"I lost track of her. I was a newsboy an' lookin' out for myself when I was eight, an' sometimes I'd hunt her up, an' she'd hug me an' go on over me if she wasn't too drunk; but mostly I didn't. I might ha' been respectable enough, for I liked my work, but I got in with a set of boys that had learned to pick pockets. It was good fun. I had quick ways, an' the first time I ever hauled out a handkerchief I thought it about the smartest game anybody could play. It's more for the excitement of it, half the time, than from real native cussedness, that boys begin; an' I didn't think one way or another. But the time come when I did think. I was caught with fellows that had been up half a dozen times, an' because I was little they sent me to the house of refuge.

"Now, I ain't goin' to say more'n I can help about that, for there was one man I sha'n't ever forget. He's dead now, but he meant work with them boys, an' he did it. I believe he loved 'em every one just because they had souls. But what I do say is, that, far's I know, eight boys out o' ten come out worse'n when they went in. Why not? They're mostly the worst sort, an' it's a kind of rivalry amongst them which'll tell the most deviltry. There ain't a trick nor turn you can't be put up to, an' I learned 'em every one. I learned some other things too. We had to study some, an' I was quick, an' I learned Bible-verses so well they thought I was a crack scholar; an' we all laughed, thinkin' how easy you can humbug a teacher. But the last year I was wild to get away an' try my hand at some of the new kinks I'd learned. I was fourteen and full grown, so't I was always taken for twenty; an' I thought I was a man, sure. I run away twice, an' was brought back, an' it went hard with me, for they flogged me each time so't I couldn't stir for a week.

"At last time was up. I'd made up my mind what to do: I'd settled it by that time that everybody was ready to humbug, an' the pious-talkin' ones worst of all, for I'd seen some that I'd spotted in lies many a time. The first thing I did was to chuck away the Bible they'd given me an' make straight for Micky Hagan's. You don't know what that means? I'll tell you. Micky Hagan's was one of the receivin'-places for river-thievin'. He had boats to let, an' bought out an' out or advanced on the swag, just as you pleased; an' mostly you're in his debt, because you get into the way of swappin', an' he sets his own price on the thing you fancy.

"Now, I've thought it all out, ma'am, many a time. If there'd been anybody to take hold of us in the right way I don't believe we should have come out as we did. I wasn't bad all through then: I mean, I was ready to do a good turn if I could, an' bound for a lark anyhow. But we'd smuggled in novels and story-papers till our heads was full of what fine things we'd do. They didn't give us better things. There was books—yes, plenty of 'em—but mostly long-winded stuff about fellers that died young, bein' too good for this world. There wasn't anybody to tell us we'd a right to some fun, and the Lord meant us to enjoy life, nor to get us busy in some way that would take our minds off real wickedness. These preachers hadn't ever been boys: they'd been born in their white chokers, I believe, an' knew no more of real human nature than they did of common sense. If I had a boy growin' up I'd keep him hard at something, an' try an' have him like it, too. A boy don't mind work if there's anything he can see to be got by it. Why, see how I did. At fifteen out all night long, up an' down the river, schemin' all ways to circumvent the watchmen, for they're that 'cute it needs all your brains an' more to get ahead of 'em. You see, a ship'll come in an' unload partly, an' there's two or three days they're on the keen lookout till they're nigh empty; an' then's the best time for light plunder—ropes an' such. But I went in for reg'lar doin's—bags of coffee or spice, or anything goin'. We had a dodge for a good while they couldn't make out—goin' along soft, oars muffled, hardly drawin' a long breath, till we'd got under the dock, where I'd seen the coffee-bags lie, an' a man on 'em with pistol cocked. Then, slow an' easy, bore with a big auger up through them beams and straight into the bag, an' the coffee'd pour down into the bag we held under. Went off with seven bags that very way one night, an' I was that full of laugh! I walked back down the dock when we'd landed 'em, an' saw the watchman jest dancin' an' swearin', he was so mad.

"'What's up?' I says, innocent as could be, goin' up to him.

"'It's them d—— river-thieves,' he says, 'with a new kink,——'em! I'll be even with 'em yet. Here's seven holes right up through, an' the Lord only knows how they could do it an' I not hear 'em. They're that thick I believe there's one to every bag of coffee on ship or off; but I'll get 'em yet.' He looked at me sharp as a rat, but I kept my face straight till I'd walked off, an' then I believe I laughed a day without stoppin'.

"That went on three years. I'd got to think no man alive could take me, for I'd been grabbed a dozen times, an' always slipped out somehow. I'd been shot at, an' hit twice; been knocked overboard, an' swum under the dock—'most froze an' stiff with ice before I could get out. An' then to think that it was only a coil of rope took me at last! I thought 'twas spices, but the captain'd been too quick for us, an' every bag was in the government storehouse. I crawled up the side like a cat an' felt round, mad enough to find only that rope; an' I'd just dropped it over the side when there was a light, an' three men on me. I dropped, but they had me. I fought like mad, but the handcuffs were on, an' I was marched off quicker'n I can tell it. An' one was the very man that had sworn to be even with us, an' he knew me on the spot. That trial didn't take long. 'In consideration of my youth,' the judge said, I was to have 'only ten years.' Only ten years! He didn't know how it looked to me, that loved my own life an' freedom so't I couldn't bear a house over me even a day, but must be out in the air. I swore I'd kill whoever took me, an' I fought with the keeper till they chained me like a wild beast; an' that's the way I went to Sing-Sing, an' all warned they'd got the devil's own to deal with.

"There was six months I fought: there wasn't a week I wasn't up for punishment. Do you know what that means? It's better now, they say. Then it meant the shower-bath till you fainted dead, an' when you came to, put back to have it ag'in. It meant the leather collar an' jacket, an' your head wellnigh cut off when, half dead, you had to let it drop a bit. It meant kicks an' cuffs an' floggin's an' half rations. I was down to skin an' bone. 'You're goin', sure, Jack,' I said; an' then I said, 'What's the use? Behave yourself an' maybe you'll get pardoned out, or, better yet, maybe you'll get away.'

"It was tough work. I hated that keeper so't I could have brained him joyfully any minute. I'd set my teeth when he came near, for the murder'd run down my arms till my hands twitched an' tingled to get at him. I swore I'd kill him if I ever got a chance to do it quietly, for he'd treated us worse than dogs. But I mended my ways. It took a year of hard work before I could hold on to myself. I'd get a sight at the sky when we crossed the yard, an' my heart was up in my throat every time. Oh, to be out! If only I could be on the river ag'in an' smell the salt an' feel the wind! I've lain on my floor in the cell many a night an' cried like a baby for only ten minutes' freedom. I'm that way yet: there's wild blood in me from somewhere, an' I'd make a better Indian than white man any day."

Jack's restless motions were the best proof of his theory. As his story began he had sat quietly in the little mission-parlor, but now he was walking hastily up and down, stopping a moment at some special point, then starting again—a tall, lean figure, with characteristic New England face, very thin now, and with a hectic flush on the sunken cheeks, but shrewd and kindly—the narrow chin and high cheek-bones, prominent nose and soft thin hair, seeming to belong wholly to the type of New England villager, and by no possibility to the rough and desperate native of the Fourth Ward. Born in his own place on some quiet inland farm, he would have turned peddler, or, nearer the sea, have chosen that for his vocation; but it was impossible to look upon him as an ex-convict or to do away with the impression of respectability which seems part of the New England birthright.

"At last," he went on, "things changed. A new chaplain came, for one thing, an' I'd got so quiet they changed my cell an' put me on the other side the buildin'. I went on in a kind of dream. I worked like two, an' they begun to take notice of me. The chaplain 'd come an' talk to me, an' he worked over me well; but he might as well have talked to the dead. But my very keepin' still made him think he'd half got me, an' he'd fetch books an' papers; an' things got easier that way. I read an' studied: I was bound now to know something, an' I worked at that hard as I did at everything else; an' there come a time when I was recommended for pardon, an' five years an' a day after I went in he brought it to me. I couldn't speak: I could have gone on my knees to him, an' he had sense to know how I felt.

"'Jack,' he said, 'you're very young yet, an' now is your chance. Try to be an honest man an' pray for help. I wish I knew if you will pray.'

"'You'd make me if any one could,' I says, 'but I ain't sure of the use of it yet: I wish I was.'

"He just looked at me sorrowful, for I hadn't said even that much before, an' I went off.

"An' I did mean to keep straight. I'd had enough of prison; but when I went round askin' for work, not a soul would have me. A jail-bird!—well, they thought not. I grew mad ag'in, an' yet I wouldn't take to the river, for, somehow, I'd lost my courage. Then I met an old pal, an' he took me round to Micky's saloon. The barkeeper'd just been stuck in a fight. I'd been a profitable one for Micky, an' maybe he thought, beginnin' there, I'd go back to the river once more. An' there I was three years, an' fights nigh every night of the year. I could stop 'em when no one else could, for I was always sober.

