The man laughed out loud,—a laugh quite out of proportion to the mild good humor of the remark; but it was evident that he could no longer conceal his delight at this companionship.

"How about raisin' flowers?" he asked. "Are you strong on that?"

"I've only to look at a plant to make it grow," Kate cried, with enthusiasm. "When my friends are in despair over a plant, they bring it to me, and I just pet it a little, and it brightens up. I've the most wonderful fernery you ever saw. It's green, summer and winter. Hundreds of people stop and look up at it, it is so green and enticing, there above the city streets."

"What city?"

"Philadelphia."

"Mother's jest that way. She has a garden of roses. And the mignonette—"

But he broke off suddenly, and sat once more staring before him.

"But not a damned thing," he added, with poetic pensiveness, "would grow in that gulch."

"Why did you stay there so long?" asked Kate, after a little pause in which she managed to regain her waning courage.

"Bad luck. You never see a place with so many false leads. To-day you'd get a streak that looked big. To-morrow you'd find it a pocket. One night I'd go t' bed with my heart goin' like a race-horse. Next night it would be ploddin' along like a winded burro. Don't know what made me stick t' it. It was hot there, too! And cold! Always roastin' ur freezin'. It'd been different if I'd had any one t' help me stand it. But th' men were always findin' fault. They blamed me fur everythin'. I used t' lie awake at night an' hear 'em talkin' me over. It made me lonesome, I tell you! Thar wasn't no one! Mother used t' write. But I never told her th' truth. She ain't a suspicion of what I've been a-goin' through."

Kate sat and looked at him in silence. His face was seamed, though far from old. His body was awkward, but impressed her with a sense of magnificent strength.

"I couldn't ask no woman t' share my hard times," he resumed after a time. "I always said when I got a woman, it was goin' t' be t' make her happy. It wer'n't t' be t' ask her t' drudge."

There was another silence. This man out of the solitude seemed to be elated past expression at his new companionship. He looked with appreciation at the little pointed toes of Kate's slippers, as they glanced from below the skirt of her dainty organdie. He noted the band of pearls on her finger. His eyes rested long on the daisies at her waist. The wind tossed up little curls of her warm brown hair. Her eyes suffused with interest, her tender mouth seemed ready to lend itself to any emotion, and withal she was so small, so compact, so exquisite. The man wiped his forehead again, in mere exuberance.

"Here's my card," he said, very solemnly, as he drew an engraved bit of pasteboard from its leather case. Kate bowed and took it.

"Mr. Peter Roeder," she read. "I've no card," she said. "My name is Shelly. I'm here for my health, as I told you." She rose at this point, and held out her hand. "I must thank you once more for your kindness," she said.

His eyes fastened on hers with an appeal for a less formal word. There was something almost terrible in their silent eloquence.

"I hope we may meet again," she said.

Mr. Peter Roeder made a very low and awkward bow, and opened the door into the corridor for her.

That evening the major announced that he was obliged to go to Seattle. The journey was not an inviting one; Kate was well placed where she was, and he decided to leave her.

She was well enough now to take longer drives; and she found strange, lonely canyons, wild and beautiful, where yellow waters burst through rocky barriers with roar and fury,—tortuous, terrible places, such as she had never dreamed of. Coming back from one of these drives, two days after her conversation on the piazza with Peter Roeder, she met him riding a massive roan. He sat the animal with that air of perfect unconsciousness which is the attribute of the Western man, and his attire, even to his English stock, was faultless,—faultily faultless.

"I hope you won't object to havin' me ride beside you," he said, wheeling his horse. To tell the truth, Kate did not object. She was a little dull, and had been conscious all the morning of that peculiar physical depression which marks the beginning of a fit of homesickness.

"The wind gits a fine sweep," said Roeder, after having obtained the permission he desired. "Now in the gulch we either had a dead stagnation, or else the wind was tearin' up and down like a wild beast."

Kate did not reply, and they went on together, facing the riotous wind.

"You can't guess how queer it seems t' be here," he said, confidentially. "It seems t' me as if I had come from some other planet. Thar don't rightly seem t' be no place fur me. I tell you what it's like. It's as if I'd come down t' enlist in th' ranks, an' found 'em full,—every man marchin' along in his place, an' no place left fur me."

Kate could not find a reply.

"I ain't a friend,—not a friend! I ain't complainin'. It ain't th' fault of any one—but myself. You don' know what a durned fool I've bin. Someway, up thar in th' gulch I got t' seemin' so sort of important t' myself, and my makin' my stake seemed such a big thing, that I thought I had only t' come down here t' Helena t' have folks want t' know me. I didn't particular want th' money because it wus money. But out here you work fur it, jest as you work fur other things in other places,—jest because every one is workin' fur it, and it's the man who gets th' most that beats. It ain't that they are any more greedy than men anywhere else. My pile's a pretty good-sized one. An' it's likely to be bigger; but no one else seems t' care. Th' paper printed some pieces about it. Some of th' men came round t' see me; but I saw their game. I said I guessed I'd look further fur my acquaintances. I ain't spoken to a lady,—not a real lady, you know,—t' talk with, friendly like, but you, fur—years."

His face flushed in that sudden way again. They were passing some of those pretentious houses which rise in the midst of Helena's ragged streets with such an extraneous air, and Kate leaned forward to look at them. The driver, seeing her interest, drew up the horses for a moment.

"Fine, fine!" ejaculated Roeder. "But they ain't got no garden. A house don't seem anythin' t' me without a garden. Do you know what I think would be th' most beautiful thing in th' world? A baby in a rose-garden! Do you know, I ain't had a baby in my hands, excep' Ned Ramsey's little kid, once, for ten year!"

Kate's face shone with sympathy.

"How dreadful!" she cried. "I couldn't live without a baby about."

"Like babies, do you? Well, well. Boys? Like boys?"

"Not a bit better than girls," said Kate, stoutly.

