it is the miserable intruder who is most to be pitied. Lovers are buoyed up by the complacency peculiar to their state.

They saw me when it was just too late. For some moments my own discomfort occupied all my thoughts; when I saw anything it was that Elmore was much disconcerted, and that Patsy, despite her conflicting emotions, was not. Patsy plainly felt that her blush at last was justified. She had not expressed unmaidenly emotion about an indifferent stranger, but quite maidenly emotion about her own lover, and amid other emotions she was shyly pleased to have things set right before me. No conventional views about clandestine love affairs imposed upon Patsy; in fact, I don't suppose she had ever heard of any. All betrothals are, I believe, more or less clandestine among her class until actual preparations for the wedding begin, and the most advanced individualism regarding matrimonial contracts prevails in this otherwise unevolved society.

"I am very unfortunate," I stammered. "I beg your pardon a thousand times; but, as I have discovered the secret, I trust you'll accept my congratulations, Elmore," and I found myself with one arm around Patsy and my hand in his.

Elmore was very white, but he had an instinct for ceremonial that came to his aid.

I expressed myself quite sincerely in what I said. My interpretation of the situation was based principally on the absence of any shade of real mortification in little Patsy's pretty confusion and alarm; the alarm was shown in anxious glances at Elmore and had reference to himself alone. She turned her face glowing and dewy up to me, and then buried it on my shoulder in the prettiest way.

Elmore looked dubiously and with some bewilderment at me, and then with a gleam of something like spontaneous tenderness at her. These occasional notes of sincerity in the midst of his unconscious artificiality always particularly aggravated my feeling against him, they so interfered with a ready comprehensible summing-up of him. A man of straw it is easy enough to consider, but a man of straw with organs, passions, affections, this is what tests the knowledge of human nature.

Naturally I took myself and the discreet Tige away as soon as I could. That evening as the stars were coming out I went and stood beside Elmore at the lonely old gate under the holly tree. A whippoorwill was calling in the woods close by.

"Though I can't see any good reason for it," I began, "I feel dreadfully guilty about disturbing you to-day."

He turned with an uneasy look around and a softly whispered "Sh-h-h-h!"

"Indeed, Elmore, you need not be so uncomfortable; I need hardly say I hope that I shall be very careful not to expose a secret I have found out in this way. I know that you must be meaning to act for the best; how could you help it with such a dear little girl to guard!' He looked at me dubiously.

"She is mighty uneducated," he advanced tentatively.

"She is one in a million. She has an exquisite nature and a charming, rational, observant mind" ("much as appearances are against her in falling in love with you," I put in mentally), "and her beauty is delightful."

Elmore's pleased surprise overtopped other feelings for the moment. He had a great faith in my opinion. Had I not spent a winter in Nashville, besides various unguessable experiences in that dim, unpleasant, but impressive world, "the North"?

"I think she has a fine native intellect," he said finally-he always wanted to talk to me about intellect. "But of course before I can marry her she will have to be educated some way, and then my mother would rather see me dead."

"No doubt, but that is a reflection that belonged to an earlier stage of the game. I am afraid there are sad possibilities of constancy in the small Patsy, and that she will wait for you indefinitely instead of throwing you speedily over, as she should do."

Elmore stared.

"Patsy is so clever that I don't doubt that if you began tutoring her a little yourself you could very soon help her to the essential thingan ability to speak and write English as well as the people you 'll take her among."

"I think that is probably a good suggestion, cousin; I shall consider the feasibility of putting it in practice."

It was now dark, but I could see my kinsman's melancholy poet's profile cut against the western sky, and to look at it made me melancholy too. I was glad to leave him and the falling dews and the disconsolate whippoorwill and go into the firelighted house, to toast my shins and tell myself that it was not my affair. I saw that Patsy's fate hung on painfully slender chances, and I was young enough to credit my impression of the seriousness of the issue for her. I resented the way I was disquieting myself on her account.

I need not have been so disturbed about it, for Heaven knows I ceased to concern myself about her soon enough. We came to New York for the winter, and my own life closed in around me, and in two weeks all the world I had left behind was as if it was the creation of a dream.

The next summer we returned South and

went to a little embryonic mountain resort where half a dozen old friends of my mother's with their sons and daughters formed the company. We had not seen any one from Strathboro', and Elmore and Patsy were still in dreamland to me, when one noonday, as I came out of the dining-room upon the vineshaded gallery, one of the servants came to me and said:

"Merky's little Ellen say, Miss Matt, dat dere young white gal down to de kaleebit spring as is wantin' to see you. I tell Merky be mighty becomin' in dat young white gal to come up hyah to you, but she say dat she rekested dat you be tole dat she desire yoh 'sistance. She done tole dat little Ellen huh name, but law, dat chile! she ain't got no mo' hayd on huh-"

I got my hat and started for the chalybeate spring with a misgiving heart. I knew it was Patsy. Yes, there she stood, in a copperasdyed cotton riding-skirt, her white, Sunday, slat sun-bonnet fallen back, as she strained her eyes up the wrong path.

