometimes, though rarely, it was visible as the moon drew nearher setting, and then it would glitter whitely and malignantly, like afrosty spear-point. 

At last the settlers began to whisper that the Star was not in the marshat all, but that Dugald McIntyre, after the fashion of these canny folk, had o'er-reached himself, and run the lines of the dike right over it. That it could continue to shine under such discouraging circumstances, the settlement by this time scorned to doubt. To "The Eye of Gluskāp"the people were ready to attribute any powers, divine or devilish. 

Whether the degree of possession to which Dugald McIntyre had attainedcould be considered to constitute a legal ownership of the jewel or notis a question for lawyers, not for the mere teller of a plain tale, themere digger among the facts of a perishing history. Suffice it to saythat the finger of ill-fortune soon designated Dugald McIntyre as theman whose claim to the "Eye" was acknowledged by the Fates. 

From the time of the completion of the new dike dated the Scotchman'stroubles. His cattle one year, his crops another, seemed to find theseasons set against them. Dugald's prudence, watchfulness, and untiringindustry minimized every stroke; nevertheless, things went steadily tothe worse. 

It was Destiny _versus_ Dugald McIntyre, and with true Scottishdetermination Dugald braced himself to the contest. He made a bravefight; but wherever there was a doubtful point at issue, the CourtInvisible ruled inexorably and without a scruple against the possessorof the "Eye of Gluskāp. " When he was harvesting his first crop of hayoff the new dike--and a fine crop it seemed likely to be--the rains setin with a persistence that at length reduced the windrows to a conditionof flavorless gray straw. Dugald McIntyre set his jaws grimly together, took good hay from another meadow to mix with the ruined crop, and by adiscreet construction of his bundles succeeded in selling the whole lotat a good price to his most gracious Majesty's government at Halifax. This bold stroke seemed to daunt the Fates for a time, and while theywere recovering from their confusion affairs went bravely with Dugald. When haying season came round again the weather kept favorable, and thehay was all harvested in perfect shape. Dugald was much too prudent toboast; but in his innermost heart he indulged a smile of triumph. Thatnight his barns and outbuildings were burned to the ground, and two finehorses with them; and his house was saved hardly. This was too much evenfor him. Refusing to play longer a losing game, he sold the "New Marsh"at some sacrifice to a settler who laughed at superstition. Thissceptical philosopher, however, proved open to conviction. A twelvemonthlater he was ready almost to give the land away, and the "Eye ofGluskāp" with it. For a mere song the rich and smiling tract, carrying aheavy crop just ready for the scythe, was purchased by a young NewEnglander with an admirable instinct for business. This young man wentto Halifax and mortgaged the land and crop to their full value; and withthe cash he left to seek his fortune. Thus the "Eye of Gluskāp, " and theMarsh with it, came into the possession of a widow of great wealth, onwhom the spell, it seemed, was of none effect. Her heirs were inEngland, and it came to pass, in the course of a generation, that GrandPré knew not the owners of the fated Marsh, and could not tell whattroubles, if any, were falling upon the possessors of "The Star. "Nevertheless the star kept up its gleaming, a steady eye of violet underthe sunsets, a ray of icy pallor when the large moon neared her setting;and at length it was discovered that the enchanted jewel had yet otherperiods of manifestation. Belated wayfarers, on stormy December nights, had caught the unearthly eye-beam when no other light could be seen inearth or sky. When this took place the tide was always near about thefull, and beating hoarsely all along the outer dykes. Then would beheard, between the pauses of the wind, the rattle of oars at the mouthof the creek, and the creaking of ships' cordage, and anon the sound ofchildren crying with the cold. If voices came from the spot where the"New Marsh" lay unseen and the "Star" shone coldly watchful, they werefor the most part in a tongue which the wayfarers could not understand. But now and again, some said, there were orders spoken in English, andthen the clank of arms and the tramp of marching feet. Of course thesethings were held in question by many of the settlers, but there werenone so hardy as to suffer themselves to be caught upon the "New Marsh"after nightfall. "The Eye of Gluskāp" discerned a supernatural terror inmany a heart that claimed renown for courage. 

III. 

A hundred years had rolled down the hillsides of the Gaspereau and outacross the Minas tides into the fogs and hollows of the past; and stillthe patch of dyked land at the creek's mouth was lit by the unsearchablelustre of the "Eye of Gluskāp. "

As for the various distinguished scientists who undertook to unravel themystery, either much study had made them blind, or the lights wereunpropitious; for not one of them ever attained to a vision of theviolet gleam. They went away with laughter on their lips. 