"I like boys," responded Roeder, with conviction. "My mother liked boys. She had three girls, but she liked me a damned sight the best."

Kate laughed outright.

"Why do you swear?" she said. "I never heard a man swear before,—at least, not one with whom I was talking. That's one of your gulch habits. You must get over it."

Roeder's blond face turned scarlet.

"You must excuse me," he pleaded. "I'll cure myself of it! Jest give me a chance."

This was a little more personal than Kate approved of, and she raised her parasol to conceal her annoyance. It was a brilliant little fluff of a thing which looked as if it were made of butterflies' wings. Roeder touched it with awe.

"You have sech beautiful things," he said. "I didn't know women wore sech nice things. Now that dress—it's like—I don't know what it's like." It was a simple little taffeta, with warp and woof of azure and of cream, and gay knots of ribbon about it.

"We have the advantage of men," she said. "I often think one of the greatest drawbacks to being a man would be the sombre clothes. I like to wear the prettiest things that can be found."

"Lace?" queried Roeder. "Do you like lace?"

"I should say so! Did you ever see a woman who didn't?"

"Hu—um! These women I've known don't know lace,—these wives of th' men out here. They're th' only kind I've seen this long time."

"Oh, of course, but I mean—"

"I know what you mean. My mother has a chest full of linen an' lace. She showed it t' me th' day I left. 'Peter,' she said, 'some day you bring a wife home with you, an' I'll give you that lace an' that linen.' An' I'm goin' t' do it, too," he said quietly.

"I hope so," said Kate, with her eyes moist. "I hope you will, and that your mother will be very happy."

. . . . . . .

There was a hop at the hotel that night, and it was almost a matter of courtesy for Kate to go. Ladies were in demand, for there were not very many of them at the hotel. Every one was expected to do his best to make it a success; and Kate, not at all averse to a waltz or two, dressed herself for the occasion with her habitual striving after artistic effect. She was one of those women who make a picture of themselves as naturally as a bird sings. She had an opal necklace which Jack had given her because, he said, she had as many moods as an opal had colors; and she wore this with a crepe gown, the tint of the green lights in her necklace. A box of flowers came for her as she was dressing; they were Puritan roses, and Peter Roeder's card was in the midst of them. She was used to having flowers given her. It would have seemed remarkable if some one had not sent her a bouquet when she was going to a ball.

"I shall dance but twice," she said to those who sought her for a partner. "Neither more nor less."

"Ain't you goin' t' dance with me at all?" Roeder managed to say to her in the midst of her laughing altercation with the gentlemen.

"Dance with you!" cried Kate. "How do men learn to dance when they are up a gulch?"

"I ken dance," he said stubbornly. He was mortified at her chaffing.

"Then you may have the second waltz," she said, in quick contrition. "Now you other gentlemen have been dancing any number of times these last fifteen years. But Mr. Roeder is just back from a hard campaign,—a campaign against fate. My second waltz is his. And I shall dance my best."

It happened to be just the right sort of speech. The women tried good-naturedly to make Roeder's evening a pleasant one. They were filled with compassion for a man who had not enjoyed the society of their sex for fifteen years. They found much amusement in leading him through the square dances, the forms of which were utterly unknown to him. But he waltzed with a sort of serious alertness that was not so bad as it might have been.

Kate danced well. Her slight body seemed as full of the spirit of the waltz as a thrush's body is of song. Peter Roeder moved along with her in a maze, only half-answering her questions, his gray eyes full of mystery.

Once they stopped for a moment, and he looked down at her, as with flushed face she stood smiling and waving her gossamer fan, each motion stirring the frail leaves of the roses he had sent her.

"It's cur'ous," he said softly, "but I keep thinkin' about that black gulch."

"Forget it," she said. "Why do you think of a gulch when—" She stopped with a sudden recollection that he was not used to persiflage. But he anticipated what she was about to say.

"Why think of the gulch when you are here?" he said. "Why, because it is only th' gulch that seems real. All this,—these pleasant, polite people, this beautiful room, th' flowers everywhere, and you, and me as I am, seem as if I was dreamin'. Thar ain't anything in it all that is like what I thought it would be."

"Not as you thought it would be?"

"No. Different. I thought it would be—well, I thought th' people would not be quite so high-toned. I hope you don't mind that word."

"Not in the least," she said. "It's a musical term. It applies very well to people."

They took up the dance again and waltzed breathlessly till the close. Kate was tired; the exertion had been a little more than she had bargained for. She sat very still on the veranda under the white glare of an electric ball, and let Roeder do the talking. Her thoughts, in spite of the entertainment she was deriving from her present experiences, would go back to the babies. She saw them tucked well in bed, each in a little iron crib, with the muslin curtains shielding their rosy faces from the light. She wondered if Jack were reading alone in the library or was at the club, or perhaps at the summer concert, with the swell of the violins in his ears. Jack did so love music. As she thought how delicate his perceptions were, how he responded to everything most subtle in nature and in art, of how life itself was a fine art with him, and joy a thing to be cultivated, she turned with a sense of deep compassion to the simple man by her side. His rough face looked a little more unattractive than usual. His evening clothes were almost grotesque. His face wore a look of solitude, of hunger.

"What were you saying?" she said, dreamily. "I beg your pardon."

"I was sayin' how I used t' dream of sittin' on the steps of a hotel like this, and not havin' a thing t' do. When I used t' come down here out of the gulch, and see men who had had good dinners, an' good baths, sittin' around smokin', with money t' go over there t' th' bookstan' an' get anythin' they'd want, it used t' seem t' me about all a single man could wish fur."

"Well, you've got it all now."

"But I didn't any of th' time suppose that would satisfy a man long. Only I was so darned tired I couldn't help wantin' t' rest. But I'm not so selfish ur s' narrow as to be satisfied with THAT. No, I'm not goin' t' spend m' pile that way—quite!"

He laughed out loud, and then sat in silence watching Kate as she lay back wearily in her chair.

