III.

"There's John Stocklager, daddy," Said young Nick, thinking much; "A hundred years he's settled Amongst the mountain Dutch. Ask him!" "Nay, young Nick Hammer, You young fellows run too fast: I shall set out here a thinking, And maybe Funk'll go past!"

IV.

He drank and smoked and pondered, And deep in the mystery sunk; And the more Nick Hammer wondered The duller he grew about Funk. The wagoners talked it over, And a new idea to trace Enlivened the dead old village Like a new house built in the place.

V.

One day in June two wagons Came over Antietam bridge And a tall old man behind them Strode up the turnpike ridge. His beard was long and grizzled, His face was gnarled and long, His voice was keen and nasal, And his mouth and eye were strong.

One wagon was full of boxes And the other full of poles, As the weaver's wife discovered While the weaver took the tolls. Two young men drove the horses, And neither the people knew; But young Nick asked a question And that old man looked him through.

A little feed they purchased, And their teams drank in the creek, And to and fro they travelled As silently for a week— Went southward laden heavy, And northward always light, And the gnarled old man aye with them, With the long beard flowing white.

From Sharpsburg up to Cavetown The story slowly rolled— That old man knew the mountains Were filled with ore of gold. The boxes held his crucibles; 'Twas haunted where he trod; And every shafted pole he brought Was a divining rod!

And none knew whence he came there, Nor they his course who took, Down the road to Harper's Ferry, In a shaggy mountain nook; But Nick the Sire grew certain, While from his eye he shrunk, That old man was none other Than the missing Mr. Funk:

The famous city-builder Who once had pitched upon The sunny ledge of Funkstown, And the site of Washington. Again he was returning To the Potomac side, To found a temple in the hills Before he failed and died!

And Nick laughed gently daily That he alone had guessed The mystery of the elder Funk That had puzzled all the rest. And younger Nick thought gently: "Since that chap asked for Funk There's been commotion in this town, And daddy's always drunk."

VI.

But once the ring of rapid hoofs Came sudden in the night, And on the Blue Ridge summits flashed The camp-fire's baleful light. Young Nick was in the saddle, With half the valley men, To find that old man's fighting sons Who kept the ferry glen.

And like the golden ore that grew To his divining rod, The shining, armed soldiery Swarmed o'er the clover sod; O'er Crampton's gap the columns fought, And by Antietam fords, Till all the world, Nick Hammer thought, At Funkstown had drawn swords.

VII.

Together, as in quiet days Before the battle's roar, Nick Hammer and his one-legg'd son Smoked by the tavern door. The dead who slept on Sharpsburg Heights Were not more still than they; They leaned together like the hills, But nothing had to say;

Save once, as at his wooden stump The young man looked awhile, And damned the man who made that war— He saw Nick Hammer smile. "My little boy," the old man said, "Think long as I have thunk— You'll find this war rests on the head Of that 'air Mister Funk!"



JUDGE WHALEY'S DEMON.

In the little town of Chester, near the Bay of Chesapeake, lived an elegant man, with the softest manners in the world and a shadow forever on his countenance. He bore a blameless character and an honored name. He had one son of the same name as his own, Perry Whaley. This son was forever with him, for use or for pleasure; they could not be happy separated, nor congenial together. A destiny seemed to unite them, but with it also a baleful memory. The negroes whispered that in the boy's conception and birth was a secret of shame; he was not this father's son, and his mother had confessed it.

That mother was gone—fled to a distant part of the world with her betrayer—and the divorce was recorded while yet young Perry Whaley was a babe. But the boy never knew it: his origin reposed in the sensitive memory of his father only, and every day the father looked at the son long and distantly, and the son at the father with a most affectionate longing.

"Papa," he would say, "can't you try to love me? Do I disobey you? I am sure I am always unhappy out of your sight."

The father could not do without that boy, but could only hate him. "My son," he would reply, "you are obedient, but a demon! I could not love you if I would!"

"Never mind then, father, I can wait. There is plenty of time in life to make you love me!"

Judge Whaley—for he had been on the bench—was the highest example in Maryland of honor and pride. A General of militia, often in the Legislature, and once or twice a Senator at Washington, he had all the shattered sensibilities of a proud man wounded in the soul. Age was coming untimely upon his high temples and shadowed countenance, and as he walked along the market-place and green court-house yard, polite to men, boys, and negroes, they said in low tones, "Pity such a real gentleman can't be happy!"

In public affairs Judge Whaley was not silent: he led his party with intrepid utterances, and his prejudices, like his intellect, were strong; but though the election sometimes hung by a few votes, and his influence then gave every temptation on the part of low speakers and writers to allude to his domestic dishonor, the vile reminiscence was never mentioned. A profound respect for the man permeated society, and in his unsmiling way he was kind to whites and blacks. A slaveholder, and at the head of the principal slave-holding connection, and the particular champion in that region of slavery privileges, he would take his Bible and visit the cottages of his negroes and read to them even when sick of contagious fevers. He defended poor clients freely in the courts, and fought for the lives of free negroes under capital indictments. He was of the vestry of the aged Episcopal Church, which dominated the social influence of the town, and never omitted attendance on all the services, but with the shadow forever on his brow. Young Perry went everywhere with his father, and chattered and was active to oblige him, and sometimes by his boyish humor made a little light weaken the strong edges of that paternal shadow; but in a few minutes, looking up into the Judge's face, he would see that distant, accusing look returned again.

A great desire sprang up in the boy's heart to be fully loved by his father. He looked at other boys and saw that they received from their fathers a treatment not more gentle, but more real, as if a deep well of feeling lay in those parents which could send up cool water or tears, either in disagreement or sympathy. Young Perry had his own horse and his negro, and was the only inhabitant, besides the Judge, of the old black brick, square, colonial house on the brink of the river—that house whence the light had gone in lurid flight when the young wife, in the bravado of her shame, departed forever.

Judge Whaley was able, with his intellectual sympathy, to observe that his boy was apt and right-minded.

Perry read law precociously, and liked it. He was the best juvenile debater in the little old college on the slight hill overlooking the town. His appearance was good, and he had a cheerful nature; yet nowhere, among beautiful girls or riding companions, gunning on the river, crabbing on the bridge, or skating on the meadows, was he half so happy as with his father.

"Well, Perry," the Judge would say, "how is my demon to-day—what is he studying now?"

"Studying you, papa; I don't understand you."

"The time will come, alas for you!" exclaimed the Judge.

"Do I displease you in any thing I do?"

"No, my son."

"Do you believe I love you?"

"Yes, I do believe it. I wish, Perry, it could be returned."

The son, under the influence of this discouraging confidence, became serious and melancholy. He would take his gun on his shoulder and wade out into the meadow marshes, as if for game, and there would be seen by other gunners sitting on some old pier or perched on some worm fence, looking straight up at the sky, as if it might answer the riddle of his father's hate and his own unreciprocated affection. He would also, on rainy or cold days, when the inmates could not stir abroad, mount his horse and ride to the almshouse beyond the town mill, and, taking a pleasant story or ballad from his pocket, read to the huddled paupers, as well as to the keeper's family, attracted by his pleasant condescension. By degrees the boy's face also took the shadow worn by his father.

"Oh, if they could only love!" remarked the old people around the court-house; "or if they only could admit the real love between them!"

The Judge never admitted it; that seemed to be a part of his religion, a duty to himself, if painful, and the son never woke nor retired to rest without searching in that paternal shadow for the kindly gleam of awakened love, yet ever kissed the shadow only, and a brow that was cold.

One Christmas Day the river was frozen—a rare event in that genial latitude, and hearing that wild geese were flying down toward the bay creeks and coves, the Judge took his gun and a negro and set off, without waiting for Perry, who was not immediately to be found. An hour later the boy returned and heard of his father's departure, and started on horseback to overtake the carriage. He followed the track beyond the mill and almshouse, and across the heads of several peninsulas or necks leading into the wide tidal river. A few frosted persimmons hung yet to their warty branches; the hulls of last autumn's black walnuts were beneath the spreading boughs; old orchards of peach-trees where the tints of green and bud smouldered in pink contrast to the oft-blackened and sapless branches, set off the purple beads of the haw on the bushes along the lanes. Fish-hawks, flying across the sky, felt the shadow of the flocks of wild ducks flying higher; and rabbits crossed the road so boldly in the face of Perry Whaley, that once a raccoon, limping across a cornfield like a lame spaniel, turned too and took both barrels of Perry's gun without other fright or injury than slightly to hurry its pace. As the young man heard the crows chatter around the corn-shocks and the mocking-bird in some alder-thicket answer and sauce the catbird's scream, he said to himself:

"Every thing is attached by an inner chord to something else, and that other thing, free-hearted, carols or quarrels back—except father to me. Can I not, too, find something to love me? There is Marion, the Doctor's daughter, with the chestnut curls falling all round her neck—she loves me, I know; but until I gain my father's love I cannot think of woman!"