One spring there came to Grand Pré a young Englishman named Desbra, along-limbed, ample-chested youth, with whitish hair and ruddy skin, andclear, straightforward blue eyes. Desbra was resolved to learn farmingin a new country, so he bought an old farm on the uplands, with anexhausted orchard, and was for a time surprised at the infertility ofthe soil. 

Gradually he made himself master of the situation, and of some moredesirable acres, and also, incidentally it seemed, of the affections ofa maiden who lived not far from Grand Pré. 

Dugald McIntyre had prospered again when the "Eye of Gluskāp" no longerlooked malignantly on his fortunes; and to his descendants he had leftone of the finest properties within view of Blomidon. It was JessieMcIntyre, his great-grandchild, who had captured the heart of youngDesbra. 

One rosy September afternoon, as Jessie stood in the porch where thewild grapes clustered half ripe, the young Englishman came swinging hislong legs up the slope, sprang over the fence between the apple trees, and caught the maiden gleefully in his arms. 

"Congratulate me, Mistress McIntyre, " he cried, as the girl pushed himaway in mock disapproval. "I have just made a bargain, --a famousbargain, --a thing I never did before in my life. "

"Good boy, " replied Jessie, standing a-tip-toe to pat the pale brush ofher lover's well-cropped hair. "Good boy, we'll make a Blue Nose of youyet! And what is this famous bargain, may I ask?"

"Why, I've just bought what so many of your fellow-countrymen call the'Noo Ma'sh, '" answered Desbra. "I have got it for twenty dollars anacre, and it's worth a hundred any day! I've got the deed, and thething's an accomplished fact. "

Jessie looked grave, and removed herself from her lover's embrace inorder to lend impressiveness to her words. "Oh, Jack, Jack!" she said, "you don't know what you have done! You have become a man of Destiny, which I don't believe you want to be at all. You have bought the 'Star. 'You have made yourself the master of the 'Witch's Stone. ' You havesummoned the 'Eye of Gluskāp' to keep watch upon you critically. Infact, it would take a long time to tell you all you have done. But onething more you must do, --you must get rid of that famous bargain ofyours without delay. I'm not superstitious, Jack, but truly in this caseI am disturbed. Bad luck, horrid bad luck, has always befallen any manowning that piece of Marsh, for the Marsh contains the Witch's Stone, and a spell is on the man that possesses that fatal jewel. "

Jack Desbra laughed and recaptured the maiden. "All right, " said he, "ifa man mustn't possess it, I shall give it away to a woman! How will thatsuit you, my lady?"

Jessie looked dubious, but said anything would be better than for him tokeep it himself. Whereupon the young man continued: "Put on your hat, then, and come down into the village with me, and I will forthwithtransfer the property, with all appurtenances thereof, to JessieMcIntyre, spinster, of the parish of Grand Pré, County of Kings, Province of Nova Scotia, in her Majesty's Dominion of Canada; and the'Eye of Gluskāp' will find something better to keep watch upon than me!"

To this proposal Miss Jessie, being in the main a very level-headedyoung lady, in spite of her little superstitions, assented withoutdemur, and the two proceeded to the village. 

On the way thither and back, Desbra learned all the history of the "Staron the Marsh, " as I have endeavored to unfold it in the preceding pages. As it happened, however, there was no mention of Pierrot Desbarat'ssurname in Jessie's account. Marie Beaugrand she spoke of, but Marie's_fiancé_, the last finder of the amethyst, she simply called Pierrot. 

"But have you yourself ever seen the sinister glory you describe?" askedDesbra, as they neared the McIntyre home. Jessie's story had interestedhim keenly. He was charmed with the tale as constituting at least anotable bit of folk-lore. 

"Of course I've seen it, " replied Jessie, almost petulantly. "I dare sayI can show it to you now. Let us go to the top of the hill yonder, wherethat old poplar stands up all by itself. That tree is a relic of theAcadians, and the 'Eye' watches it, I fancy, when it has nothing betterto look at!"