"'Why don't you drink?' they'd say, an' I'd tell 'em I wanted what brains I had unfuddled. But I hated it worse an' worse. I'd have stopped any minute if there'd been one alive to take me by the hand an' say, 'Here's honest work.' I looked at folks when I went out, to see if there was one that could be spoken to. An' at last I made up my mind for another try. I'd saved some money an' could live a while, an' one Saturday night I just left when Micky paid me. 'Get another man,' I said: 'I'm done;' an' I walked out, with him shoutin' after me.

"Then I waited three months. I answered advertisements, an' I put 'em in. I went here an' I went there, an' always it was the same story, for I answered every one square. An' at last I was sick of it all: I had nothing to live for. 'I'm tired of living with rascals,' I said, 'an' good folks are too good to have anything to do with me. I've had all I want. If work don't come in a week I'll get out of this the easiest way.'

"It didn't come. My money was gone: I'd gone hungry two days. I'd been on half rations before that, till my strength was all gone: I'd pawned my clothes till I wasn't decent. Then I hadn't a cent even for a place on the floor in a lodgin'-house, an' I sat in the City Hall Park long as they would let me. Then, when I was tired of bein' rapped over the head, I got up an' walked down Beekman street to the river—slow, for I was too far gone to move fast. But as I got nearer something seemed to pull me on: I began to run. 'It's the end of all trouble,' I said; an' I went across like a shot an' down the docks. It was bright moonlight, an' I had sense to jump for a dark place where the light was cut off; an' that's all I remember. I must have hit my head ag'inst a boat, for when they took me out it was for dead. Two of my old pals hauled me out, an' worked there on the dock to bring me to, till the ambulance come an' took me to Bellevue.

"I wouldn't have lived, but I didn't know enough not to, bein' in a fever a month. Then I come out of it dazed an' stupid, an' it wasn't till I'd been there six weeks that I got my senses fairly an' knew I was alive after all.

"'I'll do it better next time,' I said, bein' bound to get out of it still; but that night a man in the bed next me began to talk an' ask about it. I told him the whole. When I got through he says, 'I don't know but one man in New York that'll know just what to do, an' that's McAuley of Water street. You go there soon's you can stir an' tell him.'

"I laughed. 'I'm done tellin',' I said.

"'Try him,' he says; an' he was that urgent that I promised. I'd ha' given a hand if I hadn't, though.

"I went out, tremblin' an' sick, an' without a spot to lay my head; an' right there I stood by the river an' thought it would come easier this time. But I'd never go back on my word, an' so I started down, crawlin' along, an' didn't get there till meetin' had begun. I didn't know what sort of a place it was.

"It was new then, in an old rookery of a house, but the room clean an' decent, an' just a little sign out, 'HELPING HAND FOR MEN.' I sat an' listened an' wondered till it was over, an' then tried to go, but first I knew I tumbled in a dead faint an' was bein' taken up stairs. They made me a bed next their own room. 'You'd better not,' I said: 'I'm a jail-bird an' a rascal, an' nobody alive wants to have anything to do with me.'

"'You be quiet,' says Jerry. 'I'm a jail-bird myself, but the Lord Jesus has forgiven me an' made me happy; an' He'll do the same by you.'

"They kept me there a week, an' you'd think I was their own, the way they treated me. But I stuck it out: 'When I see a man that's always been respectable come to me an' give me work, an' say he's not afraid or ashamed to, then maybe I'll believe in your Lord Jesus Christ you talk about; but how am I goin' to without?'

"An' that very night it came. You know him well—the gentleman that looks as if the wind had never blown rough on him, an' yet with an eye that can't be fooled.

"'You don't need to tell me a word,' he says: 'I believe you are honest, an' you can begin to-morrow if you're strong enough. It's light work, an' it shall be made easier at first.'

"I looked at him, an' it seemed to me something that had frozen me all up inside melted that minute. I burst out cryin', an' couldn't stop. An' then, first thing I knew, he was down on his knees prayin' for me. 'Dear Lord,' he said, 'he is Thy child, he has always been Thy child. Make him know it to-night: make him know that Thy love has followed him and will hold him up, so that his feet will never slip again.'

"These words stayed by me. I couldn't speak, an' he went away. He knew what he'd done.

"That's all. Some of the men shake their heads: they say it wasn't regular conversion. All I know is, the sense of God come into me then, an' it's never left me. It keeps me on the watch for every soul in trouble. I'm down on the docks o' nights. I know the signs, an' now an' then I can help one that's far gone. I'm goin' myself, you see. There ain't much left of me but a cough an' some bones, but I shall be up to the last. God is that good to me that I'll go quick when I do go; but, quick or slow, I bless Him every hour of the day for the old mission an' my chance."

HELEN CAMPBELL.



WESTBROOK.

Ruth looked very warm and tired as she came up the path in the strong sunlight; and in striking contrast to her sat Miss Custer in the sheltered veranda, with her cool gray draperies flowing about her in the most graceful folds that could be imagined, as though a sculptor's hand had arranged them. Her dress was cut so as to disclose her white throat rising, swan-like, above a ruffling of soft yellow lace; and her sleeves, flaring a little and short enough to reveal a good deal of the exquisitely-moulded arms, were edged with the same costly trimming, throwing a creamy shadow on the white skin and giving it a tinge like ivory.

Miss Custer liked being considered a brunette, and directed all the arts of her toilette to the bringing out of that idea. She had not much to commence with, however. Her eyes were brown, it is true, but they were a sort of amber-brown, large and serene, with dusky, long-fringed lids drooping over them; and her hair, which was dark in the shadow of the veranda, all hemmed in with trees in thick foliage, was bright gold in certain lights.

She was an amply-framed, finely-proportioned person, and rejoiced in her physique, having a masculine pride in her breadth of shoulders and depth of chest. But in all other respects she was exquisitely feminine: she never displayed either strength or agility. Westbrook was a country place, and in the young folks' rambles about town and out over the hills she was more often fatigued than anybody else, and obliged to accept support from some one of the gentlemen, all of whom were eager enough to offer their services.

She had been in Westbrook only two weeks—she had come to rest herself from the burdens of fashionable life—but she was already very much at home with the place and the people. She was one of those persons who immediately interest the whole neighborhood, and of whom people say, "Have you met her? Have you been introduced to her?"

She was not an entire stranger: there were a good many people in Westbrook who had known her parents years before, and who took her at once upon the credit of her family.

Ruth looked tired and warm, I say, as she came up the path. It was after four o'clock, and school was just out. She was the teacher of the grammar department in the ugly red-brick school-house down at the other end of the town, and she had had a tiresome walk through the heat.

Miss Custer dropped her work, some delicate embroidery, in her lap and folded her white hands upon it, and smiled down at her. She liked Ruth, and was glad to see her coming: the afternoon had been rather dull because she was alone, and she was not constituted for solitude.

Doctor Ebling had said at the dinner-table that, with Ruth's permission—at which Ruth blushed and said something rather saucy, for her—he would read The Spanish Gypsy to Miss Custer out in the shade.

"It is so confoundedly healthy at this particular season," he said, "especially up among these Connecticut hills, that a physician's occupation's gone."

First, however, he went down town—going part of the way with Ruth—to make sure that no orders were awaiting him at his office, intending to come back immediately.

Miss Custer stepped across the hall from the dining-room into the sitting-room, made cool by having the blinds closed, and struck a few chords on the piano. Herbert Bruce, a young attorney of some wealth and some renown, and bosom friend of Doctor Ebling, followed her, and stood, hat in hand, with his shoulder against the door-jamb. "So you have never read The Gypsy?" he remarked.

Miss Custer turned quickly and came a step toward him. "Oh yes, I have read it," she returned. "Or, rather, a good many people have read it to me. But one can stand hearing a poem a good many times, you know."

"By Jove! that's a cooler!" thought Bruce. "No doubt she has been bored to death by that wretched Gypsy, and now Ebling is going to martyrize her again, and make a fool of himself into the bargain."

"Won't you be seated?" Miss Custer asked, "and let me play you something?"

In the shaded room, with her languid eyes intensified, she was a decided brunette, and a very brilliant and beautiful one. Mr. Bruce, pleading business, although he knew there was not a soul stirring down street, and nothing more to be done in his office than in that of Mortimer Lightwood, Esq., declined rather ungraciously and stalked off.

"A born coquette!" he muttered with his hat pulled over his eyes. "Ebling's a fool: Ruth Stanley is worth a dozen of her."

Miss Custer went up stairs and made her afternoon toilette, then got out her embroidery and came down to her accustomed rustic arm-chair, smilingly conscious of the perfection of all that pertained to herself, from the soft ringlets on her broad forehead, so different from the stiff, frowsy crimps of the country-girls, to the small Newport ties with their cardinal-red bows, the only bright color about her. She was just beginning to wonder what kept the doctor so long, when, raising her eyes from a reverie which had been almost a nap, she saw him driving by at a fast trot, with a farm-boy galloping on horseback beside him. He waved his hand to her.