The pine-trees above his head murmured rather than moaned, as if they strongly sympathized with him and would presently make loud and angry cause against his enemies. "What is it," asked Perry of his unsuspecting mind, "which makes my father so unappeasable? What is there in me which broods upon his just and honorable life, and which he cannot drive away though he tries? Has he some learned superstition, some religious vow or mistaken sacrifice?"

Perry turned down a lane and then into the bed of a frozen brook, and coming in sight of the broad river, espied his father, gun in hand, stealthily creeping under a load of brush and twigs which the Judge's negro had piled about his back and head, to conceal his figure from a flock of ducks that were bathing and diving in an open place of deep water, to which the ice had not extended.

The gliding brush heap, by slow and flitting advances, had progressed about to within gunshot of the scarce suspecting fowls, and Perry and the negro, from different sides of the cove, watched with the keenest interest—when suddenly, with very little noise, the ice gave way and Judge Whaley had sunk in deep water, loaded down with heavy gunning boots, shot-belt, overcoat and gun. The negro stood paralyzed a minute and then fell upon his knees, unknowing what to do. A sense of joy started in Perry Whaley's breast as strong as his apprehensive fears. He might be made the instrument of saving that beloved life, and dissipating the spell of its indifference!

Nothing but this ardent passion saved Perry himself from drowning. He had crossed the cove ere yet the impulse of parental recognition had taken form, and throwing a rein from the carriage around the negro man's armpits, and seizing a long fence-rail, ran rapidly across, pulling both toward the point of danger.

Judge Whaley had been a powerful man and an accomplished sportsman; and still as resolute as in youth, struggled with all intelligence for his life. He sank to the bottom on first breaking through the ice, then reaching upward made two or three powerful efforts to catch the rim of the ice-field and sank again in each endeavor, weighted down with leather and iron. He had sunk to rise no more when Perry reached the edge of the field, placed the end of the rail over the abyss and planted the negro's weight upon it, and then he dived, head foremost, into the freezing salt depths—where the tide was running—and with the carriage rein looped in his right hand. Before he could lay hand upon his father, that desperate man had seized him by the hair and drawn his head to the bottom, and every instant Perry felt that his remainder of breath was almost run unless he could break that iron hold. Even in that instant of agony, with death painting its awful pageantry on his interior sight, Perry felt a gladder kind of destiny; that perhaps the arms of a father's love were around him, and in another sphere, already about to dawn, the shadow might depart from that kind face and unyearning heart.

But with a sense of more human dutifulness, Perry recalled his residuum of perception. It was necessary to break that drowning man's grapple upon his hair, and taking the only way, if cruel, to assist his father, the young man struck the elder's knuckles with his clinched fist. As they released the rein was thrown about Judge Whaley's shoulders and run through the buckle, and as his rescuer, almost exhausted, swam upward, he made the rein fast to his ankle and seized hold of the rail. Here occurred another agonizing delay. The negro could not pull the rail in, between his own fears and the double burden; the young man was exhausted and cramped with cold, and every instant his father, still submerged, was drowning. At this moment when the renewed probability of death brought no compensations of a tender sentiment, it pleased the tide to whirl Judge Whaley's body inwards, directly beneath the ice-field, and he being now insensible, if alive at all, the negro clutched it effectually. In the awakened pain and hope of that minute, Perry Whaley supported himself along the piece of rail to the solid ice, and assisted to draw his father from the water, and then swooned dead. They lay together, the unwelcome son and the repelling father, under the universal pity of the great eye of Heaven, on the natal day of Him who came into the world also fatherless, but not disowned.

A neighboring farmer sent one of his boys to Chester for the doctor, and by rubbing and restoratives, both the Judge and his son were brought back to circulation and pulsation. Perry soon recovered, but Judge Whaley was saved only with the greatest difficulty. It was nightfall in the hospitable farm-house before he was able to see or speak, and then, a little drunken with the spirits which had been administered, he asked in a whisper:

"Who saved my life?"

"Who but your son Perry?" answered the cheerful Doctor Voss. "You were both wrapped together for a long while in the bottom of the cove!"

"My son!" exclaimed Judge Whaley, scarcely understanding the reply. "Who is my son?"

"Here, father! We are both alive. Thank God!"

"My son?" muttered Judge Whaley. "Brave son! Who is it?"

"Why, Perry Whaley!" answered the good housewife. "His arms are around your neck. Those warm kisses were his!"

The sick man glared about him till his eye fell on the boy.

"Ha!" he whispered. "By you. Had I awakened in heaven would you have been there, too?"

The Judge sank back into a moment's insensibility, and the son sat there sobbing piteously.

Though saved from the wave Judge Whaley had a long following spell of fever, in which his son nursed him for many weeks, and once the spark of life seemed to have fled; the Judge's pulse stopped still, and while they were at solemn prayer—the rector of the Episcopal Church reading from his book—Perry cried: "He still lives. It is the medicine he needs!"

After the second resuscitation Dr. Voss remarked: "It is not often, Judge Whaley, that a man's life is twice saved by his son!"

Tears were no longer in Perry's eyes; he had heard his father in delirium constantly repeat his name. After the Judge's recovery he placed in Perry's pocket a fine English watch, and gave him a pair of horses and a stylish wagon.

"Hereafter," he said, "you shall take charge of the property. My son, look about you and find a wife! In your character you are deserving of a good one, for I fear the affection you are seeking can never arise in my heart enough to satisfy you. Gratitude and respect are always here, my son, but love has been a stranger to me these many years. I wish you to marry while I live, and be happy in some good woman's affection. I may die and you may not become my heir! There is the doctor's beautiful daughter; she has my decided approval!"

"If it is your wish, father, I will marry."

The day Perry Whaley was admitted to the bar of Kent County on motion of his father, he stopped with his pair of horses at Doctor Voss's house, and asked Miss Marion to take a drive. She was a peerless brunette, whose dark brown curls taking the light upon their luxuriance seemed the rippling of water from the large amber wells of her eyes. In childhood she had looked with admiration on his straight, trim figure and manly courtesy, and hoped that she might find favor in his sight. For this she had put by the scant opportunities in a small, old, unvisited town, to be wedded to her equals, and the whispered imputation that there was a taint in Perry Whaley's blood made no impression upon her wishes. Her younger sisters were gone before her, but true to the impetuous tendencies of her childhood she waited for Perry, indulging the dream that she was destined to be his wife.

The happy, supreme opportunity had come. They took the road over the river drawbridge into another county; the frost was out of the ground, and the loamy road invited the horses to their speed until the breath of spring raised in Marion's cheeks the color that dressed the budding peach orchards which spread over the whole landscape, as if Nature was in maternity and her rosy breasts were full of milk.

"Do you like these horses, Marion?" said Perry Whaley, when they had gone several miles. "If you do you can drive them as long as you live."

She laughed, more because it was the feminine way than in her feeling.

"Drive them alone?"

"Only when you do not want me to go."

"Then it will seldom be alone, Perry."

They both breathed short in silence, the happy silence of youth's desire and assent, until Perry said, "You are sure you love me, then?"

"Must I be frank, Perry?"

"As much as ever in your life!"

"I am very sure. I loved you in my childhood—no more now than then, except that the growth of love has strengthened with my strength."

"Marion," said the young man with a thoughtful face, "if I have not long ago recognized this fidelity, which, to be also frank with you, I have suspected—not because of any desert of mine, but love is like the light which we distinctly feel even with our eyes shut—it has been because with all my soul I was laboring for my father's love first. You have seen the shadow on his brow? How it came there I do not know. I have thought that with my wife to light the dark chambers of our old house, a triple love would bloom there, and what he has called the demon in me would disappear beneath your beautiful ministrations. Be that angel to both of us, and as my wife touch the fountain of his tears and make his noble heart embrace me!"

Marion Voss felt a great sense of trouble. "Is it possible," she thought, "that Perry has never suspected the cause of that shadow on the Judge's life? Perhaps not! It would have been cruel to tell Perry, but crueller, perhaps, to let him grow to manhood in unchallenged pride and find it out at such a critical time." The rest of the ride passed in endearments and the engagement vow was made.

"My dear one," said Marion, as they rolled on the bridge at Chester, and the few lights of the town and of the vessels and the single steamboat descended into the river, "had you not better have an understanding with your father on the subject of his affection? Perhaps you have talked in riddles. Something far back may have disturbed your mutual faith. Whatever it is, nothing shall break my promise to you. I will be your wife, or no man's. But the shadow that is on Judge Whaley's face I fear no wife can drive away."