"I've got t' have that there garden," he said, laughingly. "Got t' get them roses. An' I'll have a big bath-house,—plenty of springs in this country. You ken have a bath here that won't freeze summer NOR winter. An' a baby! I've got t' have a baby. He'll go with th' roses an' th' bath." He laughed again heartily.

"It's a queer joke, isn't it?" Roeder asked. "Talkin' about my baby, an' I haven't even a wife." His face flushed and he turned his eyes away.

"Have I shown you the pictures of my babies?" Kate inquired. "You'd like my boy, I know. And my girl is just like me,—in miniature."

There was a silence. She looked up after a moment. Roeder appeared to be examining the monogram on his ring as if he had never seen it before.

"I didn't understand that you were married," he said gently.

"Didn't you? I don't think you ever called me by any name at all, or I should have noticed your mistake and set you right. Yes, I'm married. I came out here to get strong for the babies."

"Got a boy an' a girl, eh?"

"Yes."

"How old's th' boy?"

"Five."

"An' th' girl?"

"She'll soon be four."

"An' yer husband—he's livin'?"

"I should say so! I'm a very happy woman, Mr. Roeder. If only I were stronger!"

"Yer lookin' much better," he said, gravely, "than when you come. You'll be all right."

The moon began to come up scarlet beyond the eastern hills. The two watched it in silence. Kate had a feeling of guilt, as if she had been hurting some helpless thing.

"I was in hopes," he said, suddenly, in a voice that seemed abrupt and shrill, "thet you'd see fit t' stay here."

"Here in Helena? Oh, no!"

"I was thinkin' I'd offer you that two hundred thousand dollars, if you'd stay."

"Mr. Roeder! You don't mean-surely—"

"Why, yes. Why not?" He spoke rather doggedly. "I'll never see no other woman like you. You're different from others. How good you've been t' me!"

"Good! I'm afraid I've been very bad—at least, very stupid."

"I say, now—your husband's good t' you, ain't he?"

"He is the kindest man that ever lived."

"Oh, well, I didn't know."

A rather awkward pause followed which was broken by Roeder.

"I don't see jest what I'm goin' t' do with that thar two hundred thousand dollars," he said, mournfully.

"Do with it? Why, live with it! Send some to your mother."

"Oh, I've done that. Five thousand dollars. It don't seem much here; but it'll seem a lot t' her. I'd send her more, only it would've bothered her."

"Then there is your house,—the house with the bath-room. But I suppose you'll have other rooms?"

Peter laughed a little in spite of himself.

"I guess I won't have a house," he said. "An' I couldn't make a garden alone."

"Hire a man to help you." Kate was trembling, but she kept talking gayly. She was praying that nothing very serious would happen. There was an undercurrent of sombreness in the man's manner that frightened her.

"I guess I'll jest have t' keep on dreamin' of that boy playin' with th' roses."

"No, no," cried Kate; "he will come true some day! I know he'll come true."

Peter got up and stood by her chair.

"You don't know nothin' about it," he said. "You don't know, an' you can't know what it's bin t' me t' talk with you. Here I come out of a place where there ain't no sound but the water and the pines. Years come an' go. Still no sound. Only thinkin', thinkin', thinkin'! Missin' all th' things men care fur! Dreamin' of a time when I sh'd strike th' pile. Then I seed home, wife, a boy, flowers, everythin'. You're so beautiful, an' you're so good. You've a way of pickin' a man's heart right out of him. First time I set my eyes on you I thought you were th' nicest thing I ever see! And how little you are! That hand of yours,—look at it,—it's like a leaf! An' how easy you smile. Up th' gulch we didn't smile; we laughed, but gen'ly because some one got in a fix. Then your voice! Ah, I've thought fur years that some day I might hear a voice like that! Don't you go! Sit still! I'm not blamin' you fur anythin'; but I may never, 's long's I live, find any one who will understand things th' way you understand 'em. Here! I tell you about that gulch an' you see that gulch. You know how th' rain sounded thar, an' how th' shack looked, an' th' life I led, an' all th' thoughts I had, an' th' long nights, an' th' times when—but never mind. I know you know it all. I saw it in yer eyes. I tell you of mother, an' you see 'er. You know 'er old German face, an' 'er proud ways, an' her pride in me, an' how she would think I wuz awfully rich. An' you see how she would give out them linens, all marked fur my wife, an' how I would sit an' watch her doin' it, an'—you see everything. I know you do. I could feel you doin' it. Then I say to myself: 'Here is th' one woman in th' world made fur me. Whatever I have, she shall have. I'll spend my life waitin' on her. She'll tell me all th' things I ought t' know, an' hev missed knowin'; she'll read t' me; she'll be patient when she finds how dull I've grown. And thar'll be th' boy—'"

He seized her hand and wrung it, and was gone. Kate saw him no more that night.

The next morning the major returned. Kate threw her arms around his neck and wept.

"I want the babies," she explained when the major showed his consternation. "Don't mind my crying. You ought to be used to seeing me cry by this time. I must get home, that's all. I must see Jack."

So that night they started.

At the door of the carriage stood Peter Roeder, waiting.

"I'm going t' ride down with you," he said. The major looked nonplussed.

Kate got in and the major followed.

"Come," she said to Roeder. He sat opposite and looked at her as if he would fasten her image on his mind.

"You remember," he said after a time, "that I told you I used t' dream of sittin' on the veranda of th' hotel and havin' nothin' t' do?"

"Yes."

"Well, I don't think I care fur it. I've had a month of it. I'm goin' back up th' gulch."

"No!" cried Kate, instinctively reaching out her hands toward him.

"Why not? I guess you don't know me. I knew that somewhere I'd find a friend. I found that friend; an' now I'm alone again. It's pretty quiet up thar in the gulch; but I'll try it."

"No, no. Go to Europe; go to see your mother."