Just then Hugh, son and heir of Aunt Ruby, mistress of this Westbrook boarding-establishment, who had been sent down town after dinner to do some marketing, came in at the gate with a basket on his arm, eating an apple. He paused when he came up, and rested himself by putting one foot on the lower step and settling his weight upon the other. "There's a man out east bin awfully cut up in a mowin'-machine," said he, glancing up at Miss Custer sideways from under his broad-brimmed straw hat, sure that she would appreciate the news, he being the first to tell it; for he had a boyish conceit that Miss Custer had a very high opinion of him, and even indulged the fancy that if he were a man—say twenty-one—instead of a youth of seventeen, he could cut out all them downtown fellers that hung round her.

"Oh! poor man!" said Miss Custer with a sweetness of sympathy that must have comforted the wounded person immensely had he heard it.

"Burnses' boy came in for Doc Ebling," continued Hugh. "They don't know whether they can patch him up again or not."

"I suppose the doctor will find out," said Miss Custer complacently; and Hugh flung away his apple-core and walked on around the house.

Miss Custer hardly knew what to do with herself. She went back to her room, and was tempted to lie down, but then it would rumple her dress and spoil her hair. She thought of the invalid lady, Mrs. Tascher, whose room was at the other end of the hall, but she had an uncomfortable intuition that Mrs. Tascher disliked her. For herself, she disliked nobody: there were people who were not congenial to her, but she never took the trouble to get up a feeling against them. But it seemed to her Mrs. Tascher had not only clearly defined but conscientious likes and dislikes. She had tried to overcome the opposing current so far as it concerned herself, because it was unpleasant; and, although not wholly unaccountable—for she was conscious of some weaknesses, as most mortals are—so far as Mrs. Tascher was affected by her shortcomings the prejudice seemed unfounded. She had never injured her—never, except in that large sense in which all good souls are injured by wrong-doing; which large sense Miss Custer, perhaps, had but a dim consciousness of even when stung—for she was very susceptible—by the criticism, open or implied, of certain high, discriminating natures.

After a while she went down to the back regions, and glided in upon the white kitchen-floor with her sweeping skirts.

Aunt Ruby looked up with an exclamation of surprise. She was picking over raspberries for tea: "Oh, you oughtn't to come in here, Miss Custer: you'll spoil your clothes."

"Impossible," said Miss Custer, glancing around at the cleanness of everything with flattering significance, and seated herself in a low splint-bottomed chair.

"To be sure, Peggy scrubbed this morning," said Aunt Ruby with a feeling of satisfaction, "but one can't ever be very sure about a kitchen-floor."

"I could always be sure enough of yours to scatter my best things upon it," said Miss Custer, who, wishing to be entertained, was exceedingly good-natured; though, for that matter, she was seldom otherwise.

Aunt Ruby, who was greatly taken with the fine-lady boarder who made herself so common, entertained her better than she thought, for Miss Custer took a curious interest in most of the people she met, and liked to study them.

Of course Aunt Ruby could not spend time for her own or anybody else's amusement merely: when she got through with the raspberries she went at something else, her loose slippers clattering over the floor back and forth wherever her duty called her. But still, she talked, and Miss Custer sat looking out into the clean-swept back yard with its boxed-up flower-beds blooming with the gayest annuals, and its cooped-up hens with their broods of puffy chickens scratching and picking and chirping outside.

"Have Doctor Ebling and Miss Stanley been long engaged?" Miss Custer asked, the conversation having somehow led up to that query.

"Oh, la! yes," Aunt Ruby answered—"for more'n a year. The way of it was: Ruth's guardian, Mr. Murray, who was a minister, went off to some forrin country several years ago to be a missionary, and left Ruth here to finish her education. He was to send for her to come an' teach in a mission-school if she wanted to go—an' she al'ays said she did—after she'd graduated in the normal. But she came up here to stay a spell after graduatin', an' met Doctor Ebling; an' they took a notice to each other right away, an' were engaged. She wrote to Mr. Murray about it, an' he gave his consent to the marriage. But it couldn't take place just yet, for the doctor had only just begun his practice an' wasn't ready to settle down."

"That is, I suppose, he had not sufficient means to set up housekeeping?" said Miss Custer, smiling.

"Well, perhaps not in the way he'd like," Aunt Ruby returned evasively, not being a gossip in the mischievous sense.

"And your other gentleman-boarder, Mr. Bruce—" began Miss Custer, and then stopped.

"Oh, he's got enough money to set up housekeeping like a king," said Aunt Ruby, feeling that this was safe ground. "If he had anybody to set up with him," she added, and laughed at her own wit.

"But did Miss Stanley really think of going to teach in a foreign mission-school?" Miss Custer asked.

"To be sure she did," said Aunt Ruby. "She's a Christian girl, if ever there was one. You might look the world over, Miss Custer, an' you'd hardly find another girl like Ruth Stanley. She's the same as a missionary right here at home, because she looks out for every poor an' sick body in the town, an' spends half her wages to help them."

"Just the sort of person, then, for a doctor's wife," laughed Miss Custer, and gathered up her embroidery to go back to the veranda.

Instead of going through the dining-room, the way she had entered, she crossed over to the door of the back sitting-room, which was ajar, and pushed it open. She started and her cheeks crimsoned, at the recollection of her conversation with Aunt Ruby, on finding the sitting-room occupied.

Mrs. Tascher sat in Aunt Ruby's great arm-chair, with its calico cushions, looking over some fashion-plates in the carelessly-indolent way that very warm weather induces. She had some pieces of muslin and a pair of scissors beside her on the table, as though she had been cutting out. She looked up with a smile that was intended simply as an expression of politeness, and not such a smile as she would give a friend, and nodded: "Good-afternoon, Miss Custer."

Miss Custer, feeling herself compromised by having been caught gossiping—and by Mrs. Tascher, of all people!—fortified herself by a little accession of pride in her usually suave demeanor. "Good-afternoon," she returned, passing on through the room. "How stiflingly warm it is here!"

"Yes. I have been thinking of going into the parlor," said Mrs. Tascher: "it is always cool there, because the blinds are kept closed."

"Does she say that to prevent my taking refuge in the parlor?" thought Miss Custer, and moved on and went outside.

By and by some soft piano-strains came through the window, the sash of which was raised, at her back. When they ceased she became conscious, without turning her head to look through the shutters, that Mrs. Tascher had seated herself in an easy-chair and taken up a book from the centre-table, which held the usual stock of gilt-edged poems—Whittier's, Tennyson's, etc.

Nearly an hour passed in sultry silence, broken only by the buzzing of flies and, now and then, a subdued sound of wheels on the sandy road below. At last the gate-latch clicked, and Ruth came in, walking slowly up the path.

Doctor Ebling had driven by a few moments before, and gone up the alley to the stable, and just as Ruth reached the steps, shutting her parasol and smiling up rather wearily at Miss Custer, he came around the corner of the house, lifting his hat and wiping the perspiration from his face.

"Why, where have you been?" Ruth asked in surprise.

"In the country," said he.

"And just think, Miss Stanley," exclaimed Miss Custer, speaking to Ruth, but looking a smiling reproach at the doctor, and for a moment forgetting the parlor occupant at her back, "here I have been sitting this whole blessed afternoon! I could have borne the infliction of my own solitary company better, of course, if I had not been promised an entertainment."

"You must charge your disappointment to a poor fellow who got himself cut to pieces by a grass-mower," said the doctor.

"Who was it?" asked Ruth quickly, with a sympathetic play of facial muscles.

"A man by the name of Burgess, out east of town."

"And is he in a bad way?"

"Rather."

Ruth stood for a moment with her eyes upon the ground, absorbed in the thought of a fellow-being in distress, and the doctor, glancing from her up to Miss Custer, was conscious of the strong contrast between them.

Miss Custer was ten years Ruth's senior, but just now it looked as if it might be the other way: teaching gave Ruth a jaded look that seemed like age. But she was only eighteen. She wore a plain brown dress and linen cuffs and collar, all of which bore the stamp of the school-room. Her shoes were dusty, and her hair, untouched since early morning, had settled into a mass at the back of her neck, more artistic than stylish.

By and by she excused herself and went into the house. It was her habit to take a bath and dress herself before tea. The doctor came up and seated himself on the top step, and remarked that he didn't know whether it would be worth while to go up town before supper or not. Miss Custer was about to persuade him that it would not be worth while, when a movement on the part of Mrs. Tascher recalled her to the consciousness of that lady's proximity and put her under a sort of constraint. "Do you suppose your office to be strewn with orders for your immediate attendance upon wounded individuals?" she asked carelessly.

"If I thought it was," said he, "I'd make for the woods over yonder and hide myself."

"Unnatural physician! I always supposed medical men to be the most devoted to their profession, and the fondest of exercising it, of all beings."

"As to devotion," said the doctor, "I agree with you—we are a devoted class. But as to exercise of any description, that is contrary to all human inclination in such a temperature as this."

"And yet Miss Stanley endures it," said Miss Custer, and could have bitten her tongue the next moment.

A grave expression settled upon the doctor's face. "Yes," said he, "her brave spirit surmounts everything. She is of a different make-up from all the other people I know. And, by the way, it always seems to me irrelevant to bring her into comparison with ordinary mortals," he added; and, getting up and settling his hat upon his head, he strode off.