These words disturbed young Perry Whaley, as he drove his horses into the hotel stable and slowly pursued his way across the public plot or area, past the old square brick Methodist church, already lighted brightly for a special evening service, though it was a week-day. He passed next the small, echoing market-house and the Episcopal church, and court-house yard. Every thing he saw had at that moment the appearance of something so very vivid and real that it frightened him. Yonder was the spot where, with other boys, he had burned tar-barrels on election nights; up a lane the jail where he had seen the prisoners flatten their noses against the bars to beg tobacco; a tall Lombardy poplar at a corner stood stolid except at its summit, where a portion of the foliage whispered with a freshening sound. How still; as if every thing was in suspense like him—the favorite of the old town for so many years, and soon to become the possessor of its most beautiful and virtuous woman!

He sounded the knocker at the door of the square, solid brick mansion, built while all acknowledged the King of Britain here, and in whose threshold General Washington had stood more than once. His father admitted him directly into a prim, wainscoted room with a square-angled stairway in the corner leading above; a thick rag carpet was on the floor; the furniture was mahogany and hair-cloth; on the wall were portraits of the Whaleys or Whalleys, back to that regicide who fled from the vengeance of King Charles's sons, and, escaping many perils in New England, lived unrecognized on this peninsula.

Judge Whaley had lighted a large oil lamp, and its shade threw the flame upon his strong magisterial face, wherein grief and righteousness seemed as highly blent as in some indigent republican Milton or Pym.

"My father," said Perry Whaley with the tender tone habitual to him, "I have consulted your wishes as well as my desire. Marion Voss will be my wife."

"It is well, my son," replied Judge Whaley, placing upon his nose his first pair of silver spectacles. "You are entitled to so much beauty and grace on every ground of a dutiful youth and agreeable person, and of talents which will make both of you a comfortable livelihood."

"Father, with so great a change of relations before me, I desire to obtain your whole confidence."

Perry's voice trembled; the Judge sat still as one of the brazen andirons where the wood burned with a colorless flame in the fireplace. The father took off the spectacles and laid them down.

"Confidence in what respect, Perry?"

The young man walked to his father and knelt at his knee and clasped his hand. Even then Perry saw the shadow gather in that kind man's brow, as if he perceived the demon in his son.

"Before I make a lady my wife, father, I want every mystery of my life related. I have always heard that my mother died. Where is she buried?"

There was a long pause.

"She is not dead," said Judge Whaley, without any inflection, "except to me."

"Not dead, father?" asked the son, with throbbing temples. "Oh, why have I been so deceived? Were you unhappy?"

"I thought I was happy," said the Judge huskily; "that was long my impression."

"And my mother—was she, too, happy when you were so?"

"No."

The young man rose and walked to the wainscot and back again. "Dear father, I see the origin of the shadow upon your brow. Why was I not told before? Perhaps the son of two unhappy parents might have brought them together again, if for no other congenial end, than that he was their only son!"

The Judge raised his eyes to the imploring eyes of the younger man. The shadow never was so deep upon his brow as Perry saw it now; it was the shadow of a long inured agony intensified by a dread judicial sympathy.

"You are not my son!" he said.

Perry's mouth opened, but not to articulate. He stretched out his hands to touch something, and that only which he could not reach struck and stunned him; he had fallen senseless to the floor.

When Perry returned to knowledge he was lying upon the carpet, a cloak under his head, and his father, walking up and down, stooped over him frequently to look into his face with a tender, yet suffering interest. The young man did not move, and only revealed his wakefulness at last by raising his hand to check a relieving flow of tears.

"My dear boy," finally said Judge Whaley, himself shedding tears, "I had supposed that you already knew something of the tragedy of my life."

"Never," moaned Perry.

"Then, forgive me; I should myself have gradually told you the tale; it might have come up with your growth, inwoven like a mere ghost story. Did no playmate, no older intimate, not one of your age striving for the bar, ever whisper to you that I had been deceived, and that you, my only comfort, were the fruit of the deception?"

"No, sir." Perry's tears seemed to dry in the recollection. "We were both gentlemen—at least, after we reached this world. No one ever insulted me nor you! I humbly thank God that, discredited as I may have been, my conduct to all was so considerate that no one could obtrude such a truth upon me. Is it the truth? O father!—I must call you so! it is the only word I know—is this, at last, one of the dreadful visions of diseased sleep or of insanity? Who am I? What was my mother? I can bear it all, for now I have seen why you never loved me."

Perry, pale as death and still of feeble brain, had arisen as he spoke and made this imploration with only the eloquence of haggard forgetfulness. The Judge took Perry's hands and supported him.

"My son, have I not earned the name of father? Yes, I have plucked the poison-arrow from my heart and sucked its venom. I have taken the offspring of my injurer and warmed it in my bosom. Every morning when you arose I was reminded of my dishonor. Every night when we kissed good-night, I felt, God knows, that I had loved my enemies and done good to them which injured me!"

The young man, looking up and around in the impotence of expression, saw the portraits of the dead Whaleys in unbroken lineal respectability, bending their eyes upon him—the one, the only impostor of the name!

"Perry," continued the Judge, "I am not wholly guilty of keeping you blind. I have told you many times that between us was a gap, a rift of something. I have sometimes said, as your artless caresses, mixed with the bitter recollection of your origin, almost dispossessed my reason, that you were 'my demon.'"

"Yes, father; but I was so anxious to love you that I never brooded on that. I see it all! Every repulse comes back to me now. You have suffered, indeed, and been the Christian. But I must hear the tale before I depart."

"Depart! Where?"

"To find my mother, if she lives. To find my name! I cannot bear this one. It would be deceit."

"Not even the name of My Son?"

"Alas! no. Just as I am I must be known. My putative father, if he lives, must give me another name."

"Thank God, Perry, he is dead!"

"But not his name. I can make honorable even my—"

"Say it not!" exclaimed the Judge, placing his hand upon Perry's mouth. "Pure as all your life has been, you shall not degrade it with such a word. Oh, my son!—my orphan son!—dear faithful prattler around my feet for all these desolate and haunted years, I have doubted for your sake every thing—that wedlock was good, that pride of virtuous origin was wise, that human jealousy was any thing but a tiger's selfishness. I did not sow the seed that brought you forth; too well I know it! Yet grateful and fair has been the vine as if watered by the tears of angels; and when I sleep the demon in you fades, and then, at least, your loving tendrils find all my nature an arbor to take you up!"

"Would to God!" said Perry bitterly, "that in the sleep of everlasting death we laid together. O my God! how I have loved you—father!"

The Judge enfolded the young man in his arms and like a child Perry rested there. The lamp, previously burning very low, went out for want of oil, as the old man nursed like his own babe the serpent's offspring, not his own but another's untimely son, bred on the honor of a husband's name. As they sat in the perfect darkness of the old riverside mansion, Judge Whaley told his tale.

He had neglected to marry until he had become of settled legal and business habits, and more than forty-five years of age when he chose for a wife a young lady who professed to admire and love him. They had no children. The wife was a coquette, and began to woo admiration almost as soon as the nuptials were done. Judge Whaley thought nothing ill of this; he was in the heyday of his practice and willing to let one so much his junior enjoy herself. Among his law students was a young man from South Carolina, of brilliant manners and insidious address. This person had already become so intimate with Mrs. Whaley as to draw upon the Judge anonymous letters notifying him that he was too indifferent, to which letters he gave no attention, only bestowing the more confidence and freedom upon her, when, happily, as it was thought, the wife showed signs of maternity. Perry was born, to the joy of his father. The young mother, however, hastened to recover her health and gayety. The favor she expressed for the student's society was revived and not opposed by her husband. Judge Whaley returned unexpectedly one day to his residence; he came upon a scene that in an instant destroyed faith and rendered explanation impossible. His wife was false. The student passionately avowed himself her seducer. The Judge went through the ordeal like a magistrate.

"Take her away with you," he said. "That is the only reparation you can do her, until she is legally divorced, and after that, if necessary, I will give her an allowance, but she cannot rest under this roof another night. It has been the abode of chaste wives since it was builded. My honor is at stake. This day she must go. Make her your wife and let neither ever return."

They departed by carriage, unknown to any, and never had returned. But a few weeks after they disappeared a letter was received by Judge Whaley, admonishing him that his son was the offspring of the same illegal relations. It was signed and written by his wife. The wretched man debated whether he should send the infant to an asylum or keep it upon his premises. Through procrastination, continued for twenty years, the child had derived all the advantages of legitimacy, and still the demon of the husband's peace was the test of the gentleman's religion.

As this story had proceeded toward its final portions, the young man had detached himself from his father's arms. When Judge Whaley concluded in the darkness he waited in vain for a response. The old man lighted the lamp and peered about the room wistfully. Perry was gone.