"I thought about that a good deal, a while ago. But I don't seem t' have no heart fur it now. I feel as if I'd be safer in th' gulch."

"Safer?"

"The world looks pretty big. It's safe and close in th' gulch."

At the station the major went to look after the trunks, and Roeder put Kate in her seat.

"I wanted t' give you something," he said, seating himself beside her, "but I didn't dare."

"Oh, my dear friend," she cried, laying her little gloved hand on his red and knotted one, "don't go back into the shadow. Do not return to that terrible silence. Wait. Have patience. Fate has brought you wealth. It will bring you love."

"I've somethin' to ask," he said, paying no attention to her appeal. "You must answer it. If we 'a' met long ago, an' you hadn't a husband or—anythin'—do you think you'd've loved me then?"

She felt herself turning white.

"No," she said softly. "I could never have loved you, my dear friend. We are not the same. Believe me, there is a woman somewhere who will love you; but I am not that woman—nor could I have ever been."

The train was starting. The major came bustling in.

"Well, good-by," said Roeder, holding out his hand to Kate.

"Good-by," she cried. "Don't go back up the gulch."

"Oh," he said, reassuringly, "don't you worry about me, my—don't worry. The gulch is a nice, quiet place. An' you know what I told you about th' ranks all bein' full. Good-by." The train was well under way. He sprang off, and stood on the platform waving his handkerchief.

"Well, Kate," said the major, seating himself down comfortably and adjusting his travelling cap, "did you find the Western type?"

"I don't quite know," said she, slowly. "But I have made the discovery that a human soul is much the same wherever you meet it."

"Dear me! You haven't been meeting a soul, have you?" the major said, facetiously, unbuckling his travelling-bag. "I'll tell Jack."

"No, I'll tell Jack. And he'll feel quite as badly as I do to think that I could do nothing for its proper adjustment."

The major's face took on a look of comprehension.

"Was that the soul," he asked, "that just came down in the carriage with us?"

"That was it," assented Kate. "It was born; it has had its mortal day; and it has gone back up the gulch."



A Michigan Man

A PINE forest is nature's expression of solemnity and solitude. Sunlight, rivers, cascades, people, music, laughter, or dancing could not make it gay. With its unceasing reverberations and its eternal shadows, it is as awful and as holy as a cathedral.

Thirty good fellows working together by day and drinking together by night can keep up but a moody imitation of jollity. Spend twenty-five of your forty years, as Luther Dallas did, in this perennial gloom, and your soul—that which enjoys, aspires, competes—will be drugged as deep as if you had quaffed the cup of oblivion. Luther Dallas was counted one of the most experienced axe-men in the northern camps. He could fell a tree with the swift surety of an executioner, and in revenge for his many arboral murders the woodland had taken captive his mind, captured and chained it as Prospero did Ariel. The resounding footsteps of Progress driven on so mercilessly in this mad age could not reach his fastness. It did not concern him that men were thinking, investigating, inventing. His senses responded only to the sonorous music of the woods; a steadfast wind ringing metallic melody from the pine-tops contented him as the sound of the sea does the sailor; and dear as the odors of the ocean to the mariner were the resinous scents of the forest to him. Like a sailor, too, he had his superstitions. He had a presentiment that he was to die by one of these trees,-that some day, in chopping, the tree would fall upon and crush him as it did his father the day they brought him back to the camp on a litter of pine boughs.

One day the gang-boss noticed a tree that Dallas had left standing in a most unwoodmanlike manner in the section which was allotted to him.

"What in thunder is that standing there for?" he asked.

Dallas raised his eyes to the pine, towering in stern dignity a hundred feet above them.

"Well," he said feebly, "I noticed it, but kind-a left it t' the last."

"Cut it down to-morrow," was the response.

The wind was rising, and the tree muttered savagely. Luther thought it sounded like a menace, and turned pale. No trouble has yet been found that will keep a man awake in the keen air of the pineries after he has been swinging his axe all day, but the sleep of the chopper was so broken with disturbing dreams that night that the beads gathered on his brow, and twice he cried aloud. He ate his coarse flap-jacks in the morning and escaped from the smoky shanty as soon as he could.

"It'll bring bad luck, I'm afraid," he muttered as he went to get his axe from the rack. He was as fond of his axe as a soldier of his musket, but to-day he shouldered it with reluctance. He felt like a man with his destiny before him. The tree stood like a sentinel. He raised his axe, once, twice, a dozen times, but could not bring himself to make a cut in the bark. He walked backwards a few steps and looked up. The funereal green seemed to grow darker and darker till it became black. It was the embodiment of sorrow. Was it not shaking giant arms at him? Did it not cry out in angry challenge? Luther did not try to laugh at his fears; he had never seen any humor in life. A gust of wind had someway crept through the dense barricade of foliage that flanked the clearing, and struck him with an icy chill. He looked at the sky; the day was advancing rapidly. He went at his work with an energy as determined as despair. The axe in his practised hand made clean straight cuts in the trunk, now on this side, now on that. His task was not an easy one, but he finished it with wonderful expedition. After the chopping was finished, the tree stood firm a moment; then, as the tensely-strained fibres began a weird moaning, he sprang aside, and stood waiting. In the distance he saw two men hewing a log. The axe-man sent them a shout and threw up his arms for them to look. The tree stood out clear and beautiful against the gray sky; the men ceased their work and watched it. The vibrations became more violent, and the sounds they produced grew louder and louder till they reached a shrill wild cry. There came a pause, then a deep shuddering groan. The topmost branches began to move slowly, the whole stately bulk swayed, and then shot towards the ground. The gigantic trunk bounded from the stump, recoiled like a cannon, crashed down, and lay conquered, with a roar as of an earthquake, in a cloud of flying twigs and chips.

When the dust had cleared away, the men at the log on the outside of the clearing could not see Luther. They ran to the spot, and found him lying on the ground with his chest crushed in. His fearful eyes had not rightly calculated the distance from the stump to the top of the pine, nor rightly weighed the power of the massed branches, and so, standing spell-bound, watching the descending trunk as one might watch his Nemesis, the rebound came and left him lying worse than dead.