Miss Custer felt a pang of keen regret. "I have offended him," she thought.

But at the supper-table, an hour or two later, there was no evidence of offence in his attitude toward her, though it must be allowed that he paid rather more attention to Ruth than usual when she came down stairs freshened up in a light-colored lawn dress and her dark hair handsomely coiled and ornamented with a half-blown rose. She sat just opposite Doctor Ebling and beside Miss Custer, and stood the contrast with that amber-eyed beauty very well. Doctor Ebling thought so, and it had a tendency to elevate his spirits. The three carried on an animated dialogue. Mr. Bruce, at the end of the table, was abstracted, and ate his supper with great diligence, except when Mrs. Tascher, being his nearest neighbor, addressed a remark to him: then he turned to her with the utmost deference and replied as elaborately as friendly politeness demanded.

"Any of you folks in for a boat-ride this evening?" called up Hugh from the lower end of the table. "My Sally Lunn is anchored down by the big oak if you want her, and here's the key," holding it up.

"Why, yes," said Doctor Ebling, taking it upon himself to answer. Hugh's questions and remarks were usually addressed to the company collectively, and the doctor generally was tacitly elected spokesman.—"Don't you want to go, ladies?" he asked, "and you, Bruce?"

The ladies, Ruth and Miss Custer, assented with bright looks.

Mr. Bruce replied deliberatively that he was not sure he could leave the office.

"Oh, come now, Bruce, that's put on," said the doctor. "No man, whatever his profession, unless he be a farmer, can convince me of a pressure of business at this season. Banish the delusive idea and make yourself agreeable for once."

Mr. Bruce raised his head, showing at the same time a flash of his white teeth and his black eyes. "For once?" he repeated. "Making myself agreeable, or making a grotesque caricature of myself in my struggles to be agreeable, has been the business of my life."

"Oh, Mr. Bruce!" laughed Ruth. "Everybody knows you are delightful, but the idea of your making an effort in that direction is too absurd."

"If I had made that speech," thought Miss Custer, "Mrs. Tascher would have looked a severe criticism."

Mrs. Tascher, as it was, looked across at Ruth and said laughingly, "That hits him hard, my dear, but he ought not to wince."

Mr. Bruce had colored slightly and broken up the gravity of his face.

Later, when they all rose from the table, Mrs. Tascher, under some pretext or other, detained him a moment. "Do go!" she said: "you see how it is—Ruth never has the doctor to herself a moment any more. They used to take delightful little moonlight strolls together, and were as happy as a pair of young lovers ought to be. Now there is always a third party."

"Oh! So you think I ought to sacrifice myself to the happiness of the precious lovers? And what if I get enthralled myself? Who will come to my rescue?"

"I am willing to trust you," laughed Mrs. Tascher. "You have thirty years upon your head, and a vast amount of hard practicality in it: Dr. Ebling lacks something of both."

The girls had got their hats and were already out upon the veranda.

"Come, Bruce: have you decided whether there is an important case pending or not?" called the doctor.

Mrs. Tascher gave him a little push, and he sauntered out. She stood in the doorway and saw him, with a feeling of satisfaction, pair off with Miss Custer after they had got outside the gate. "I believe she likes him twenty times better than she does the doctor," she soliloquized. "And yet with what persistency she clings to Ruth and her lover! Poor Ruth! She takes her down in good faith."

The stream upon which Westbrook was built was about half a mile distant, and the sun was going down when they reached the big oak where the boat was anchored. Doctor Ebling clambered down the steep bank and unlocked it, and got in and rowed up a little way to where there was a better descent.

"Now, then, shall we all go at once," said he, "or take turns?"

"It is such a diminutive vessel," said Bruce, eying it doubtingly, "that perhaps Miss Custer and myself had better 'pause upon the brink' here, and wait until you two have made a short voyage."

"Oh, we shall not make a very short voyage," said Ruth, running down the bank and grasping the doctor's hand as he held it out to steady her in stepping into the boat. "I want to go up as far as the bridge and make a sketch to-night: the sunset and the moon-rise are lovely."

"Better come on—don't think we'll upset," said the doctor, beginning, nevertheless, to push off.

Bruce looked about and found a log to sit on. "Just spread your shawl on it," said he; and Miss Custer was obliged to unfold her beautiful white burnous.

"What an idea!" she thought, "and how ungallant he is!"

And yet he had a remarkable power of fascination, though, as Ruth said, he made no effort to please.

He took a seat beside her, and for some time his eyes followed the boat. After a while he said, "And did you manage to get through with The Spanish Gypsy again?"

"Oh no," said Miss Custer. "Didn't you know? The doctor was called into the country."

"Ah! he was?"

"Yes."

"Then you lost your afternoon's entertainment? That must have been a great deprivation."

He turned his head and looked at her with a lingering, exploring gaze that was difficult for her to fathom. How should she answer? He was certainly the only being of his sex who baffled or embarrassed her.

"It was indeed," she returned demurely, and yet with a hope that he might discover that she was but half in earnest. Her eyelids drooped and her lips were curved with a smile. She was pleasurably conscious of his prolonged gaze, and hoped something from it, knowing from much previous experience the power of her beauty.

The silence was very eloquent. He broke it—or intensified it indeed—by repeating from The Gypsy, in a low and remarkably well-modulated voice,

"Do you know Sometimes when we sit silent, and the air Breathes gently on us from the orange trees, It seems that with the whisper of a word Our souls must shrink, yet poorer, more apart. Is it not so?

Do you know the answer?" he asked, never once taking away his eyes.

She raised hers and gave it with equal effect:

"Yes, dearest, it is true. Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken: even your loved words Float in the larger meaning of your voice As something dimmer."

There was nothing audacious in her manner of repeating it—no coquettish reference, in voice or glance, to him. She threw into her eyes an expression of complete absorption in the spirit and story of the poem, and appeared to be far away with Don Silva and Fedalina.

Her seriousness and evident intensity of feeling were a surprise to him. He had simply been trying her with a careless stroke, but he seemed to strike true flint. "I could have sworn," he thought to himself, "that she was making fun of Ebling's proposition to read to her to-day when she said one could stand hearing a poem a good many times." And he actually went on repeating passage after passage, while she sat with her hands folded and her eyes fixed dreamily, drinking it in like distant music sounding all the way from the Spanish shores.

They were both so absorbed—not in the poem, but in thoughts that floated under the poem and circled right around themselves—that they did not hear the dipping of the oars as the doctor rowed back to shore in the white moonlight—not softened now, as it had been a while ago, by the mellow tints in the west. "Hallo!" he called. "Come down now and embark."

"Shall we?" asked Bruce in a voice so low that it seemed almost tender.

She answered by getting up, and he took the burnous off the log and folded it about her shoulders. It gave her a conscious thrill.

They sauntered down, and Bruce gave her his hand to make the descent of the bank. Ruth sprang up like a gazelle while the doctor held the boat to shore, and then pushed it off when the occupants were seated.

"I'm the poorest rower in Christendom," said Bruce, taking up the oars and making a few awkward strokes.

"Never mind about rowing," said Miss Custer. "When we get out into the current let us drift: I like it just as well."

Bruce did so, resting the handles of the oars upon his knees.

Perfect silence reigned. The moon was strangely bright, making the very air silvery. Miss Custer, with the rarest tact, let the stillness alone, knowing there was power in it.

By and by Bruce murmured,

"With dreamful eyes, My spirit lies Under the walls of Paradise.

What a strange effect moonlight and water have upon us, Miss Custer! They seem almost to disembody us. I can hardly ever recall a single line of poetry in the daytime when the sun is shining. But moonlight brings out all the delicate images of the mind's palimpsest."

"Pray, then, go on and repeat something more," said Miss Custer in a low voice: "I like to hear you. Repeat the rest of 'Drifting.'"

Bruce complied, and then struck upon Byron, and was surprised and delighted to find that Miss Custer followed him even there. The truth was, Miss Custer had rehearsed all these things many times before with different actors. The whole plot lay before her, ending and all. Bruce was certainly hooked, and all she had to do was to draw the line carefully in. To be sure, he was an odd specimen, a sort of man she was not much acquainted with; but that made him all the more interesting, and she was conscious of her power to manage him.

At last Bruce put the boat about without consulting her, and rowed back to the landing in silence and with considerable dexterity, considering his self-depreciation as a rower. Ruth and the doctor, who had no doubt been affected by the moonlight too, stood on the bank waiting for them. They all went home together, a rather merry party, and immediately dispersed for the night.

The next morning, when Miss Custer came down to breakfast radiant and joyous, with a consciousness of being in perfect keeping with the unpoetic sunshine, she was stricken with consternation at finding Mr. Bruce as distant and nonchalant as ever. No lingering, exploring glance this morning—nothing but the usual flash of his dark eyes as he bowed to her. Was it possible that all the fine effects of last night had passed out of his consciousness?