That night, in the happiness of her engagement, Marion Voss had a glad unrest, which her mother noticed. "Dear," said the mother, "let us go over to the Methodist church. It is one of their protracted meetings or revivals, as they call it. If Perry comes he will know where to find us, as I will leave word."

The Methodists were second in social standing, but a wide gap separated them from the slave-holding and family aristocracy, who were Episcopalians. The sermon was delivered by one of their most powerful proselytizers, an old man in a homespun suit, high shoulders, lean, long figure, and glittering eyes. He was a wild kind of orator, striking fear to the soul, dipping it in the fumes of damnation, lifting it thence to the joys of heaven. Terrible, electrical preaching! It was the product of uncultured genius and human disappointment. Marion sat in awe, hardly knowing whether it was impious or angelic. In a blind exordium the old zealot commanded those who would save their souls to walk forward and kneel publicly at the altar, and make their struggle there for salvation.

The first whom Marion saw to walk up the dimly lighted aisle and kneel was Perry Whaley. All in the church saw and knew him, and a thunderous singing broke out, in which religious and mere denominational zeal all threw their enthusiasm.

"Judge Whaley's son—Episcopalian—admitted to the bar to-day—wonderful!"

Marion heard these whispers on every hand; and as the singing ceased, and the congregation knelt to pray, Marion's mother saw her turning very pale, and silently and unobserved led her out of the meeting-house.

It was one o'clock in the morning when Judge Whaley heard Perry enter the door. He was preceded by the beams of a lamp, as his step came almost trippingly up the stairs. The Judge looked up and saw the face of his demon, streaked with recent tears and shaded with dishevelled hair, but on it a look like eternal sunshine.

"Glory! glory! glory!" exclaimed the young man hoarsely. He rushed upon his aged friend, and kissed him in an ecstacy almost violent.

"My boy! Perry! What is it? You are not out of your mind?"

"No! no! I have found my father, our father!"

"Who is it?" asked the Judge, with a rising superstition, as if this were not his orphan, but its preternatural copy; "you have found your father? What father?"

"God!" exclaimed young Perry, his countenance like flame. "My father is God and He is love!"

The town of Chester and the whole country had now a serious of rapid sensations. Judge Whaley and his son were turned lunatics, and behaved like a pair of boys. Marion Voss had broken her engagement with Perry Whaley because he insisted that he was not the Judge's son. Young Perry was exhorting in the Methodist church, and studying and starving himself to be a preacher. The Methodists were wild with social and denominational triumph: the Episcopalians were outraged, and meditated sending Perry to the lunatic asylum. Finally, to the great joy of nervous people, the last sensation came—Perry Whaley had left Chester to be a preacher.

Judge Whaley now grew old rapidly, and meek and careless of his attire. In an old pair of slippers, glove-less and abstracted, he crossed the court-house green, no longer the first gentleman in the county in courteous accost and lofty tone. He read his Bible in the seclusion of his own house, and fishermen on the river coming in after midnight saw the lamp-light stream through the chinks of his shutters, and said: "He has never been the same since Perry went away." But he read in the religious papers of the genius and power of the absent one, roving like a young hermit loosened, and with a tongue of flame over the length and breadth of the country, producing extraordinary excitement and adding thousands to his humble denomination.

On Christmas Day the Judge was sitting in his great room reading the same mystic book, and listening, with a wistfulness that had never left him, to every infrequent footfall in the street. There came a knock at the door. He opened it, and out of the darkness into which he could not see came a voice altered in pitch, but with remembered accents in it, saying:

"Father, mother has come home!"

Stepping back before that extraordinary salutation, Judge Whaley saw a man come forward leading a woman by the hand. The Judge receded until he could go no farther, and sank into his chair. The woman knelt at his feet; older, and grown gray and in the robes of humility, yet in countenance as she had been, only purified, as it seemed, by suffering and repentance, he saw his wife of more than twenty years before.

Looking up into the face of the son he had watched so long for, the old man saw a still more wonderful transformation. The elegant young gentleman of a few months before was a living spectre, his bright eyes standing out large and consumptive upon a transparent skin, and glittering with fanaticism or excitement.

"Perry Whaley," said the woman firmly, but with sweetness, "it is twenty-two years since I left this house with hate of me in your heart and a degraded name; I was in thought and act a pure woman, though the evidence against me was mountain-high. My sin was that of many women—flirtation. Nothing more, before my God! I trifled with one of your students, a reckless and hot-blooded man, and inspired him with a tyrannous passion. He swore if I would not fly with him to destroy me. One day, the most dreadful of my life, he heard your foot upon the stairs ascending to my chamber, and threw himself into it before you and avowed himself your injurer. Then rose in confirmation of him every girlish folly; I saw myself in your mild eyes condemned, in this community long suspected, and by my own family discarded for your sake. Where could I go but to the author of my sorrows? He became my husband and I am a widow."

Judge Whaley stretched out his hand in the direction of his eyes, not upon the old wife at his feet, but toward his son, who had settled into a chair and closed his eyes as if in tired rapture.

"Hear me but a moment more," said the kneeling woman. "I was the slave of an ever-jealous maniac; but my heart was still at this fireside with your bowed spirit, and this our son. My husband told me that the way to recover the child was to claim it as his. His motive, I fear, was different—to place me on record as confessedly false and prevent our reunion forever. But I was not wise enough to see it. I only thought you would send my son to me. I waited in my lonely home in Charleston years on years. He came at last, but not too late; my frivolous soul, grown selfish with vanity and disappointment, bent itself before God through the prayers of our son. I am forgiven, Perry Whaley. I have felt it!"

The old man did not answer, but strained his eyes upon his son. "See there!" he slowly spoke, "Perry is dying. Famished all these years for human love, this excess of joy has snapped the silver cord. Wife, Mary, we have martyred him."

It was the typhoid fever which had developed from Perry's wasting vitality. He sank into delirium as they looked at him, and was carried tenderly to his bed. Marion Voss came to nurse him with his mother. She, too, after Perry's departure, had grown serious and followed his example, and was a Methodist. The young zealot sank lower and lower, despite science or prayers. Both churches prayed for him. Negroes and whites united their hopes and kind offices. One morning he was of dying pulse, and the bell in the Episcopal church began to toll. At the bedside all the little family had instinctively knelt, and Perry's mother was praying with streaming eyes, committing the worn-out nature to Heavenly Love, when suddenly Judge Whaley, who had kept his hand on Perry's pulse, exclaimed:

"It beats! He lives again. The stimulant, Marion!"

Father and son had rescued each other's lives. One day as Perry had recovered strength, Judge Whaley said:

"My son, are you a minister, qualified to perform marriages?"

"Yes."

"When you are ready and strong, will you marry your mother and me again?"

"Very soon," said Perry; "but not too soon. Here is Marion waiting for me, as she has waited, like Rachel for Jacob, these many years. I shall preach no more, dear father, except as a layman. I see by your eyes that the demon is no longer in our home, and the remainder of my life will be spent in returning to you the joy my presence for years dispelled."

"O Perry, my patient son," exclaimed the father, "they who entertain angels unawares have nothing to look to with regret—except unkindness."



A CONVENT LEGEND.

The General Moreau, that pure republican, Who won at Hohenlinden so much glory, And by Bonaparte hated, crossed the sea to be free. And brought to the Delaware his story. World-renowned as he was, unto Washington he strayed. Where Pichegru, his friend, had contended, And to Georgetown he rode, in search of a church, To confess what of good he offended.

The Jesuits' nest beckoned up to the height Where pious John Carroll had laid it, And the General knelt at the cell but to tell His offence; yet or ever he said it, A voice in the speech of his Bretagny home, From within, where the monk was to listen, Exclaimed like a soldier: "Ah me! mon ami, Take my place and a sinful one christen!

"For mine was the band that brought exile to you; Cadoudal, the Chouan, my master, Broke my sword and my heart, and I lost when I crost, Both honor and love to be pastor. A knight of the king and my lady at court, At the call of Vendee the despised, Into Paris I stole with a few, one or two, As assassins, to murder disguised.

"On the third of Nivose, in the narrowest street, And never a traitor one to breathe it, We prepared to blow up Bonaparte with a cart, And a barrel of powder beneath it. He came like a flash, dashing by, but behind, Poor folks and his escort in feather, And the child that we put, sans remorse, by the horse, Were torn all to pieces together."

"To the guillotine both of my comrades were sent, But the Church, saving me for the tonsure, Hid me off in the wilds, and my dame, to her shame, To be Pere sold me out from a Monsieur; And now she is clad in the silk of the court, And I in the wool of confessor,— Hate me not, ere hence you go, Jean Victor Moreau! And with France be my fame's intercessor!"

"Limoelan! priest! is it you that I hear In this convent by Washington's river? Ah! France, how thy children are hurled round the world, Like the arrows from destiny's quiver! Take shrift for thy crime! Be thou pardoned with peace, Poor exile of Breton, my brother!" And the cannon of Dresden Moreau gave release, The bells of the convent the other.