Three months later, when the logs, lopped of their branches, drifted down the streams, the woodman, a human log lopped of his strength, drifted to a great city. A change, the doctor said, might prolong his life. The lumbermen made up a purse, and he started out, not very definitely knowing his destination. He had a sister, much younger than himself, who at the age of sixteen had married and gone, he believed, to Chicago. That was years ago, but he had an idea that he might find her. He was not troubled by his lack of resources; he did not believe that any man would want for a meal unless he were "shiftless." He had always been able to turn his hand to something.

He felt too ill from the jostling of the cars to notice much of anything on the journey. The dizzy scenes whirling past made him faint, and he was glad to lie with closed eyes. He imagined that his little sister in her pink calico frock and bare feet (as he remembered her) would be at the station to meet him. "Oh, Lu!" she would call from some hiding-place, and he would go and find her.

The conductor stopped by Luther's seat and said that they were in the city at last; but it seemed to the sick man as if they went miles after that, with a multitude of twinkling lights on one side and a blank darkness, that they told him was the lake, on the other. The conductor again stopped by his seat.

"Well, my man," said he, "how are you feeling?"

Luther, the possessor of the toughest muscles in the gang, felt a sick man's irritation at the tone of pity.

"Oh, I'm all right!" he said, gruffly, and shook off the assistance the conductor tried to offer with his overcoat. "I'm going to my sister's," he explained, in answer to the inquiry as to where he was going. The man, somewhat piqued at the spirit in which his overtures were met, left him, and Luther stepped on to the platform. There was a long vista of semi-light, down which crowds of people walked and baggage-men rushed. The building, if it deserved the name, seemed a ruin, and through the arched doors Luther could see men—hackmen-dancing and howling like dervishes. Trains were coming and going, and the whistles and bells kept up a ceaseless clangor. Luther, with his small satchel and uncouth dress, slouched by the crowd unnoticed, and reached the street. He walked amid such an illumination as he had never dreamed of, and paused half blinded in the glare of a broad sheet of electric light that filled a pillared entrance into which many people passed. He looked about him. Above on every side rose great, many-windowed buildings; on the street the cars and carriages thronged, and jostling crowds dashed headlong among the vehicles. After a time he turned down a street that seemed to him a pandemonium filled with madmen. It went to his head like wine, and hardly left him the presence of mind to sustain a quiet exterior. The wind was laden with a penetrating moisture that chilled him as the dry icy breezes from Huron never had done, and the pain in his lungs made him faint and dizzy. He wondered if his red-cheeked little sister could live in one of those vast, impregnable buildings. He thought of stopping some of those serious-looking men and asking them if they knew her; but he could not muster up the courage. The distressing experience that comes to almost every one some time in life, of losing all identity in the universal humanity, was becoming his. The tears began to roll down his wasted face from loneliness and exhaustion. He grew hungry with longing for the dirty but familiar cabins of the camp, and staggered along with eyes half closed, conjuring visions of the warm interiors, the leaping fires, the groups of laughing men seen dimly through clouds of tobacco-smoke.

A delicious scent of coffee met his hungry sense and made him really think he was taking the savory black draught from his familiar tin cup; but the muddy streets, the blinding lights, the cruel, rushing people, were still there. The buildings, however, now became different. They were lower and meaner, with dirty windows. Women laughing loudly crowded about the doors, and the establishments seemed to be equally divided between saloon-keepers, pawnbrokers, and dealers in second-hand clothes. Luther wondered where they all drew their support from. Upon one signboard he read, "Lodgings 10 cents to 50 cents. A Square Meal for 15 cents," and, thankful for some haven, entered. Here he spent his first night and other nights, while his purse dwindled and his strength waned. At last he got a man in a drug-store to search the directory for his sister's residence. They found a name he took to be his brother-in-law's. It was two days later when he found the address,—a great, many-storied mansion on one of the southern boulevards,—and found also that his search had been in vain. Sore and faint, he staggered back to his miserable shelter, only to arise feverish and ill in the morning. He frequented the great shop doors, thronged with brilliantly-dressed ladies, and watched to see if his little sister might not dash up in one of those satin-lined coaches and take him where he would be warm and safe and would sleep undisturbed by drunken, ribald songs and loathsome surroundings. There were days when he almost forgot his name, and, striving to remember, would lose his senses for a moment and drift back to the harmonious solitudes of the North and breathe the resin-scented frosty atmosphere. He grew terrified at the blood he coughed from his lacerated lungs, and wondered bitterly why the boys did not come to take him home.

One day, as he painfully dragged himself down a residence street, he tried to collect his thoughts and form some plan for the future. He had no trade, understood no handiwork; he could fell trees. He looked at the gaunt, scrawny, transplanted specimens that met his eye, and gave himself up to the homesickness that filled his soul. He slept that night in the shelter of a stable, and spent his last money in the morning for a biscuit.

He travelled many miles that afternoon looking for something to which he might turn his hand. Once he got permission to carry a hod for half an hour. At the end of that time he fainted. When he recovered, the foreman paid him twenty-five cents. "For God's sake, man, go home," he said. Luther stared at him with a white face and went on.

There came days when he so forgot his native dignity as to beg. He seldom received anything; he was referred to various charitable institutions the existence of which he had never heard.

One morning, when a pall of smoke enveloped the city and the odors of coal-gas refused to lift their nauseating poison through the heavy air, Luther, chilled with dew and famished, awoke to a happier life. The loneliness at his heart was gone. The feeling of hopeless imprisonment that the miles and miles of streets had terrified him with gave place to one of freedom and exaltation. Above him he heard the rasping of pine boughs; his feet trod on a rebounding mat of decay; the sky was as coldly blue as the bosom of Huron. He walked as if on ether, singing a senseless jargon the woodmen had aroused the echoes with,—

"Hi yi halloo! The owl sees you! Look what you do! Hi yi halloo!"