Some time during the day Bruce found an opportunity to say to Mrs. Tascher, "Don't ask me to do it again: I came near making a fool of myself last night. Got to quoting poetry and all that."

"Did you, indeed?" said she, laughing. "If the siren had that effect on you, a hardened bachelor, consider how it would go with Ebling."

"Ebling's heart is supposed to be preoccupied," said Bruce: "mine is an 'aching void.'"

That evening Hugh challenged Miss Custer to a game of croquet, and she, with secret reluctance, but a very good grace—being one of those sweetly-amiable people who never speak ill of any one, and never manifest the least boredom, no matter who undertakes the office of entertainer to them—accepted. However, she would make the most she could out of it. She invited the rest of the company to come down and look on and see that she had fair play. Bruce, at whom she glanced appealingly, paid no heed, but put on his hat and went down town with the air of a man greatly preoccupied and oppressed with business cares. Mrs. Tascher never went out when the dew was falling, and so there was nobody but Ruth and the doctor. They complied at once, and took seats on a rustic bench under the trees.

Miss Custer was conscious of showing to advantage in this picturesque game, and paid far more attention to her attitudes than her strokes: as a consequence, she was beaten, and immediately threw down her mallet.

"I'll give you another chance," said Hugh wistfully.

"Oh, I could never redeem myself with you if we should play till doomsday," she answered.

"You have beaten me," persisted Hugh.

"But I have a presentiment that I can't do it to-night," she returned.

"Well, then, Hugh," said the doctor, getting up and helping himself to a mallet, "if she is so disheartened, suppose we give her a chance to come off second best by taking a game with me?"

Hugh, smiling, but a little put out, stepped back, and the contest began, with far more animation on the part of Miss Custer. Presently Hugh's mother called him, and he went away. After a time Ruth called to the players, who were both at the other end of the ground, "Say, folks, if you'll excuse me I'll go in."

Miss Custer turned round and answered, "Oh, poor child! I presume you do find it dull."

Ruth ran up to Mrs. Tascher's room. Her acquaintance with that lady she counted among the best things of her life. The world had seemed larger and brighter and better since she had known her.

Mrs. Tascher was a widow: she had considerable wealth, but being an invalid she was deprived of the enjoyment of it to a great extent. She welcomed Ruth's friendly little visits always with a smile that seemed to make her soul stand out upon her face. She was what one might call a woman of the world. That is, she had travelled much, read much, studied people much, and mingled all her previous life in intelligent and refined society.

"Why, where is the rest of your party, my dear?" she asked as Ruth tapped on the door and came in.

"Hugh's mother wanted him," Ruth answered, "and I left Frank and Miss Custer playing a game."

Mrs. Tascher's smile faded. She felt tempted to speak a word of warning, but it seemed too bad to destroy the innocent faith of this high-minded, unsuspecting girl. She gave Ruth a chair, and Ruth begged her to read something: Mrs. Tascher's reading was sweeter than music to her. She complied readily, because it gave her pleasure to do anything Ruth asked. "Here is a poem by Whittier, just out," she said, taking up a magazine, the leaves of which she had cut only that afternoon. She began it, and Ruth leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes the better to see the images that passed in her mind. Mrs. Tascher read on until the light grew so dim that she could not see the lines, and then she got up and went to the window to finish. She glanced out as she did so, and stood silent. At last she said, "Come here, Ruth."

Ruth got up and went and looked out.

Away down at the farther end of the lawn stood Miss Custer and the doctor with their elbows resting upon the fence, evidently very deeply absorbed in each other. The spot was very lonely and still, hemmed in by trees, and would not have been visible from below—perhaps from hardly any other point but this window.

"Doesn't it strike you, Ruth, that a couple of young people must be rather sentimental to stray away like that?" asked Mrs. Tascher.

Ruth laughed, but not very joyously, and immediately turned away from the window, as though the sight hurt her.

Mrs. Tascher did so too, and struck a match to light her lamp. "If I were you, Ruth," she said as she settled the shade over it, "I would go down to the croquet-ground, from where you can see those people, and call to them."

"Oh no," said Ruth with a shiver.

"Why, you see," continued Mrs. Tascher, "it doesn't look well. Miss Custer ought to know better, but she is so vain of her influence over gentlemen that she exercises it upon every occasion that offers. It doesn't appear to make any difference who the gentleman is: it would be all the same to her now if it were Hugh instead of the doctor. I believe she does care something for Bruce, and he is her lawful prey; but she knows the doctor is not in the market."

Ruth threw back her head proudly. "He can be in the market," she said hoarsely.

"No, no, my dear," said Mrs. Tascher, shaking her head. "I don't want you to get reckless: I want to see you play this game with Miss Custer with a cool hand and come out ahead. You can do it, and you will be stronger and safer in the end."

Ruth pretty soon went out. She entered her room with her hand upon her heart, and sat down by the window without striking a light. In the course of half an hour the doctor and Miss Custer appeared in sight, walking slowly toward the house. They passed directly under her window, but their voices were so low that she could distinguish no word. By and by she heard the piano going. A moment after Mrs. Tascher tapped on her door, and, turning the knob, put her head in and called, "Ruth!"

Ruth got up and came forward.

"Come," said her visitor, "let us go down to the parlor."

"I cannot," said Ruth: "please don't ask me."

"Foolish child!" said Mrs. Tascher. "I am a thousand times sorry that I brought this thing to your notice."

"It was brought to my notice long ago," said Ruth brokenly; and Mrs. Tascher turned and went down stairs.

The doctor was leaning back in an easy-chair, completely absorbed in watching the exquisite figure at the piano and listening to the strains she evoked.

"One would think she had feeling," commented Mrs. Tascher mentally as she entered the room and swept across to the vacant seat beside the doctor, dispelling somehow, with her strong presence, the spirit of sentimentalism that pervaded the atmosphere. "Why, Doctor Ebling, are you here?" she asked: "I supposed you had gone to town. Where is Miss Stanley?"

"I—I don't know," said the doctor—honestly enough, to be sure.

"I thought you all went down to the croquet-ground?"

"Yes, we did. But she came back, and left Miss Custer and myself to finish our game."

"Oh, then I presume she is in her room.—Have you finished playing, Miss Custer?" with a smile of placid indifference as Miss Custer turned round on the piano-stool.

"Yes," said Miss Custer, getting up and taking a chair. "Doctor Ebling wished to hear the 'Last Hope.'"

"You haven't come to that in your experience yet, have you, doctor?" laughed Mrs. Tascher, though she was not in the habit of playing upon words.

"No," said the doctor. "It seems to me the 'last hope' is that we feel when we draw our last breath."

The three spent the evening together, and Mrs. Tascher brought into exercise the old charms and graces of manner and conversation that years ago had made her one of the most brilliant and fascinating women society could boast of. She was not old—not more than thirty-five—and when animated she was still beautiful: her face became illuminated and stars shone in her eyes. She so far outdid Miss Custer in the matter of pleasing and entertaining that when the doctor went away he hardly thought of the latter. He said to himself as he went down town, "What a remarkably brilliant woman Mrs. Tascher must have been in her day! And is yet, for that matter. Husband been dead six years: wonder why she never married again?"

Then he wondered with a slight feeling of uneasiness where Ruth had kept herself all the evening. "How affectionately and admiringly Mrs. Tascher always speaks of Ruth!" he said, and added, "Well, she is a noble girl."

There was an indefinable hardness in Ruth's manner the next morning. Her voice was hollow and her smile seemed ironical, though she was unusually gay. Mrs. Tascher, who observed her closely and with some uneasiness, thought her mockingly attentive to Miss Custer. Something was said at the dinner-table again about the doctor's promise to read to Miss Custer, and Ruth exclaimed, "By all means!—Miss Custer, make him stay at home and read you that poem."

The doctor of course fell readily in with the idea, and said he would not go down town this time to see if there were any orders: if anybody wanted him it was generally known that if he was not in his office he was at his boarding-place.

"Why did you do it?" said Mrs. Tascher, putting her handkerchief on her head and going down to the gate with Ruth.

"Because," said Ruth with drawn lips and heaving bosom, "I do not want to get him unfairly. If there is some one else who interests him more than I, he is still at liberty to choose."

"Ruth," said Mrs. Tascher, and her eyes flashed, "do you think she is getting him fairly? You have no conception of the scheming of that woman."

"Oh yes, indeed I believe I know it all," said Ruth, and hurried away.

In a few days school closed, and Ruth packed her trunk and went up to Merton, a little village about twenty miles distant, to visit her aunt. Almost as soon as she was gone Miss Custer was taken sick. Aunt Ruby insisted upon her occupying the spare bedroom, a cool, spacious apartment opening off the back sitting-room. The professional services of Doctor Ebling were of course engaged at once, and he proved himself very attentive at least.

To save appearances and for Ruth's sake, although she had little hope, Mrs. Tascher took up her position in the sick-room and compelled the doctor to give all his directions to her. He pronounced the malady a low fever brought on by the extreme heat of the season. Mrs. Tascher thought it was the result of exposure to night-dews, carelessness in regard to diet and lack of proper exercise.