CRUTCH, THE PAGE.

I.—CHIPS.

The Honorable Jeems Bee, of Texas, sitting in his committee-room half an hour before the convening of Congress, waiting for his negro familiar to compound a julep, was suddenly confronted by a small boy on crutches.

"A letter!" exclaimed Mr. Bee, "with the frank of Reybold on it—that Yankeest of Pennsylvania Whigs! Yer's familiarity! Wants me to appoint one U—U—U, what?"

"Uriel Basil," said the small boy on crutches, with a clear, bold, but rather sensitive voice.

"Uriel Basil, a page in the House of Representatives, bein' an infirm, deservin' boy, willin' to work to support his mother. Infirm boy wants to be a page, on the recommendation of a Whig, to a Dimmycratic committee. I say, gen'lemen, what do you think of that, heigh?"

This last addressed to some other members of the committee, who had meantime entered.

"Infum boy will make a spry page," said the Hon. Box Izard, of Arkansaw.

"Harder to get infum page than the Speaker's eye," said the orator, Pontotoc Bibb, of Georgia.

"Harder to get both than a 'pintment in these crowded times on a opposition recommendation when all ole Virginny is yaw to be tuk care of," said Hon. Fitzchew Smy, of the Old Dominion.

The small boy standing up on crutches, with large hazel eyes swimming and wistful, so far from being cut down by these criticisms, stood straighter, and only his narrow little chest showed feeling, as it breathed quickly under his brown jacket.

"I can run as fast as anybody," he said impetuously. "My sister says so. You try me!"

"Who's yo' sister, bub?"

"Joyce."

"Who's Joyce?"

"Joyce Basil—Miss Joyce Basil to you, gentlemen. My mother keeps boarders. Mr. Reybold boards there. I think it's hard when a little boy from the South wants to work, that the only body to help him find it is a Northern man. Don't you?"

"Good hit!" cried Jeroboam Coffee, Esq., of Alabama. "That boy would run, if he could!"

"Gentlemen," said another member of the committee, the youthful abstractionist from South Carolina, who was reputed to be a great poet on the stump, the Hon. Lowndes Cleburn—"gentlemen, that boy puts the thing on its igeel merits and brings it home to us. I'll ju my juty in this issue. Abe, wha's my julep?"

"Gentlemen," said the Chairman of Committee, Jeems Bee, "it 'pears to me that there's a social p'int right here. Reybold, bein' the only Whig on the Lake and Bayou Committee, ought to have something if he sees fit to ask for it. That's courtesy! We, of all men, gentlemen, can't afford to forget it."

"No, by durn!" cried Fitzchew Smy.

"You're right, Bee!" cried Box Izard. "You give it a constitutional set."

"Reybold," continued Jeems Bee, thus encouraged, "Reybold is (to speak out) no genius! He never will rise to the summits of usefulness. He lacks the air, the swing, the pose, as the sculptors say; he won't treat, but he'll lend a little money, provided he knows where you goin' with it. If he ain't open-hearted, he ain't precisely mean!"

"You're right, Bee!" (General expression.)

"Further on, it may be said that the framers of the govment never intended all the patronage to go to one side. Mr. Jeffson put that on the steelyard principle: the long beam here, the big weight of being in the minority there. Mr. Jackson only threw it considabul more on one side, but even he, gentlemen, didn't take the whole patronage from the Outs; he always left 'em enough to keep up the courtesy of the thing, and we can't go behind him. Not and be true to our traditions. Do I put it right?"

"Bee," said the youthful Lowndes Cleburn, extending his hand, "you put it with the lucidity and spirituality of Kulhoon himself!"

"Thanks, Cleburn," said Bee; "this is a compliment not likely to be forgotten, coming from you. Then it is agreed, as the Chayman of yo' Committee, that I accede to the request of Mr. Reybold, of Pennsylvania?"

"Aye!" from everybody.

"And now," said Mr. Bee, "as we wair all up late at the club last night, I propose we take a second julep, and as Reybold is coming in he will jine us."

"I won't give you a farthing!" cried Reybold at the door, speaking to some one. "Chips, indeed! What shall I give you money to gamble away for? A gambling beggar is worse than an impostor! No, sir! Emphatically no!"

"A dollar for four chips for brave old Beau!" said the other voice. "I've struck 'em all but you. By the State Arms! I've got rights in this distreek! Everybody pays toll to brave old Beau! Come down!"

The Northern Congressman retreated before this pertinacious mendicant into his committee-room, and his pesterer followed him closely, nothing abashed, even into the privileged cloisters of the committee. The Southern members enjoyed the situation.

"Chips, Right Honorable! Chips for old Beau. Nobody this ten-year has run as long as you. I've laid for you, and now I've fell on you. Judge Bee, the fust business befo' yo' committee this mornin' is a assessment for old Beau, who's away down! Rheumatiz, bettin' on the black, failure of remittances from Fauqueeah, and other casualties by wind an' flood, have put ole Beau away down. He's a institution of his country and must be sustained!"

The laughter was general and cordial amongst the Southerners, while the intruder pressed hard upon Mr. Reybold. He was a singular object; tall, grim, half-comical, with a leer of low familiarity in his eves, but his waxed mustache of military proportions, his patch of goatee just above the chin, his elaborately oiled hair and flaming necktie, set off his faded face with an odd gear of finery and impressiveness. His skin was that of an old roue's, patched up and calked, but the features were those of a once handsome man of style and carriage.

He wore what appeared to be a cast-off spring overcoat, out of season and color on this blustering winter day, a rich buff waistcoat of an embossed pattern, such as few persons would care to assume, save, perhaps, a gambler, negro buyer, or fine "buck" barber. The assumption of a large and flashy pin stood in his frilled shirt-bosom. He wore watch-seals without the accompanying watch, and his pantaloons, though faded and threadbare, were once of fine material and cut in a style of extravagant elegance, and they covered his long, shrunken, but aristocratic limbs, and were strapped beneath his boots to keep them shapely. The boots themselves had been once of varnished kid or fine calf, but they were cracked and cut, partly by use, partly for comfort; for it was plain that their wearer had the gout, by his aristocratic hobble upon a gold-mounted cane, which was not the least inconsistent garniture of his mendicancy.

"Boys," said Fitzchew Smy, "I s'pose we better come down early. There's a shillin', Beau. If I had one more sech constituent as you, I should resign or die premachorely!"

"There's a piece o' tobacker," said Jeems Bee languidly, "all I can afforde, Beau, this mornin'. I went to a chicken-fight yesterday and lost all my change."

"Mine," said Box Izard, "is a regulation pen-knife, contributed by the United States, with the regret, Beau, that I can't 'commodate you with a pine coffin for you to git into and git away down lower than you ever been."

"Yaw's a dollar," said Pontotoc Bibb; "it'll do for me an' Lowndes Cleburn, who's a poet and genius, and never has no money. This buys me off, Beau, for a month."

The gorgeous old mendicant took them all grimly and leering, and then pounced upon the Northern man, assured by their twinkles and winks that the rest expected some sport.

"And now, Right Honorable from the banks of the Susquehanna, Colonel Reybold—you see, I got your name; I ben a layin' for you!—come down handsome for the Uncle and ornament of his capital and country. What's yore's?"

"Nothing," said Reybold in a quiet way. "I cannot give a man like you any thing, even to get rid of him."

"You're mean," said the stylish beggar, winking to the rest. "You hate to put your hand down in yer pocket, mightily. I'd rather be ole Beau, and live on suppers at the faro banks, than love a dollar like you!"

"I'll make it a V for Beau," said Pontotoc Bibb, "if he gives him a rub on the raw like that another lick. Durn a mean man, Cleburn!"

"Come down, Northerner," pressed the incorrigible loafer again; "it don't become a Right Honorable to be so mean with old Beau."

The little boy on crutches, who had been looking at this scene in a state of suspense and interest for some time, here cried hotly:

"If you say Mr. Reybold is a mean man, you tell a story, you nasty beggar! He often gives things to me and Joyce, my sister. He's just got me work, which is the best thing to give; don't you think so, gentlemen?"

"Work," said Lowndes Cleburn, "is the best thing to give away, and the most onhandy thing to keep. I like play the best—Beau's kind o' play."

"Yes," said Jeroboam Coffee; "I think I prefer to make the chips fly out of a table more than out of a log."

"I like to work!" cried the little boy, his hazel eyes shining, and his poor, narrow body beating with unconscious fervor, half suspended on his crutches, as if he were of that good descent and natural spirit which could assert itself without bashfulness in the presence of older people. "I like to work for my mother. If I was strong, like other little boys, I would make money for her, so that she shouldn't keep any boarders—except Mr. Reybold. Oh! she has to work a lot; but she's proud and won't tell anybody. All the money I get I mean to give her; but I wouldn't have it if I had to beg for it like that man!"