Swung over his shoulder was a stick he had used to assist his limping gait, but now transformed into the beloved axe. He would reach the clearing soon, he thought, and strode on like a giant, while people hurried from his path. Suddenly a smooth trunk, stripped of its bark and bleached by weather, arose before him.

"Hi yi halloo!" High went the wasted arm—crash!—a broken staff, a jingle of wires, a maddened, shouting man the centre of a group of amused spectators! A few moments later, four broad-shouldered men in blue had him in their grasp, pinioned and guarded, clattering over the noisy streets behind two spirited horses. They drew after them a troop of noisy, jeering boys, who danced about the wagon like a swirl of autumn leaves. Then came a halt, and Luther was dragged up the steps of a square brick building with a belfry on the top. They entered a large bare room with benches ranged about the walls, and brought him before a man at a desk.

"What is your name?" asked the man at the desk.

"Hi yi halloo!" said Luther.

"He's drunk, sergeant," said one of the men in blue, and the axe-man was led into the basement. He was conscious of an involuntary resistance, a short struggle, and a final shock of pain,—then oblivion.

The chopper awoke to the realization of three stone walls and an iron grating in front. Through this he looked out upon a stone flooring across which was a row of similar apartments. He neither knew nor cared where he was. The feeling of imprisonment was no greater than he had felt on the endless, cheerless streets. He laid himself on the bench that ran along a side wall, and, closing his eyes, listened to the babble of the clear stream and the thunder of the "drive" on its journey. How the logs hurried and jostled! crushing, whirling, ducking, with the merry lads leaping about them with shouts and laughter. Suddenly he was recalled by a voice. Some one handed a narrow tin cup full of coffee and a thick slice of bread through the grating. Across the way he dimly saw a man eating a similar slice of bread. Men in other compartments were swearing and singing. He knew these now for the voices he had heard in his dreams. He tried to force some of the bread down his parched and swollen throat, but failed; the coffee strangled him, and he threw himself upon the bench.

The forest again, the night-wind, the whistle of the axe through the air. Once when he opened his eyes he found it dark. It would soon be time to go to work. He fancied there would be hoar-frost on the trees in the morning. How close the cabin seemed! Ha!—here came his little sister. Her voice sounded like the wind on a spring morning. How loud it swelled now! "Lu! Lu!" she cried.

The next morning the lock-up keeper opened the cell door. Luther lay with his head in a pool of blood. His soul had escaped from the thrall of the forest.

"Well, well!" said the little fat police-justice, when he was told of it. "We ought to have a doctor around to look after such cases."



A Lady of Yesterday

"A LIGHT wind blew from the gates of the sun," the morning she first walked down the street of the little Iowa town. Not a cloud flecked the blue; there was a humming of happy insects; a smell of rich and moist loam perfumed the air, and in the dusk of beeches and of oaks stood the quiet homes. She paused now and then, looking in the gardens, or at a group of children, then passed on, smiling in content.

Her accent was so strange, that the agent for real estate, whom she visited, asked her, twice and once again, what it was she said.

"I want," she had repeated smilingly, "an upland meadow, where clover will grow, and mignonette."

At the tea-tables that night, there was a mighty chattering. The brisk village made a mystery of this lady with the slow step, the foreign trick of speech, the long black gown, and the gentle voice. The men, concealing their curiosity in presence of the women, gratified it secretly, by sauntering to the tavern in the evening. There the keeper and his wife stood ready to convey any neighborly intelligence.

"Elizabeth Astrado" was written in the register,—a name conveying little, unaccompanied by title or by place of residence.

"She eats alone," the tavern-keeper's wife confided to their eager ears, "and asks for no service. Oh, she's a curiosity! She's got her story,—you'll see!"

In a town where every man knew every other man, and whether or not he paid his taxes on time, and what his standing was in church, and all the skeletons of his home, a stranger alien to their ways disturbed their peace of mind.

"An upland meadow where clover and mignonette will grow," she had said, and such an one she found, and planted thick with fine white clover and with mignonette. Then, while the carpenters raised her cabin at the border of the meadow, near the street, she passed among the villagers, mingling with them gently, winning their good-will, in spite of themselves.

The cabin was of unbarked maple logs, with four rooms and a rustic portico. Then all the villagers stared in very truth. They, living in their trim and ugly little homes, accounted houses of logs as the misfortune of their pioneer parents. A shed for wood, a barn for the Jersey cow, a rustic fence, tall, with a high swinging gate, completed the domain. In the front room of the cabin was a fireplace of rude brick. In the bedrooms, cots as bare and hard as a nun's, and in the kitchen the domestic necessaries; that was all. The poorest house-holder in the town would not have confessed to such scant furnishing. Yet the richest man might well have hesitated before he sent to France for hives and hives of bees, as she did, setting them up along the southern border of her meadow.

Later there came strong boxes, marked with many marks of foreign transportation lines, and the neighbor-gossips, seeing them, imagined wealth of curious furniture; but the man who carted them told his wife, who told her friend, who told her friend, that every box to the last one was placed in the dry cemented cellar, and left there in the dark.

"An' a mighty ridic'lous expense a cellar like that is, t' put under a house of that char'cter," said the man to his wife—who repeated it to her friend.

"But that ain't all," the carpenter's wife had said when she heard about it all, "Hank says there is one little room, not fit for buttery nor yet fur closit, with a window high up—well, you ken see yourself-an' a strong door. Jus' in passin' th' other day, when he was there, hangin' some shelves, he tried it, an' it was locked!"

"Well!" said the women who listened.