When the lovers reached the hill-top and paused beside the ancient anddecaying poplar, the sun had just gone down behind North Mountain, and asombre splendor flooded the giant brow of Blomidon. The girl pointedtoward the mouth of the creek. Desbra could not restrain a cry ofastonishment. From just inside the dike, in a deep belt of olive shadow, came a pale, fine violet ray, unwavering and inexplicable. Presently heremarked:--

"That is a fine gem of yours, my dear; and if _I_ owned such a treasureI shouldn't leave it lying around in that careless fashion. Who knowswhat might happen to it, away down there on the New Marsh? What if agull, now, should come along and swallow it, to help him grind his fishbones. "

"Don't be silly, Jack!" said the girl, her eyes dilating as she watchedthe mystic beam. "You know you don't half like the look of it yourself. It makes you feel uncanny, and you're just talking nonsense to makebelieve you don't think there is anything queer about it!"

"Quite the contrary, I assure you, O Mistress of the Witch Stone, OCynosure of the 'Eye of Gluskāp!'" answered Desbra. "I am, indeed, somuch impressed that I was taking pains to remind the Powers of thetransfer I have just effected! I desire to hide me from the 'Eye ofGluskāp' by taking refuge behind a certain little spinster'spetticoats!"

There was a long silence, while Desbra kept gazing on the mystic gleamas if fascinated. At last Jessie made a move as if she thought it timeto return to the house, whereupon the young man, waking out of his fitof abstraction, said slowly:--

"Do you know, it seems to me now as if you had been telling me an oldstory. I feel as if you had merely recalled to my memory incidents whichI had long forgotten. I remember it all now, with much that I think youdid not tell me. Looking at that strange point of light I haveseen, --_did_ you tell me anything of an old man dying in a boat andbeing brought to shore just as Marie was leaving for the ship? That is ascene that stands out upon my memory sharply now. And did you sayanything about an old priest? I saw him leaning over the side of theboat and slipping something into Mane's sack. "

"No, " said Jessie, "I didn't tell you any of that, though it allhappened as you say. Let us go home, Jack, it frightens me terribly. Oh, I wish you hadn't bought that Marsh!" and she clung trembling to theyoung man's arm. 

"But what can it mean?" persisted Desbra, as they descended the hill. "Why should I think that I was there when it all happened, --that it allhappened to me, in fact? My grandmother was of French blood, --perhapsAcadian blood, for my grandfather married her, in the West Indies. Afterthe exile the Acadians, you say, were scattered all over the face of theNew World! Can there be in my veins any of the blood of that unhappypeople?"

Jessie stopped short and looked up at her lover's face. "Why, yourname, " she cried, "sounds as if it might have been French once!"

"My grandfather's name was Manners Sutton, " responded Desbra, musing. "My father had to take my grandfather's name to inherit some property inMartinique. I, of course, pronounce my name in English fashion, but itis spelled just as my father's was--D-e-s-b-r-a!"

As the young Englishman gave his name its French accent andpronunciation, Jessie uttered a little cry of intelligence and wonder. She looked at her lover a moment in silence, and then said very slowly, very deliberately, pausing for every word to tell. 

"The name of Marie's lover, the young man who found the 'Witch's Stone, 'was--Pierrot Desbarats! D-e-s-b-a-r-a-t-s. You are none other, Jack, than the great-grandson of Marie and Pierrot. "

"Truly, " said Desbra, "when I come to think of it, the name was spelledthat way once upon a time!"

"Well, you shall _not_ be a man of Destiny, Jack!" exclaimed the girl. "I won't have it! But as for me, that is another matter. We shall see ifthe 'Eye of Gluskāp' has any malign influence over _me_!"

IV. 

Early in December, having just returned to Grand Pré from their weddingjourney, Jack Desbra and his wife were standing one evening in a windowthat looked out across the marshes and the Basin. It was a wild night. Aterrific wind had come up with the tide, and the waves raged inthunderously all along the Minas Dykes. There was nothing visiblewithout, so thick was the loud darkness of the storm; but the youngEnglishman had suggested that they should look to see if the "Star"would shine a welcome to their home-coming. 

"It is _my_ Star, remember, Jack, " said his wife, "and it will be guiltyof no such irregularity as showing itself on a night like this. "

"You forget, my lady, " was the reply, "that the Star is now mine. TheMarsh has the Star, and my lady has the Marsh; but I have my lady, andso possess all!"