"Patsy!"

"O-O Miss Matty! You 're mighty good to come to me. It were fearful bold an' presumin' in me to send for ye, an' ask ye to come hyer to me. I crave your pardon! You're so good! I've come up from the valley to speak to ye. I did n't know where else on the airth to go, an' I hyern from the preacher that you-uns were hyer."

"Sit down, Patsy-no, come; we will walk over towards the bluff; then we will not be disturbed."

I took her hand as if she were four years old, and comforted and reassured, as if she were four, she walked with me. We sat down on a big log a few rods seemingly from the end of the earth, a great sky breaking through the trees at our feet.

"Now," I said, "tell me all about it." "It 's schoolin'," she answered solemnly, laying her hand upon my knee and gazing in my face.

"Oh, it certainly might be worse. What is it, Patsy dear—you want to go to school?"

"I've worrited Pappy tell he is plum wore out, an' he now say he air willin' to put me to school to git shed of me. Yes, Miss Matty, he sartainly have give his consent, but Miss-Miss Matt, we don't know the fust thing about it, whar to go, nor nothin'; an' ef Pappy have to worry about it, he 'll gin up the whole project. Now he's made up his mine he won't begrudge the money, but I'm skeered of his bein' worrited. When I foun' he was comin' up the mounting, I put in to come along an' ask you to holp me, for I never forgot how good ye ware to me, an'

VOL. XXXVII.—124.

how, though bein' kinsfolks to Elmore, ye pardoned me."

Her face with its brimming eyes was turned up to mine again in her own irresistible flower fashion.

"Elmore teached me some," she said presently.

"I wonder you did n't make up your mind to go to Strathboro' to school, where you'd be near Elmore," I said.

She flushed. "I reckon I-ye see I could n't abear bein' there an' not havin' Elmore take no notice of me; an'," she hurried on to say, "I could n't abear to let him make trouble for hisself by lettin' people see his feelin's as long as I am so unlearned an' backward. I make Elmore be mighty keerful—keerfuller than he likes."

We settled upon a cheap country academy in an adjoining county, where I thought she would be as little discounted as anywhere, and where the head teacher was an acquaintance of mine, whom I hoped to stir up to a little special sympathy and interest.

Patsy returned home that afternoon, riding behind her father, as she came; but she repeated her visit several times during the summer. That season had now sunk into the position of a mere forerunner to the autumn, when school began. I had a beautiful time overseeing her dresses and making her look pretty. She was a very superior sort of doll. Once she staid all night at our cottage. The way in which she waited and watched for suggestions and examples of etiquette at table and elsewhere, yet managed while pursuing that arduous occupation to preserve her own soft, bright, unconscious bearing, was a bit of social skill such as a court might not match in a year.

I am aware how improbable this sounds to the unsentimental observer of country girls, but there was much that was childlike about Patsy-among other things she was plastic like a child. Then too if she was from the backwoods she was also Southern, which in this connection means that wide-reaching, deepreaching Puritanism had played small part in checking her natural instincts of social grace.

Our acquaintances were told nothing about her, but they, particularly the elders, let her pass with a graciousness born of experience of life in a poor and thinly populated and aristocratic country, where anybody may be akin to anybody, and where kinship countsstate of society similar to that in Scotland, especially the Scotland of the past. I feared that the callow school-girls even at Burns's Corners would be less elastic.

- a

I gave little Miss all the points on grammar that it seemed she could digest, and she made

wonderfully good use of them. One day I said, "Do you and Elmore write to each other?"

She colored, and bent over her sewing. The tears had sprung to her eyes, but if I had not been a brute in the way I watched her I never should have known it, she recovered herself so gallantly. In an instant she answered steadfastly:

"Oh, no. He writes to me onct in a while, but in course he don't like to do all the writin', an' ye see my letters would shame him,

"He keeps a-sayin' to me to be true to him," she said once. "I'd rother he 'd feel sure without askin'."

She had plenty of dignity of character, but how was that to teach her to release a lover like this? It simply made her feel his neglects like wounds, without even the solace of indignation.

Patsy was far from loquacious, but at times when favoring conditions started her chirping and twittering she brought forth discriminating remarks. In talking of her brothers she said:

"Ab have the mos' sense, but what's that when Eb have all the determination?"