However, they were not unfriendly, these brisk gossips. Two of them, plucking up tardy courage, did call one afternoon. Their hostess was out among her bees, crooning to them, as it seemed, while they lighted all about her, lit on the flower in her dark hair, buzzed vivaciously about her snow-white linen gown, lighted on her long, dark hands. She came in brightly when she saw her guests, and placed chairs for them, courteously, steeped them a cup of pale and fragrant tea, and served them with little cakes. Though her manner was so quiet and so kind, the women were shy before her. She, turning to one and then the other, asked questions in her quaint way.

"You have children, have you not?"

Both of them had.

"Ah," she cried, clasping those slender hands, "but you are very fortunate! Your little ones,—what are their ages?"

They told her, she listening smilingly.

"And you nurse your little babes—you nurse them at the breast?"

The modest women blushed. They were not used to speaking with such freedom. But they confessed they did, not liking artificial means.

"No," said the lady, looking at them with a soft light in her eyes, "as you say, there is nothing like the good mother Nature. The little ones God sends should lie at the breast. 'Tis not the milk alone that they imbibe; it is the breath of life,-it is the human magnetism, the power,-how shall I say? Happy the mother who has a little babe to hold!"

They wanted to ask a question, but they dared not—wanted to ask a hundred questions. But back of the gentleness was a hauteur, and they were still.

"Tell me," she said, breaking her reverie, "of what your husbands do. Are they carpenters? Do they build houses for men, like the blessed Jesus? Or are they tillers of the soil? Do they bring fruits out of this bountiful valley?"

They answered, with a reservation of approval. "The blessed Jesus!" It sounded like popery.

She had gone from these brief personal matters to other things.

"How very strong you people seem," she had remarked. "Both your men and your women are large and strong. You should be, being appointed to subdue a continent. Men think they choose their destinies, but indeed, good neighbors, I think not so. Men are driven by the winds of God's will. They are as much bidden to build up this valley, this storehouse for the nations, as coral insects are bidden to make the reefs with their own little bodies, dying as they build. Is it not so?"

"We are the creatures of God's will, I suppose," said one of her visitors, piously.

She had given them little confidences in return.

"I make my bread," she said, with childish pride, "pray see if you do not think it excellent!" And she cut a flaky loaf to display its whiteness. One guest summoned the bravado to inquire,—

"Then you are not used to doing housework?"

"I?" she said, with a slow smile, "I have never got used to anything,—not even living." And so she baffled them all, yet won them.

The weeks went by. Elizabeth Astrado attended to her bees, milked her cow, fed her fowls, baked, washed, and cleaned, like the simple women about her, saving that as she did it a look of ineffable content lighted up her face, and she sang for happiness. Sometimes, amid the ballads that she hummed, a strain slipped in of some great melody, which she, singing unaware, as it were, corrected, shaking her finger in self-reproval, and returning again to the ballads and the hymns. Nor was she remiss in neighborly offices; but if any were ailing, or had a festivity, she was at hand to assist, condole, or congratulate, carrying always some simple gift in her hand, appropriate to the occasion.

She had her wider charities too, for all she kept close to her home. When, one day, a story came to her of a laborer struck down with heat in putting in a culvert on the railroad, and gossip said he could not speak English, she hastened to him, caught dying words from his lips, whispered a reply, and then what seemed to be a prayer, while he held fast her hand, and sank to coma with wistful eyes upon her face. Moreover 'twas she who buried him, raising a cross above his grave, and she who planted rose-bushes about the mound.

"He spoke like an Italian," said the physician to her warily.

"And so he was," she had replied.

"A fellow-countryman of yours, no doubt?"

"Are not all men our countrymen, my friend?" she said, gently. "What are little lines drawn in the imagination of men, dividing territory, that they should divide our sympathies? The world is my country—and yours, I hope. Is it not so?"

Then there had also been a hapless pair of lovers, shamed before their community, who, desperate, impoverished, and bewildered at the war between nature and society, had been helped by her into a new part of the world. There had been a widow with many children, who had found baskets of cooked food and bundles of well-made clothing on her step. And as the days passed, with these pleasant offices, the face of the strange woman glowed with an ever-increasing content, and her dark, delicate beauty grew.

John Hartington spent his vacation at Des Moines, having a laudable desire to see something of the world before returning to his native town, with his college honors fresh upon him. Swiftest of the college runners was John Hartington, famed for his leaping too, and measuring widest at the chest and waist of all the hearty fellows at the university. His blond curls clustered above a brow almost as innocent as a child's; his frank and brave blue eyes, his free step, his mellow laugh, bespoke the perfect animal, unharmed by civilization, unperplexed by the closing century's fallacies and passions. The wholesome oak that spreads its roots deep in the generous soil, could not be more a part of nature than he. Conscientious, unimaginative, direct, sincere, industrious, he was the ideal man of his kind, and his return to town caused a flutter among the maidens which they did not even attempt to conceal. They told him all the chat, of course, and, among other things, mentioned the great sensation of the year,—the coming of the woman with her mystery, the purchase of the sunny upland, the planting it with clover and with mignonette, the building of the house of logs, the keeping of the bees, the barren rooms, the busy, silent life, the charities, the never-ending wonder of it all. And then the woman—kind, yet different from the rest, with the foreign trick of tongue, the slow, proud walk, the delicate, slight hands, the beautiful, beautiful smile, the air as of a creature from another world.

Hartington, strolling beyond the village streets, up where the sunset died in daffodil above the upland, saw the little cot of logs, and out before it, among blood-red poppies, the woman of whom he had heard. Her gown of white gleamed in that eerie radiance, glorified, her sad great eyes bent on him in magnetic scrutiny. A peace and plenitude of power came radiating from her, and reached him where he stood, suddenly, and for the first time in his careless life, struck dumb and awed. She, too, seemed suddenly abashed at this great bulk of youthful manhood, innocent and strong. She gazed on him, and he on her, both chained with some mysterious enchantment. Yet neither spoke, and he, turning in bewilderment at last, went back to town, while she placed one hand on her lips to keep from calling him. And neither slept that night, and in the morning when she went with milking pail and stool out to the grassy field, there he stood at the bars, waiting. Again they gazed, like creatures held in thrall by some magician, till she held out her hand and said,—

"We must be friends, although we have not met. Perhaps we ARE old friends. They say there have been worlds before this one. I have not seen you in these habiliments of flesh and blood, and yet—we may be friends?"