Her presence, it must be allowed, put but little constraint upon the extraordinary intimacy of the pair. The doctor was all devotion, and Miss Custer all languor and dependence. She made a beautiful invalid, with her rare complexion and her white, lissome hands lying so restfully and helplessly on the counterpane. One day, after being freshly dressed in an embroidered gown of the finest texture, and instructing Mrs. Tascher how to wind her hair, which was long and abundant, around the top of her head in a coronet that was very becoming to her, she requested to have Mr. Bruce sent in when he came to his dinner. She had some affairs that must be looked into immediately by a legal eye.

"Had you not better just send him a message?" asked Mrs. Tascher.

"No: I prefer to attend to it myself," she returned coldly.

Bruce was therefore sent in, and Mrs. Tascher stepped out into the sitting-room. Miss Custer, who was certainly very white, raised her dusky eyelids, smiled faintly and held out her jewelled hand. Bruce, standing awkwardly enough by the bed-side, took it, but without apparent appreciation of its loveliness.

The invalid had chosen an inopportune moment: despite the subdued light of the chamber, it was high noon and the sun shone burningly outside, and Bruce, who had just eaten a hearty dinner, was utterly devoid of sentiment and indifferent to nice effects. There was a tumbler of dewy roses on a little table beside the bed, and he picked out one, and, sitting down, began eating the leaves one by one. "I hope," said he, thinking it a good plan to rally the sick a little, "you haven't got so discouraged by this indisposition—which the doctor tells me is not at all serious—that you wish to make your will?"

"No," she returned, hardly able to conceal her disgust at the unfeeling wretch: "I merely wish to send to my attorney for some money."

"Oh, is that it?" said Bruce, laughing. "Then the doctor was right. So long as a person takes a controlling interest in his affairs he is safe."

"A person!" thought Miss Custer, and really curled her lip. She gave him her lawyer's address, stated the sum she wanted and told him he might say that she was ill.

"And unable to write," added Bruce. "All right! I shall be as prompt in the execution of your commission as the exigences of the case appear to demand."

He took up his hat and went out cheerily, and Miss Custer turned her face to the wall and cried. For a day or two she was worse: then she grew better, and was finally able to sit up. At the expiration of two weeks Ruth came back. She was very pale and her face had a rigid look. Miss Custer met her sweetly, being still under the subduing influence of invalidism, and Ruth tried to feel kindly to her; which was a great vexation to Mrs. Tascher.

"Let me alone," said Ruth passionately one day. "Don't you see how I hate her? I could almost kill her! I am trying to fight down the demon in me."

The doctor, who had himself grown thin and haggard-looking, welcomed Ruth back with an air of constraint.

One day the young folks of the village got up a picnic and invited Aunt Ruby's boarders. The doctor at first hesitated about giving his permission for Miss Custer to go, but she coaxed, and he finally consented. The evening before the picnic Ruth requested an interview with the doctor, and they walked out into the grove. She told him she wished to release him from his engagement, and it was a painful satisfaction to her to see the agony that was in his face. He accused himself bitterly—said he had broken up her happiness and ruined her life, that he could never forgive himself, and ended by refusing to accept his release, and declaring that he should never avail himself of any of the advantages it offered.

The next morning he went to Bruce with white face and strained eyes, and begged him, for the love he bore him, to take Miss Custer to the picnic and to stay by her.

"So, my boy," said Bruce, not a little affected, "you have got into the ditch and want me to help you out? Well, I will do what I can.—Thank the Lord, his eyes are opened at last!" he muttered as Ebling went away.

The picnic-ground was a wooded hillside that sloped down into a grassy meadow a mile from town. The company all got together at the appointed hour—two in the afternoon—in the street below Aunt Ruby's, and waited for her boarders to come out. Ruth had persuaded Mrs. Tascher to go, and the doctor, with a painful attempt to appear natural, kept beside her and was scrupulously attentive to her comfort. Ruth playfully claimed Hugh as her escort. Bruce, true to agreement, monopolized Miss Custer in a masterly way, much to her surprise. She tried to snub him at first, but he ignored all her efforts in that direction with consummate stupidity, and in the end she submitted with a charming grace that was torture to the doctor.

Everybody seemed in fine spirits, but on the part of two or three members of the company we have reason to suppose that it was only seeming. And perhaps a little general knowledge of the affairs of mankind might justify us in the suspicion that there were others not so happy as their bright looks seemed to warrant. But, however that might be, every one threw in his or her contribution to the pleasure and amusement of the day. The doctor helped to lay out a croquet-ground and fixed the target for archery-practice; Hugh was active in putting up swings; some of the older and more dignified gentlemen, including Bruce, took upon themselves the lighter duty of entertaining the ladies; when lunch-time came some of the young fellows kindled a fire, and Ruth boiled the coffee. After that there was a good deal of pairing off and walking about, or sitting cozily upon old mossy, fallen trunks of trees.

Miss Custer, who had not yet risen from the grass-plot where she had sat to eat her dinner, looked away down across the green meadows with sleepy, half-shut eyes, and asked, "What is that pile of stones in the corner yonder?"

A youthful jeweller whom she remembered among her distant admirers answered, "It's an old well. This place here used to be a stock-farm, but it hasn't been used for that for a good many years; so the framework and buckets have been taken away."

Miss Custer, seized with a sudden impulse, sprang up and exclaimed, "I have a great mind to go down and take a look into it. Old wells have a peculiar fascination for me, and that one looks so lovely and romantic!"

She had a thought that Bruce might volunteer to accompany her, but that indolent barrister, sprawling upon the grass at her feet, hardly felt called upon by the nature of his agreement with Ebling to undergo quite so much as that. He reflected that it was his business to keep the charmer out of mischief for the day. "And if she meanders away to that fascinating well," he thought, "in her own solitary company, nobody will be damaged, so far as I can see."

But Miss Custer, seeing no other way and feeling the position a little awkward, appealed to Ruth, who got up and started with her. When they had clambered down the rather steep hill to the meadow's edge Miss Custer affectionately took her arm. "Don't you think picnics are stupid things?" she asked confidingly.

"Why," said Ruth, "we didn't think so this morning."

"Oh no, not when we were anticipating, but

One of the pleasures of having a rout Is the pleasure of having it over.

I shall be glad when we get back home, though I suppose we shall not start till near sundown."

When they reached the well Miss Custer stepped upon the flat white stones with which it was walled up to the surface of the ground and gazed down into its dark depths. "What a queer feeling that is which one is almost sure to have standing upon the edge of danger!—a sort of reckless impulse to throw one's self forward. Did you ever feel it?" Ruth, standing just behind her as she leaned over, saw her hands involuntarily clutch her dress, as though the strange temptation were so great that she must hold herself forcibly back from it. "I have—a thousand times," she added; "and I feel it now."

"Take care!" cried Ruth, catching at her.

Miss Custer, in turning away her charmed gaze, lost her balance from sheer dizziness and plunged forward. Ruth, with a look and cry of horror, bent over and saw the fearful descent, so quick and so noiseless until the dull splash was heard and the black water opened and closed again. Then she threw up her hands and started to run toward the hill, calling loudly. But already they had seen and were coming. One—Doctor Ebling—was far ahead of the rest. Ruth met him and turned back with him.

"Ruth, you did it: I saw you push her," he found breath to say. But Ruth's sensibilities were too shocked to feel the accusation.

The doctor was halfway down the well before any one else reached the spot. Bruce had had the forethought to cut down a swing and bring the rope. In a very few minutes Miss Custer—or what was believed to be her lifeless body—was lying wet upon the grass and the doctor, also dripping, was making a hasty examination of her condition. "I think she will live," was his verdict, "but we must get her home with all speed."

A light wagon coming up the road was signalled to, and they got her into it and drove furiously to town. By the time the rest of the party reached home she was partially recovered, though very weak and terribly shaken.

As soon as it was said that she was out of danger and would probably suffer no serious consequences Ruth recalled the doctor's frightful words: "You did it: I saw you push her."

She rushed in search of him. He was in the parlor, walking back and forth with a troubled air. She went up to him: "Frank, you accused me of doing that dreadful thing. I have just remembered what you said—that you saw me push her. I did not: I put out my hand to save her."

"I hope to God you did!" said he, but his look was doubting and reproachful.

"Why, Frank," she said, with scarcely enough breath to speak the words, "if you do not believe me it will kill me!"

Just then some one came to the door and beckoned to him, and he went out. Ruth turned, with a breaking heart, to go up stairs. The youthful jeweller was talking to Mrs. Tascher in the hall. "Yes," he was saying, "I saw it all. She was standing leaning over the well, and was just turning to step back when she gave a sort of lurch as if she had got dizzy, and Miss Stanley reached out her hand and caught her by the shoulder. But she had got the start of her, and over she went in a twinkling. The whole thing was done in an instant."

"Oh, Mr. Omes, I wish you would explain all that to Doctor Ebling," said Ruth, coming up.

"Oh, he knows all about it: he saw it the same as I did," said the young man.

A suspicion crossed Ruth's mind that the doctor knew, but she could not believe him so base.