"Oh, Jack, " cried the girl, with a shudder, "there it is! I am suresomething will happen. Let us sell the Marsh to-morrow, dear; for nowthat I belong to you I can no longer protect you from the spell. I hadforgotten that!"

"Very well, " said Desbra, lightly, "if you say so, we'll sellto-morrow. "

As the two stood locked in each other's arms, and straining their eyesinto the blackness, the violet ray gathered intensity, and almost seemedto reveal, by fits, the raving turmoil of the rapidly mounting tide. 

In a few moments Desbra became absorbed, as it were, in a sort of wakingdream. His frank, merry, almost boyish countenance took on a newexpression, and his eyes assumed the strange, far-focused steadfastnessof the seer's. His wife watched, with a growing awe which she could notshake off, the change in her husband's demeanor; and the fire-light inthe cheerful room died away unnoticed. 

At last the girl could bear no longer the ghostly silence, and thatstrange look in her husband's face. "What do you see, Jack?" she cried. "What do you see? Oh, how terribly it shines!"

When Desbra replied, she hardly recognized his voice. 

"I see many ships, " said he, slowly, and as if he heard not the sound ofhis own words. "They sail in past Blomidon. They steer for the mouths ofthe Canard and Gaspereau. Some are already close at hand. The strangelight of the 'Eye of Gluskāp, ' is on the sails of all. From somewhere Ihear voices singing, '_Nos bonnes gens reviendront. _' The sound of itcomes beating on the wind. Hark! how it swells over the marshes!"

"I do not hear anything, Jack, dear, except these terrible gusts thatcry past the corners of the house, " said Jessie, tremulously. 

"How light it grows upon the New Marsh, now!" continued her husband, inthe same still voice. "The 'Eye' shines everywhere. I hear no more thechildren crying with the cold; but on the Marsh I see an old manstanding. He is waiting for the ships. He waves his stick exultantly towelcome them. I know him, --it is old Remi Corveau. They told me he diedand was buried when the ships sailed away from Grand Pré. 

"There comes a great ship heading for Long Island shoal. Cannot thecaptain see how the waves break furiously before him? No ship will livea moment that strikes the shoal to-night. She strikes! God have--No! shesails straight through the breakers!--and not three feet of water on theshoal!

"Two ships have reached the creek, " continued Desbra, speaking morerapidly. "How the violet light shines through their sails! How crowdedthe decks are! All the faces are turned toward shore, with laughter andwith streaming eyes, and hands outstretched to the fields of Grand Pré. I know the faces. There is Evangeline, and there is Jaques Le May, --butwhy don't they drop anchor? They will ground if they come any nearershore! And in this sea--Merciful Heaven, they are on the dikes! Theystrike--and the dike goes down before them! The great white waves throngin behind them--the Marsh is buried--and the light goes out!"

The young man started back and put his hand to his eyes, as if awakingfrom a dream. He caught the sound of his wife's sobbing, and, throwingboth arms about her, he stooped to kiss her hair, which gleamed in thedark. 

"What's the matter, darling?" he whispered, anxiously. "And what hasbecome of our fire?"

"Oh, Jack, you have frightened me so!" replied the girl. "You have beendreaming or in a trance, and seeing dreadful things that I could not seeat all! I could see nothing but that hateful 'Eye, ' which has beenshining as if all the fires of hell were in it. Come away! we will sellthe Marsh to-morrow at _any_ price!"

"But, dear, " said Desbra, "the Star has gone out! There is not a sign ofit to be seen. All outside is black as Egypt. Look!"

Reluctantly the girl turned toward the window. She gave a little cry. "That's just what you said a minute ago!" she exclaimed. "You said 'thelight goes out, ' and then you came to yourself. I believe the dike iswashed away!"

"Well, " said Desbra, "we'll see to-morrow. " And they drew the curtainsand lit the lamps and stirred the fire to a blaze; and between theshriekings of the wind they heard the roar of the breakers, tramplingthe low and naked coast. 

When morning broke over the Gaspereau hills, and men looked out of theirwindows, every vestige of the dike that had inclosed the New Marsh wasgone. The site of the Marsh was much eaten away, and a bank of sand waspiled at the other side of the creek, near the mouth, in such a way asto divert the channel many feet from its old course. 

Thereafter the tides foamed in and out with daily and nightly clamoracross the spot where the "Star on the Marsh" had gleamed; and men madeno new effort to reclaim the ruined acres. 

THE END.