"O Beau," said Colonel Jeems Bee, "you've cotched it now! Reybold's even with you. Little Crutch has cooked your goose! Crutch is right eloquent when his wind will permit."

The fine old loafer looked at the boy, whom he had not previously noticed, and it was observed that the last shaft had hurt his pride. The boy returned his wounded look with a straight, undaunted, spirited glance, out of a child's nature. Mr. Reybold was impressed with something in the attitude of the two, which made him forget his own interest in the controversy.

Beau answered with a tone of nearly tender pacification:

"Now, my little man; come, don't be hard on the old veteran! He's down, old Beau is, sence the time he owned his blooded pacer and dined with the Corps Diplomatique; Beau's down sence then; but don't call the old feller hard names. We take it back, don't we?—we take them words back?"

"There's a angel somewhere," said Lowndes Cleburn, "even in a Washington bummer, which responds to a little chap on crutches with a clear voice. Whether the angel takes the side of the bummer or the little chap, is a p'int out of our jurisdiction. Abe, give Beau a julep. He seems to have been demoralized by little Crutch's last."

"Take them hard words back, Bub," whined the licensed mendicant, with either real or affected pain; "it's a p'int of honor I'm a standin' on. Do, now, little Major!"

"I shan't!" cried the boy. "Go and work like me. You're big, and you called Mr. Reybold mean. Haven't you got a wife or little girl, or nobody to work for? You ought to work for yourself, anyhow. Oughtn't he, gentlemen?"

Reybold, who had slipped around by the little cripple and was holding him in a caressing way from behind, looked over to Beau and was even more impressed with that generally undaunted worthy's expression. It was that of acute and suffering sensibility, perhaps the effervescence of some little remaining pride, or it might have been a twinge of the gout. Beau looked at the little boy, suspended there with the weak back and the narrow chest, and that scintillant, sincere spirit beaming out with courage born in the stock he belonged to. Admiration, conciliation, and pain were in the ruined vagrant's eyes. Reybold felt a sense of pity. He put his hand in his pocket and drew forth a dollar.

"Here, Beau," he said, "I'll make an exception. You seem to have some feeling. Don't mind the boy!"

In an instant the coin was flying from his hand through the air. The beggar, with a livid face and clinched cane, confronted the Congressman like a maniac.

"You bilk!" he cried. "You supper customer! I'll brain you! I had rather parted with my shoes at a dolly shop and gone gadding the hoof, without a doss to sleep on—a town pauper, done on the vag—than to have made been scurvy in the sight of that child and deserve his words of shame!"

He threw his head upon the table and burst into tears.

II.—HASH.

Mrs. Tryphonia Basil kept a boarding-house of the usual kind on Four-and-a-Half Street. Male clerks—there were no female clerks in the Government in 1854—to the number of half a dozen, two old bureau officers, an architect's assistant, Reybold, and certain temporary visitors made up the table. The landlady was the mistress; the slave was Joyce.

Joyce Basil was a fine-looking girl, who did not know it—a fact so astounding as to be fitly related only in fiction. She did not know it, because she had to work so hard for the boarders and her mother. Loving her mother with the whole of her affection, she had suffered all the pains and penalties of love from that repository. She was to-day upbraided for her want of coquetry and neatness; to-morrow, for proposing to desert her mother and elope with a person she had never thought of. The mainstay of the establishment, she was not aware of her usefulness. Accepting every complaint and outbreak as if she deserved it, the poor girl lived at the capital a beautiful scullion, an unsalaried domestic, and daily forwarded the food to the table, led in the chamberwork, rose from bed unrested and retired with all her bones aching. But she was of a natural grace that hard work could not make awkward; work only gave her bodily power, brawn, and form. Though no more than seventeen years of age, she was a superb woman, her chest thrown forward, her back like the torso of a Venus de Milo, her head placed on the throat of a Minerva, and the nature of a child moulded in the form of a matron. Joyce Basil had black hair and eyes—very long, excessive hair, that in the mornings she tied up with haste so imperfectly, that once Reybold had seen it drop like a cloud around her and nearly touch her feet. At that moment, seeing him, she blushed. He plead, for once, a Congressman's impudence, and without her objection, wound that great crown of woman's glory around her head, and, as he did so, the perfection of her form and skin, and the overrunning health and height of the Virginia girl, struck him so thoroughly that he said:

"Miss Joyce, I don't wonder that Virginia is the mother of Presidents."

Between Reybold and Joyce there were already the delicate relations of a girl who did not know that she was a woman, and a man who knew she was beautiful and worthy. He was a man vigilant over himself, and the poverty and menial estate of Joyce Basil were already insuperable obstacles to marrying her, but still he was attracted by her insensibility that he could ever have regarded her in that light of marriage. "Who was her father, the Judge?" he used to reflect. The Judge was a favorite topic with Mrs. Basil at the table.

"Mr. Reybold," she would say, "you commercial people of the Nawth can't hunt, I believe. Jedge Basil is now on the mountains of Fawquear hunting the plova. His grandfather's estate is full of plova."

If, by chance, Reybold saw a look of care on Mrs. Basil's face, he inquired for the Judge, her husband, and found he was still shooting on the Occequan.

"Does he never come to Washington, Mrs. Basil?" asked Reybold one day, when his mind was very full of Joyce, the daughter.

"Not while Congress is in session," said Mrs. Basil. "It's a little too much of the oi polloi for the Judge. His family, you may not know, Mr. Reybold, air of the Basils of King George. They married into the Tayloze of Mount Snaffle. The Tayloze of Mount Snaffle have Ingin blood in their veins—the blood of Poky-huntus. They dropped the name of Taylor, which had got to be common through a want of Ingin blood, and spelled it with a E. It used to be Taylor, but now it's Tayloze."

On another occasion, at sight of Joyce Basil cooking over the fire, against whose flame her moulded arms took momentary roses upon their ivory, Reybold said to himself: "Surely there is something above the common in the race of this girl." And he asked the question of Mrs. Basil:

"Madame, how was the Judge, your husband, at the last advices?"

"Hunting the snipe, Mr. Reybold. I suppose you do not have the snipe in the North. It is the aristocratic fowl of the Old Dominion. Its bill is only shorter than its legs, and it will not brown at the fire, to perfection, unless upon a silver spit. Ah! when the Jedge and myself were young, before his land troubles overtook us, we went to the springs with our own silver and carriages, Mr. Reybold."

Looking up at Mrs. Basil, Reybold noticed a pallor and flush alternately, and she evaded his eye.

Once Mrs. Basil borrowed a hundred dollars from Reybold in advance of board, and the table suffered in consequence.

"The Judge," she had explained, "is short of taxes on his Fawquear lands. It's a desperate moment with him." Yet in two days the Judge was shooting blue-winged teal at the mouth of the Accotink, and his entire indifference to his family set Reybold to thinking whether the Virginia husband and father was any thing more than a forgetful savage. The boarders, however, made very merry over the absent unknown. If the beefsteak was tough, threats were made to send for "the Judge," and let him try a tooth on it; if scant, it was suggested that the Judge might have paid a gunning visit to the premises and inspected the larder. The daughter of the house kept such an even temper, and was so obliging within the limitations of the establishment, that many a boarder went to his department without complaint, though with an appetite only partly satisfied. The boy, Uriel, also was the guardsman of the household, old-faced as if with the responsibility of taking care of two women. Indeed, the children of the landlady were so well behaved and prepossessing that, compared with Mrs. Basil's shabby hauteur and garrulity, the legend of the Judge seemed to require no other foundation than offspring of such good spirit and intonation.

Mrs. Tryphonia Basil was no respecter of persons. She kept boarders, she said, as a matter of society, and to lighten the load of the Judge. He had very little idea that she was making a mercantile matter of hospitality, but, as she feelingly remarked, "the old families are misplaced in such times as these yer, when the departments are filled with Dutch, Yankees, Crackers, Pore Whites, and other foreigners." Her manner was, at periods, insolent to Mr. Reybold, who seldom protested, out of regard to the daughter and the little Page; he was a man of quite ordinary appearance, saying little, never making speeches or soliciting notice, and he accepted his fare and quarters with little or no complaint.

"Crutch," he said one day to the little boy, "did you ever see your father?"

"No, I never saw him, Mr. Reybold, but I've had letters from him."

"Don't he ever come to see you when you are sick?"