Miss Custer was doomed to have a serious time of it, after all. The great excitement brought on fever again, and for some days her recovery was thought doubtful. Everybody in the house did all that was in her or his power to do, and the doctor was more devoted than ever. It became a fixed idea that he would marry Miss Custer as soon as she was able to sit up. He and Ruth scarcely spoke to each other.

One day Mrs. Tascher told Ruth she must go away.

"Yes, I know," answered Ruth: "I am going."

She packed her trunk again—this time taking all her things—and went back to her aunt's. In less than a week Mrs. Tascher had a letter from her stating that she had started, under the escort of a friend of her guardian's, for Beirut.

It was so great a shock to Mrs. Tascher that she scarcely left her room for ten days after it, and indeed did not wholly recover until another letter came, dated from far-off Syria, with a curious commingling of the strange and the familiar in the well-known handwriting and the foreign post-mark, assuring her that her young friend was safely sheltered under the protection of her guardian and his estimable wife. Ruth dwelt entirely upon her new experience, and never mentioned the old. She had not so much to say about her journey, though it was interesting and delightful, as about her arrival and the meeting with her dear friends, whose loved faces were so sweetly familiar in that strange, strange land that she fell upon their necks and wept. She drew vivid pictures of the magnificent scenery that lay around her in her new home—the gardens, the orange-groves, the figs and olives, the terraced slope of Mount Lebanon, the glorious Mediterranean.

Mrs. Tascher was comforted, though the void made by Ruth's absence was almost like death, the wide space seemed so unspannable. She wrote back at once in all the fulness of her heart, and Ruth was not so absorbed in grief for the loss of her lover but that she appreciated and was deeply grateful for the tender, unfailing affection of her friend. Mrs. Tascher, who felt that the sharpest knife was the best to be used in a case of urgent surgical necessity, wrote briefly that the doctor and Miss Custer were married—that Miss Custer had begged for at least three months' preparation, but the doctor was impatient; and so, as soon as she was able to stand the journey to Boston, where her friends and property were, they had joined hands and started.

"The marriage took place in the parlor," Mrs. Tascher wrote, "and the household were invited to be present. I, however, had a bad headache and could not get down stairs; Bruce pleaded 'business;' and poor Hugh, whose boyish affections have been cruelly tampered with, had a fishing engagement. So there was nobody but Aunt Ruby and her 'help' to witness the touching ceremony except the minister and his wife. It was touching, I suppose: Miss Custer wept bitterly at being so 'neglected,' and Ebling is mortally offended with Bruce."

Three years went by; which space of time Mrs. Tascher spent chiefly in Florida and New York, going back and forth as the seasons changed in obedience to medical authority. At last she concluded to try a few weeks in Westbrook again. Aunt Ruby, who still kept boarders—all strangers, however—gave her the old rooms up stairs with their pleasant windows. Here she sat and wrote to Ruth a few days after her arrival.

Ruth had become quite contented, and even happy, under the warm Syrian sun, watching with earnest, loving eyes the development of barbarism and heathenism into civilization and Christianity, though it seemed very much to her sometimes as if she had lost her place and personality in the world. She was swallowed up in the great pagan East, and was nothing to the land that owned her—to the people that were her people. She was dead to the life and world to which she had been born.

The family of her guardian, together with some of their pupils, had removed to a little village up the side of the mount to spend a few of the hottest weeks, as was their custom. The mail was regularly brought up by a young Arab riding a mule. One evening, when Ruth had gone to sit alone on one of the grassy terraces overlooking the sea and the luxuriant foliage and vegetation below—a thing she liked, though it usually made her pensive and a little sad—a young Syrian girl ran down and gave her a letter. It was Mrs. Tascher's, and I will take the liberty to transcribe a part of it here:

"Aunt Ruby has furnished me with a good many surprising items in regard to the fortunes and actions of our old associates. Bruce (he was a splendid fellow—wasn't he?—solid, practical and all that), who, you remember, had a good deal of means, has built himself a house, something quite elegant. It stands on that little knoll on the other side of the town, overlooking the river. I mean to go over and take a look at it some day: it is said to be beautifully furnished, and is kept by an old maiden aunt of our friend. Bruce, by the way, is in Europe, though what took him there I cannot conjecture, unless he means to bring home a European exportation in the shape of a wife. I wish, my dear, you had taken a fancy to him: I always thought he admired you. You don't mind my probing an old wound—do you?—because I want to speak of some of the others. Miss Custer's fortune, as it turned out, was extremely limited. She had, I believe, enough to furnish a small rented house here, and she and the doctor immediately went to housekeeping. But time, which settles all things and places them in their true light and relations, has brought to the notice of this precious pair that they are very ill adapted to each other: it is even said that they quarrel. The coarser gossips affirm that Mrs. Ebling is lazy and shiftless, and that the doctor is disheartened and neglects his business. I have seen him once, and can judge something of his state by his bearing and looks. He is certainly not the sort of man I once thought he would make. Whether there is better stuff in him than what we see developed, or whether he owes what he is entirely to circumstances, is an unsolvable question. I am inclined to think that every person has the making of two individuals in him—one bad, the other good. What a pity that a man usually has only one chance! If he makes a mistake he is lost. My dear Ruth, in the whole course of my life I have kept my eyes upon the infallible law of cause and effect; and I know this, that wrong-doing inevitably brings its own retribution."

When Ruth took her eyes from this letter and fixed them upon the distant blue water-depths they were brimful of tears. "Yes, wrong-doing is followed by retribution," she thought, "but where is the reward for right-doing?"

Oh, she felt so lonely in that far-off heathen land, with the shadow of others' wrong-doing lying always across her path! Why must she suffer and be alone?

A step from behind startled her, and she sprang up and turned round. A pair of black eyes were smiling at her from a handsome, familiar face. "Oh, Mr. Bruce!" she cried, and flew up the steps, holding out both her hands.

"I have come such a long way to see you," said Bruce, "that my motive must be pretty conspicuous: I don't mean to try to conceal it. Perhaps you have never thought of me as a man you would be at all likely to marry. Still, I have made it my business to come and ask you, and I thought I might better let you know my errand at once, instead of leaving you to guess it from any clownish efforts of mine to do the agreeable to you."

He certainly broke it to her very well, smiling and holding her hands—so well that she laughed heartily and was at home with him in a moment.

One day it was rumored in Westbrook that Bruce had come home with a wife. The news had but just reached Aunt Ruby's premises when Bruce himself came rapidly up the path and asked for Mrs. Tascher. She came down at once. "I have come for you to go and call upon my wife," said he.

"Why, Mr. Bruce—" she began.

But he stopped her, and in spite of her demurring carried her off.

"You certainly have a lovely place, Mr. Bruce," she said, looking admiringly round as they mounted the front steps of his residence. The door flew open, and there, waiting to welcome her, stood the bride—Ruth.

ALICE ILGENFRITZ.



WHERE LIGHTNING STRIKES.

The air has been growing hotter for many days, with "occasional counteracting influences" (as "Probabilities" says), until the sunshine-loving doves hide under shadowing gables and the robins and sparrows sit on the lower branches of the trees with little wings lifted from their palpitating sides. The multitudinous shrilling of the grasshoppers adds emphasis to the white heats of the air. Even the housefly seeks the shade and hums drowsily in complicated orbits about the upper part of the room, or, with too keen proboscis, destroys my last crumb of comfort, the post-prandial nap.

My eyes open upon a world that dreams. The trees stand motionless. Among their tops the bull-bat darts erratically. The pale star of thistledown mounts on some mysterious current, like an infant soul departing heavenward. The hum of the near city is hushed. The sound of the church-bells is muffled. The trumpeting of the steamer comes from the bay, as though some lone sea-monster called aloud for companionship. There is a sudden rattle and roar as a train rushes by, and then the smoke drifts away over the glowing landscape.

But there is an increasing opaque dimness in the western horizon that steadily deepens in color. Fleece-like clouds rapidly increase in height and density, and a sheet of pale flame flashes from the midst and is gone. A glowing, crinkly line marks the edge of the cloud, and disappears.

Now swallows soar far up in the sky, the doves make wild, uncertain flights above the steeples, and the hoarse trumpet of the steamer again calls for recognition. At the west another bright line falls, zigzag, to a distant hill, revealed an instant, then lost in the shadow of the cloud. Soon there is a low, momentary rumble, and you are assured that the swift, delightful, dangerous shower, that cools the earth without interrupting our pleasures for dreary days, is approaching. No one whose dwelling is not better protected than most of those which bear the vain and flimsy decorations called "lightning-rods" can know whether his own house may not in a few moments receive a ruinous stroke, or that it may not be his lot to enter eternity with the first flash from that dark, towering mass of sulphurous hue that already casts its ominous shadow upon his face.