John Hartington, used to the thin jests of the village girls, and all their simple talk, rose, nevertheless, enlightened as he was with some strange sympathy with her, to understand and answer what she said.

"I think perhaps it may be so. May I come in beside you in the field? Give me the pail. I'll milk the cow for you."

She threw her head back and laughed like a girl from school, and he laughed too, and they shook hands. Then she sat near him while he milked, both keeping silence, save for the p-rring noise he made with his lips to the patient beast. Being through, she served him with a cupful of the fragrant milk; but he bade her drink first, then drank himself, and then they laughed again, as if they both had found something new and good in life.

Then she,—

"Come see how well my bees are doing." And they went. She served him with the lucent syrup of the bees, perfumed with the mignonette,—such honey as there never was before. He sat on the broad doorstep, near the scarlet poppies, she on the grass, and then they talked—was it one golden hour—or two? Ah, well, 'twas long enough for her to learn all of his simple life, long enough for her to know that he was victor at the races at the school, that he could play the pipe, like any shepherd of the ancient days, and when he went he asked her if he might return.

"Well," laughed she, "sometimes I am lonely. Come see me—in a week."

Yet he was there that day at twilight, and he brought his silver pipe, and piped to her under the stars, and she sung ballads to him,—songs of Strephon and times when the hills were young, and flocks were fairer than they ever be these days.

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow," and still the intercourse, still her dark loveliness waxing, still the weaving of the mystic spell, still happiness as primitive and as sweet as ever Eden knew.

Then came a twilight when the sweet rain fell, and on the heavy air the perfumes of the fields floated. The woman stood by the window of the cot, looking out. Tall, graceful, full of that subtle power which drew his soul; clothed in white linen, fragrant from her fields, with breath freighted with fresh milk, with eyes of flame, she was there to be adored. And he, being man of manliest type, forgot all that might have checked the words, and poured his soul out at her feet. She drew herself up like a queen, but only that she might look queenlier for his sake, and, bending, kissed his brow, and whispered back his vows.

And they were married.

The villagers pitied Hartington.

"She's more than a match for him in years—an' in some other ways, as like as not," they said. "Besides, she ain't much inclined to mention anything about her past. 'Twon't bear the tellin' probably."

As for the lovers, they laughed as they went about their honest tasks, or sat together arms encircling each at evening, now under the stars, and now before their fire of wood. They talked together of their farm, added a field for winter wheat, bought other cattle, and some horses, which they rode out over the rolling prairies side by side. He never stopped to chat about the town; she never ventured on the street without him by her side. Truth to tell, their neighbors envied them, marvelling how one could extract a heaven out of earth, and what such perfect joy could mean.

Yet, for all their prosperity, not one addition did they make to that most simple home. It stood there, with its bare necessities, made beautiful only with their love. But when the winter was most gone, he made a little cradle of hard wood, in which she placed pillows of down, and over which she hung linen curtains embroidered by her hand.

In the long evenings, by the flicker of the fire, they sat together, cheek to cheek, and looked at this little bed, singing low songs together.

"This happiness is terrible, my John," she said to him one night,—a wondrous night, when the eastern wind had flung the tassels out on all the budding trees of spring, and the air was throbbing with awakening life, and balmy puffs of breeze, and odors of the earth. "And we are growing young. Do you not think that we are very young and strong?"

He kissed her on the lips. "I know that you are beautiful," he said.

"Oh, we have lived at Nature's heart, you see, my love. The cattle and the fowls, the honey and the wheat, the cot-the cradle, John, and you and me! These things make happiness. They are nature. But then, you cannot understand. You have never known the artificial—"

"And you, Elizabeth?"

"John, if you wish, you shall hear all I have to tell. 'Tis a long, long, weary tale. Will you hear it now? Believe me, it will make us sad."

She grasped his arm till he shrank with pain.

"Tell what you will and when you will, Elizabeth. Perhaps, some day—when—" he pointed to the little crib.

"As you say." And so it dropped.

There came a day when Hartington, sitting upon the portico, where perfumes of the budding clover came to him, hated the humming of the happy bees, hated the rustling of the trees, hated the sight of earth.

"The child is dead," the nurse had said, "as for your wife, perhaps—" but that was all. Finally he heard the nurse's step upon the floor.

"Come," she said, motioning him. And he had gone, laid cheek against that dying cheek, whispered his love once more, saw it returned even then, in those deep eyes, and laid her back upon her pillow, dead.

He buried her among the mignonette, levelled the earth, sowed thick the seed again.

"'Tis as she wished," he said.

With his strong hands he wrenched the little crib, laid it piece by piece upon their hearth, and scattered then the sacred ashes on the wind. Then, with hard-coming breath, broke open the locked door of that room which he had never entered, thinking to find there, perhaps, some sign of that unguessable life of hers, but found there only an altar, with votive lamps before the Blessed Virgin, and lilies faded and fallen from their stems.

Then down into the cellar went he, to those boxes, with the foreign marks. And then, indeed, he found a hint of that dead life. Gowns of velvet and of silk, such as princesses might wear, wonders of lace, yellowed with time, great cloaks of snowy fur, lustrous robes, jewels of worth,—a vast array of brilliant trumpery. Then there were books in many tongues, with rich old bindings and illuminated page, and in them written the dead woman's name,—a name of many parts, with titles of impress, and in the midst of all the name, "Elizabeth Astrado," as she said.

And that was all, or if there were more he might have learned, following trails that fell within his way, he never learned it, being content, and thankful that he had held her for a time within his arms, and looked in her great soul, which, wearying of life's sad complexities, had simplified itself, and made his love its best adornment.

THE END