"No. He wanted to come once when my back was very sick, and I laid in bed weeks and weeks, sir, dreaming, oh! such beautiful things. I thought mamma and sister and I were all with papa in that old home we are going to some day. He carried me up and down in his arms, and I felt such rest that I never knew any thing like it, when I woke up, and my back began to ache again. I wouldn't let mamma send for him, though, because she said he was working for us all to make our fortunes, and get doctors for me, and clothes and school for dear Joyce. So I sent him my love, and told papa to work, and he and I would bring the family out all right."

"What did your papa seem like in that dream, my little boy?

"Oh! sir, his forehead was bright as the sun. Sometimes I see him now when I am tired at night after running all day through Congress."

Reybold's eyes were full of tears as he listened to the boy, and, turning aside, he saw Joyce Basil weeping also.

"My dear girl," he said to her, looking up significantly, "I fear he will see his great Father very soon."

Reybold had few acquaintances, and he encouraged the landlady's daughter to go about with him when she could get a leisure hour or evening. Sometimes they took a seat at the theatre, more often at the old Ascension Church, and once they attended a President's reception. Joyce had the bearing of a well-bred lady, and the purity of thought of a child. She was noticed as if she had been a new and distinguished arrival in Washington.

"Ah! Reybold," said Pontotoc Bibb, "I understand, ole feller, what keeps you so quiet now. You've got a wife onbeknown to the Kemittee! and a happy man I know you air."

It pleased Reybold to hear this, and deepened his interest in the landlady's family. His attention to her daughter stirred Mrs. Basil's pride and revolt together.

"My daughter, Colonel Reybold," she said, "is designed for the army. The Judge never writes to me but he says: 'Tryphonee, be careful that you impress upon my daughter the importance of the military profession. My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother married into the army, and no girl of the Basil stock shall descend to civil life while I can keep the Fawquear estates.'"

"Madame," said the Congressman, "will you permit me to make the suggestion that your daughter is already a woman and needs a father's care, if she is ever to receive it. I beseech you to impress this subject upon the Judge. His estates cannot be more precious to his heart, if he is a man of honor; nay, what is better than honor, his duty requires him to come to the side of these children, though he be ever so constrained by business or pleasure to attend to more worldly concerns."

"The Judge," exclaimed Mrs. Basil, much miffed, "is a man of hereditary ijees, Colonel Reybold. He is now in pursuit of the—ahem!—the Kinvas-back on his ancestral waters. If he should hear that you suggested a pacific life and the grovelling associations of the capital for him, he might call you out, sir!"

Reybold said no more; but one evening when Mrs. Basil was absent, called across the Potomac, as happened frequently, at the summons of the Judge—and on such occasions she generally requested a temporary loan or a slight advance of board—Reybold found Joyce Basil in the little parlor of the dwelling. She was alone and in tears, but the little boy Uriel slept before the chimney-fire on a rug, and his pale, thin face, catching the glow of the burning wood, looked beautified as Reybold addressed the young woman.

"Miss Joyce," he said, "our little brother works too hard. Is there never to be relief for him? His poor, withered body, slung on those crutches for hours and hours, racing up the aisles of the House with stronger pages, is wearing him out. His ambition is very interesting to see, but his breath is growing shorter and his strength is frailer every week. Do you know what it will lead to?"

"O my Lord!" she said, in the negrofied phrase natural to her latitude, "I wish it was no sin to wish him dead."

"Tell me, my friend," said Reybold, "can I do nothing to assist you both? Let me understand you. Accept my sympathy and confidence. Where is Uriel's father? What is this mystery?"

She did not answer.

"It is for no idle curiosity that I ask," he continued. "I will appeal to him for his family, even at the risk of his resentment. Where is he?"

"Oh, do not ask!" she exclaimed. "You want me to tell you only the truth. He is there!"

She pointed to one of the old portraits in the room—a picture fairly painted by some provincial artist—and it revealed a handsome face, a little voluptuous but aristocratic, the shoulders clad in a martial cloak, the neck in ruffles and ruffles, also and a diamond in the shirt bosom. Reybold studied it with all his mind.

"Then it is no fiction," he said, "that you have a living father, one answering to your mother's description. Where have I seen that face? Has some irreparable mistake, some miserable controversy, alienated him from his wife? Has he another family?"

She answered with spirit:

"No, sir. He is my father and my brother's only. But I can tell you no more."

"Joyce," he said, taking her hand, "this is not enough. I will not press you to betray any secret you may possess. Keep it. But of yourself I must know something more. You are almost a woman. You are beautiful."

At this he tightened his grasp, and it brought him closer to her side. She made a little struggle to draw away, but it pleased him to see that when the first modest opposition had been tried she sat quite happily, though trembling, with his arm around her.

"Joyce," he continued, "you have a double duty: one to your mother and this poor invalid, whose journey toward that Father's house not made with hands is swiftly hastening; another duty toward your nobler self—the future that is in you and your woman's heart. I tell you again that you are beautiful, and the slavery to which you are condemning yourself forever is an offence against the creator of such perfection. Do you know what it is to love?"

"I know what it is to feel kindness," she answered after a time of silence. "I ought to know no more. You goodness is very dear to me. We never sleep, brother and I, but we say your name together, and ask God to bless you."

Reybold sought in vain to suppress a confession he had resisted. The contact of her form, her large dark eyes now fixed upon him in emotion, the birth of the conscious woman in the virgin and her affection still in the leashes of a slavish sacrifice, tempted him onward to the conquest.

"I am about to retire from Congress," he said. "It is no place for me in times so insubstantial. There is darkness and beggary ahead for all your Southern race. There is a crisis coming which will be followed by desolation. The generation to which your parents belong is doomed! I open my arms to you, dear girl, and offer you a home never yet gladdened by a wife. Accept it, and leave Washington with me and with your brother. I love you wholly."

A happy light shone in her face a moment. She was weary to the bone with the day's work, and had not the strength, if she had the will, to prevent the Congressman drawing her to his heart. Sobbing there, she spoke with bitter agony:

"Heaven bless you, dear Mr. Reybold, with a wife good enough to deserve you! Blessings on your generous heart. But I cannot leave Washington. I love another here!"

III.—DUST.

The Lake and Bayou Committee reaped the reward of a good action. Crutch, the page, as they all called Uriel Basil, affected the sensibility of the whole committee to the extent that profanity almost ceased there, and vulgarity became a crime in the presence of a child. Gentle words and wishes became the rule; a glimmer of reverence and a thought of piety were not unknown in that little chamber.

"Dog my skin!" said Jeems Bee, "if I ever made a 'pintment that give me sech satisfaction! I feel as if I had sot a nigger free!"

The youthful abstractionist, Lowndes Cleburn, expressed it even better. "Crutch," he said, "is like a angel reduced to his bones. Them air wings or pinions, that he might have flew off with, being a pair of crutches, keeps him here to tarry awhile in our service. But, gentlemen, he's not got long to stay. His crutches is growing too heavy for that expandin' sperit. Some day we'll look up and miss him through our tears."

They gave him many a present; they put a silver watch in his pocket, and dressed him in a jacket with gilt buttons. He had a bouquet of flowers to take home every day to that marvellous sister of whom he spoke so often; and there were times when the whole committee, seeing him drop off to sleep as he often did through frail and weary nature, sat silently watching lest he might be wakened before his rest was over. But no persuasion could take him off the floor of Congress. In that solemn old Hall of Representatives, under the semicircle of gray columns, he darted with agility from noon to dusk, keeping speed upon his crutches with the healthiest of the pages, and racing into the document-room; and through the dark and narrow corridors of the old Capitol loft, where the House library was lost in twilight. Visitors looked with interest and sympathy at the narrow back and body of this invalid child, whose eyes were full of bright, beaming spirit. He sometimes nodded on the steps by the Speaker's chair; and these spells of dreaminess and fatigue increased as his disease advanced upon his wasting system. Once he did not awaken at all until adjournment. The great Congress and audience passed out, and the little fellow still slept, with his head against the Clerk's desk, while all the other pages were grouped around him, and they finally bore him off to the committee-room in their arms, where, amongst the sympathetic watchers, was old Beau. When Uriel opened his eyes the old mendicant was looking into them.

"Ah! little Major," he said, "poor Beau has been waiting for you to take those bad words back. Old Beau thought it was all bob with his little cove."

"Beau," said the boy, "I've had such a dream! I thought my dear father, who is working so hard to bring me home to him, had carried me out on the river in a boat. We sailed through the greenest marshes, among white lilies, where the wild ducks were tame as they can be. All the ducks were diving and diving, and they brought up long stalks of celery from the water and gave them to us. Father ate all his. But mine turned into lilies and grew up so high that I felt myself going with them, and the higher I went the more beautiful grew the birds. Oh! let me sleep and see if it will be so again."

The outcast raised his gold-headed cane and hobbled up and down the room with a laced handkerchief at his eyes.

"Great God!" he exclaimed, "another generation is going out, and here I stay without a stake, playing a lone hand forever and forever."