Timid persons should experience gladness rather than alarm at the sound of the thunder and the flash of the lightning, both being signals that personal danger is past for the time. Persons who have been struck and rendered insensible, but who have afterward recovered, had not seen or heard what hurt them. Unless we are acquainted with the locality, and know the points likely to receive the fiery bolt; if a disruptive discharge occurs near us there is no telling the spot of danger or of safety in open ground. A discharge from the front of the cloud may take a downward angle of forty-five degrees, and, passing over hill and forest, strike an insignificant knoll or a moist meadow half a mile in advance of the cloud. For myself, if overtaken in the country by a thunderstorm, I would seek the nearest and most convenient shelter from the rain and take my chance with the lightning.

Teams and the persons accompanying them appear to be peculiarly in danger during a thunderstorm. Caves, and even deep mines, afford no absolute safety, for the thunderbolt has been known to enter even these. Tall trees are more dangerous than low ones, but none of them appear capable of affording protection against this mysterious element. The people of different countries have regarded various kinds of trees as exempt from the electric stroke, but inquiry has always shown that every species has suffered in one locality or another. The beech, from some cause, has probably escaped more generally than any other tree of considerable size in northern latitudes. But it is the neighborhood of a good conductor, not a sheltering non-conductor, that affords safety. Some scientific men have advised a station of fifteen to forty feet from a tree, or such a position between several trees, but it has sometimes happened that such open spaces have received the bolt. In cities and villages, likewise, open spaces are not found to be places of safety.[5]

The question whether the small metallic articles usually carried about the person increase the danger is a matter of some concern. Many persons on the approach of a thunderstorm customarily relieve themselves of these things. Hair-pins, clasps and the metallic springs often used in the dresses of ladies are not, however, so easily got rid of. From the record of the effects of lightning upon the human body we reach the conclusion that metal is dangerous about the person only according to its position. Constantine mentions that during a thunderstorm a lady raised her arm to close a window, when a flash of lightning entered: her golden bracelet was entirely dissipated, but without the slightest injury to the wearer. A similar case is reported in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal for 1844. During a violent thunderstorm a fishing-boat belonging to Midyell, in the Shetland Islands, was struck by lightning. The discharge came down the mast (which it tore into shivers) and melted a watch in the pocket of a man who was sitting close by, without at all injuring him. He was not even aware of what had happened until, on taking out his watch, he found it fused into one mass. Instances might be cited where a portion of the shoe was carried away without serious injury to the wearer, and where knitting-needles, scissors and other household implements have been struck, sometimes conducting the current to the person with fatal effect.

During a thunderstorm in France in July, 1858, a peasant-woman, on her way home from the fields, was struck down by lightning. No wound was detected upon her person, but her hair was singed and a part of a silver comb melted. Here metal seems to have conducted the electricity to the body. On the other hand, the traveller Brydone relates a circumstance which happened to a lady who was regarding a thunderstorm from her window. At a flash of lightning her bonnet was reduced to ashes, nothing else about her being affected. Brydone supposes the electric current to have been attracted by the metallic wire which maintained the shape of her bonnet. Hence he proposes that either these wires be abandoned or in times of danger a metallic chain be attached to the bonnet, by which the charge might pass to the earth. Accordingly, we find that it became fashionable in France at that period to wear on the top of the bonnet an ornament of bright metal connecting with a small silver chain dropping down to the ground. At about the same time umbrellas were carried fitted with wires and chain for a similar purpose.

In July, 1819, lightning fell upon the prison of Biberach in Suabia, and there struck, in a common apartment, among twenty prisoners, one only—a condemned captain of brigands, who was chained about the waist. A similar arrangement of metal proved fatal in another case. On the 9th of October, 1836, on the coast of Italy, a young man was struck by lightning and killed. It was found that he wore a girdle containing gold coins. Undoubtedly, danger or safety depends on properly placing the conducting object. It may convey the current to the vital organs or it may ward off the stroke. Probably any line of metal parallel with the length of the body when upright would be in some degree a protection. The noted Dr. King once saw a military company receive a discharge of electricity from the clouds upon their bayonets, whence their muskets conducted it to the ground without harm or any painful shock. On the other hand, a battalion of French infantry, while marching between Mouzon and Stenay, June 2, 1849, was struck by lightning, and two men killed, while about two hundred were struck to the ground. Blood flowed from their mouths, ears and noses. This effect appears to have been the result of the concussion. Similar results sometimes follow from heavy discharges of artillery.

Uniform testimony goes to show that men in metallic armor have never been fatally injured by lightning. A complete suit of metallic armor embodies the principle of the well-known electrical cage of Faraday. This is simply a basket of wire network with its open side to the ground. If the wire is of proper size and the capacity sufficient, this cage is the most effectual protection possible, unless the walls be of solid iron.

If one places beside him a better direct conductor to the earth than his own body, he will not be fatally injured by the electric current, though, if it pass very near, he may be blinded by the glare or deafened by the noise—effects which are usually temporary. Equal safety for buildings may be similarly secured.

Glass being so well known as an excellent non-conductor, some have been led to suppose it effectual in warding off the disruptive stroke. Hence chambers or cases of glass have actually been made for the use of individuals who were apt to be overcome with terror during the prevalence of a thunderstorm. In this belief, also, the vane of Christ Church in Doncaster, England, was furnished with a glass ball; but the spire was afterward struck, causing great damage. Many also think they may sit beside a closed window in safety, but records of holes being melted in the glass and whole windows crumbled to powder by lightning are too numerous to admit of any reliance upon such a precaution.

In the case of silken garments the evidence met with does not warrant a statement either for or against them; yet there appears to be no reason why this non-conductor should be more of a safeguard than any other. No doubt an abundance of gold and silver lace, or cloth having threads of these metals, might prove a protection. Feather beds, too, have been regarded as places of safety, but persons have been killed by lightning while in bed. Dr. Franklin advised especially that the vicinity of chimneys be avoided, because lightning often enters a room by them. All metallic bodies, mirrors and gilded ornaments, he held, should likewise be shunned. Contact with the walls or the floor or proximity to a chandelier, a projecting gas-pipe, a position between two considerable pieces or surfaces of metals, unless distant, are all hazardous. Draughts of air are also to be avoided. Bell-wires may generally be considered as protective, though too small to be effectual. Perhaps a hammock, in addition to the preceding precautions, will afford as much security as can be derived from insulation. But in a building having continuous iron walls, posts or pillars from top to bottom, or in one which is properly supplied with conductors in other forms, all the foregoing precautions may be neglected without apprehension. Yet, as was suggested early in this article, the great number of buildings damaged by lightning while furnished with rods has caused much distrust of this system of protection.

From the large number of trees receiving the electric current it has come to be thought by many that these may be the best protectors of buildings if properly placed. In a case coming under my observation a tree received (or at least deflected) the current and communicated it to the house. In many instances, however, the building is struck while tall trees near by are untouched.

There is no doubt that lightning generally strikes elevated rather than low objects, and therefore it has been thought that a building surrounded by steeples had nothing to fear. As previously stated, however, the bolt sometimes selects a low object when high ones are at hand. For example, lightning fell upon a house occupied by Lord Tilney in Naples, although it was surrounded on all sides, at the distance of four or five hundred paces, by the towers and domes of a great number of churches, all wet with a heavy rain.

In considering the matter of protection from lightning we must bear in mind that trees, buildings, masts and other elevated points exert no attractive power on the thundercloud except in connection with the great plane where they are situated. The primary cause of the discharge is not in the metals of the building, the exact point or line in which the insulation by the air breaks down being determined by a variety of causes. The elevated points of a building or ship may form a channel for the passage of the current, but it is not the only one nor the cause of the discharge, which would take place sooner or later though the ship or building were absent altogether.

There has been a difference of opinion in regard to the area protected by lightning-conductors, early notions on this point having been much exaggerated. Leroy's, in 1788, is the earliest positive statement which I have met. It is, that a conductor protects a horizontal space around it equal to somewhat more than three times the height of the metal rod above the building to which it is attached. The physical section of the Academy of Sciences of Paris, on being consulted by the Minister of War in 1823, expressed the opinion that a lightning-conductor protects a circular space of which the radius is equal to the height of the rod. Here, apparently, is a wide difference, but possibly the estimates refer to different elevations. Leroy clearly intended an area at a level with the top of the building: thus, supposing the rod to be attached to a chimney six feet in height and to rise a foot and a half above the chimney, then it would protect a radius of about ten feet on the roof. The estimate of the Academy of Sciences speaks of the total height of the rod, and refers to a horizontal area at the base of the measurement, whether this began at the ground or at the top of the structure to which the rod is attached. In this view the estimates do not differ so much as might appear, the latter being about one-third less than that of Leroy. Other French writers estimate the area protected as having a radius of double the height of the rod above the highest point of the connected structure, being twice the radius allowed by the Academy. Later physicists have been cautious in giving figures, for experience has shown that estimates of protection are not accurately observed by the descending bolt. For instance, when Her Majesty's corvette Dido, furnished with the best system of conductors, was struck by lightning, the discharge fell in a double or forked current upon the main royal mast, one of the branches striking the extreme point of the royal yard arm and passing along to the conductor on the mast, while the other fork fell on the vane, spindle and truck; which last was split open. As soon as the discharge reached the conductor all damage ceased.