"Beau," said Reybold, "there's hope while one can feel. Don't go away until you have a good word from our little passenger."

The outstretched hand of the Northern Congressman was not refused by the vagrant, whose eccentric sorrow yet amused the Southern Committeemen.

"Ole Beau's jib-boom of a mustache 'll put his eye out," said Pontotoc Bibb, "ef he fetches another groan like that."

"Beau's very shaky around the hams an' knees," said Box Izard; "he's been a good figger, but even figgers can lie ef they stand up too long."

The little boy unclosed his eyes and looked around on all those kindly, watching faces.

"Did anybody fire a gun?" he said. "Oh! no. I was only dreaming that I was hunting with father, and he shot at the beautiful pheasants that were making such a whirring of wings for me. It was music. When can I hunt with father, dear gentlemen?"

They all felt the tread of the mighty hunter before the Lord very near at hand; the hunter whose name is Death.

"There are little tiny birds along the beach," muttered the boy. "They twitter and run into the surf and back again, and am I one of them? I must be; for I feel the water cold, and yet I see you all, so kind to me! Don't whistle for me now; for I don't get much play, gentlemen! Will the Speaker turn me out if I play with the beach birds just once? I'm only a little boy working for my mother."

"Dear Uriel," whispered Reybold, "here's Old Beau, to whom you once spoke angrily. Don't you see him?"

The little boy's eyes came back from far-land somewhere, and he saw the ruined gamester at his feet.

"Dear Beau," he said, "I can't get off to go home with you. They won't excuse me, and I give all my money to mother. But you go to the back gate. Ask for Joyce. She'll give you a nice warm meal every day. Go with him, Mr. Reybold! If you ask for him it will be all right; for Joyce—dear Joyce!—she loves you."

The beach birds played again along the strand; the boy ran into the foam with his companions and felt the spray once more. The Mighty Hunter shot his bird—a little cripple that twittered the sweetest of them all. Nothing moved in the solemn chamber of the committee but the voice of an old forsaken man, sobbing bitterly.

IV.—CAKE.

The funeral was over, and Mr. Reybold marvelled much that the Judge had not put in an appearance. The whole committee had attended the obsequies of Crutch and acted as pall-bearers. Reybold had escorted the page's sister to the Congressional cemetery, and had observed even Old Beau to come with a wreath of flowers and hobble to the grave and deposit them there. But the Judge, remorseless in death as frivolous in life, never came near his mourning wife and daughter in their severest sorrow. Mrs. Tryphonia Basil, seeing that this singular want of behavior on the Judge's part was making some ado, raised her voice above the general din of meals.

"Jedge Basil," she exclaimed, "has been on his Tennessee purchase. These Christmas times there's no getting through the snow in the Cumberland Gap. He's stopped off thaw to shoot the—ahem!—the wild torkey—a great passion with the Jedge. His half-uncle, Gineral Johnson, of Awkinso, was a torkey-killer of high celebrity. He was a Deshay on his Maw's side. I s'pose you haven't the torkey in the Dutch country, Mr. Reybold?"

"Madame," said Reybold, in a quieter moment, "have you written to the Judge the fact of his son's death?"

"Oh yes—to Fawquear."

"Mrs. Basil," continued the Congressman, "I want you to be explicit with me. Where is the Judge, your husband, at this moment?"

"Excuse me, Colonel Reybold, this is a little of a assumption, sir. The Jedge might call you out, sir, for intruding upon his incog. He's very fine on his incog., you air awair."

"Madame," exclaimed Reybold straightforwardly, "there are reasons why I should communicate with your husband. My term in Congress is nearly expired. I might arouse your interest, if I chose, by recalling to your mind the memorandum of about seven hundred dollars in which you are my debtor. That would be a reason for seeing your husband anywhere north of the Potomac, but I do not intend to mention it. Is he aware—are you?—that Joyce Basil is in love with some one in this city?"

Mrs. Basil drew a long breath, raised both hands, and ejaculated: "Well, I declaw!"

"I have it from her own lips," continued Reybold. "She told me as a secret, but all my suspicions are awakened. If I can prevent it, madame, that girl shall not follow the example of hundreds of her class in Washington, and descend, through the boarding-house or the lodging quarter, to be the wife of some common and unambitious clerk, whose penury she must some day sustain by her labor. I love her myself, but I will never take her until I know her heart to be free. Who is this lover of your daughter?"

An expression of agitation and cunning passed over Mrs. Basil's face.

"Colonel Reybold," she whined, "I pity your blasted hopes. If I was a widow, they should be comfoted. Alas! my daughter is in love with one of the Fitzchews of Fawqueeah. His parents is cousins of the Jedge, and attached to the military."

The Congressman looked disappointed, but not yet satisfied.

"Give me at once the address of your husband," he spoke. "If you do not, I shall ask your daughter for it, and she cannot refuse me."

The mistress of the boarding-house was not without alarm, but she dispelled it with an outbreak of anger.

"If my daughter disobeys her mother," she cried, "and betrays the Jedge's incog., she is no Basil, Colonel Reybold. The Basils repudiate her, and she may jine the Dutch and other foreigners at her pleasure."

"That is her only safety," exclaimed Reybold. "I hope to break every string that holds her to yonder barren honor and exhausted soil."

He pointed toward Virginia, and hastened away to the Capitol. All the way up the squalid and muddy avenue of that day he mused and wondered: "Who is Fitzhugh? Is there such a person any more than a Judge Basil? And yet there is a Judge, for Joyce has told me so. She, at least, cannot lie to me. At last," he thought, "the dream of my happiness is over. Invincible in her prejudice as all these Virginians, Joyce Basil has made her bed amongst the starveling First Families, and there she means to live and die. Five years hence she will have her brood around her. In ten years she will keep a boarding-house and borrow money. As her daughters grow up to the stature and grace of their mother, they will be proud and poor again and breed in and out, until the race will perish from the earth."

Slow to love, deeply interested, baffled but unsatisfied, Reybold made up his mind to cut his perplexity short by leaving the city for the county of Fauquier. As he passed down the avenue late that afternoon, he turned into E Street, near the theatre, to engage a carriage for his expedition. It was a street of livery-stables, gambling dens, drinking houses, and worse; murders had been committed along its sidewalks. The more pretentious canaille of the city harbored there to prey on the hotels close at hand and aspire to the chance acquaintance of gentlemen. As Reybold stood in an archway of this street, just as the evening shadows deepened above the line of sunset, he saw something pass which made his heart start to his throat and fastened him to the spot. Veiled and walking fast, as if escaping detection or pursuit, the figure of Joyce Basil flitted over the pavement and disappeared in a door about at the middle of this Alsatian quarter of the capital.

"What house is that?" he asked of a constable passing by, pointing to the door she entered.

"Gambling den," answered the officer. "It used to be old Phil Pendleton's."

Reybold knew the reputation of the house: a resort for the scions of the old tide-water families, where hospitality thinly veiled the paramount design of plunder. The connection established the truth of Mrs. Basil's statement. Here, perhaps, already married to the dissipated heir of some unproductive estate, Joyce Basil's lot was cast forever. It might even be that she had been tempted here by some wretch whose villainy she knew not of. Reybold's brain took fire at the thought, and he pursued the fugitive into the doorway. A negro steward unfastened a slide and peeped at Reybold knocking in the hall; and, seeing him of respectable appearance, bowed ceremoniously as he let down a chain and opened the door.

"Short cards in the front saloon," he said; "supper and faro back. Chambers on the third floor. Walk up."

Reybold only tarried a moment at the gaming tables, where the silent, monotonous deal from the tin box, the lazy stroke of the markers, and the transfer of ivory "chips" from card to card of the sweat-cloth, impressed him as the dullest form of vice he had ever found. Treading softly up the stairs, he was attracted by the light of a door partly ajar, and a deep groan, as of a dying person. He peeped through the crack of the door, and beheld Joyce Basil leaning over an old man, whose brow she moistened with her handkerchief. "Dear father," he heard her say, and it brought consolation to more than the sick man. Reybold threw open the door and entered into the presence of Mrs. Basil and her daughter. The former arose with surprise and shame, and cried:

"Jedge Basil, the Dutch have hunted you down. He's here—the Yankee creditor."

Joyce Basil held up her hand in imploration, but Reybold did not heed the woman's remark. He felt a weight rising from his heart, and the blindness of many months lifted from his eyes. The dying mortal upon the bed, over whose face the blue billow of death was rolling rapidly, and whose eyes sought in his daughter's the promise of mercy from on high, was the mysterious parent who had never arrived—the Judge from Fauquier. In that old man's long waxed mustache, crimped hair, and threadbare finery the Congressman recognized Old Beau, the outcast gamester and mendicant, and the father of Joyce and Uriel Basil.