I wondered how it would be when this coherent intelligence was brought to bear on Elmore's colossal incoherence on something like equal terms. Or could there ever be an approach to equal terms so long as he had those eyes and that smile? They even warped my satisfaction in declaring him a fool.

One day Patsy's father twirled his shapeless old white hat in his hands in uncommon discomfort as he said to me:

"I don't feel no ways at ease in my mine about this schoolin' business for my little gal. Patsy have the bes' head in the house, the bes' head in the house I allus say; I set powerful store by her; she could 'a' hed schoolin' before ef I hed seen the good of it for her. Ef we could all be schooled an' live in Strathboro' there might be profit in it. I'd go through fire an' water to make that little gal happy, but I kint feel at ease in my mine about makin' her differ from all her kith an' kin. I don' see the nex' step satisfactory. I don' see the nex' step."

Sure enough, what would it be? In September my mother and I again left Tennessee. We went abroad and were gone three years. It was as if we had spent that time on another planet. Our foreign post-offices effectually estopped in our Tennessee friends any possible impulses to write to us.

After we returned to America we got an enumeration of events covering the three years, in four pages from my Aunt Sally Kilbraith.

Merriam girls-the second one. Abe Tuckerman has sold his place and is going to Texas. Cousin William has bought it. Elmore Claymore is dead; died a year and a half ago.

Cousin William Anderson is married to one of the

Two months later we sat with the good Aunt Sally around the wood fire in her own room. Uncle John smoked his pipe in the corner.

"Poor Elmore," said Aunt Sally as she was completing a chapter of details about his death and burial. "You did not know of his engagement, did you?"

66

No," said my mother. "Was he engaged to be married?"

"Oh, yes; but it was not generally known at all; is n't now; it 's quite a secret; but, dear me, I don't see any reason for not telling you, so long as you don't speak about it. The girl got us to promise not to let it be known among people here. She is John Penkerman's youngest; Edith is her name. It would have been counted a mighty good match for Elmore. John made a deal of money in those Texas lands, and Edith 's pretty, but I never called her a good match for anybody."

"Why not?" said my mother with a courteous effort at interest. She knew nothing of the other story.

men

"Why, because she is a two-faced, cold, calculating little cat. She loves admiration and to show her power; that's all she ever loved; and she has n't been any too nice, in her way, of getting what she wanted, either. She had no brains; she had to manage her O Mr. Kilbraith! Clarissa and Martha are prudent, if I'm not. You might let me free my mind; they'll be off to the ends of the earth pretty soon, and what they 've heard about people in Strathboro' will make no difference one way or the other. You see I hate the girl, Martha, child, put your foot on that spark, but you don't have to stretch the truth to find plenty to say against her. She'd been flirting with Tom, Dick, and Harry ever since she was fifteen; her looks turned her mammy's head to begin with. She 'd been engaged to half a dozen, more or less, but some way she did n't get married. At last Elmore was put on the list; he was bedazzled with the idea of marrying Edith Penkerman. He did n't know enough, poor fool, to understand that other men looked upon her as being too much of a belle. She and her mother thought, I reckon, that she might do worse; so they kept him in reserve. Don't shake your head at me, Mr. Kilbraith; you know I'm quoting your own words. Well, they kept the engagement mighty secret-gave Elmore some rose-water reason, you know. When he died, lo and behold they were more anxious to keep it quiet than ever, and in less than a year she married this Tom M'Grath, who was hangin' round her all the time, and is a better match than Elmore was. See? I did n't care so tremendous much about Elmore; 't is n't that; but that kind of a female creature, the smooth, pretty, plausible onesLord!"

During the week I learned that there was then on the place a negro woman who had been for years Cousin Nancy's servant. Recently she had married one of my uncle's hands, and was living in a cabin at the back of the orchard. I made occasion to call upon her.

"La, yes, Miss Matt," said she after seating me in her splint-bottom chair before a riffraff fire; "Miss Patsy 's livin', leastwise dat wah my information at las' accoun's. Dey do circalate de repohts dat she ain't long foh dis wohl; an' 'deed I reckon what she ain't. Mighty funny, Miss Matt, how you come to 'member a little slip of poah-white folksy gal like dat all dis time, gallivantin' roun' de wohl like you is too. What Miss Patsy goin' to die ob?

"La, Miss Matty, she nebah wah no 'count

COUSIN NANCY'S SERVANT.

ahtah she went off seekin' lahnin' at dat ah boardin' school. I know a 'ooman what hab a dahtah, a yellah gal, what 's hiahd out at dat school, an' she say dat little Patsy, she say she wuk huh-sef to def at dat school f'om staht. She study an' study huh book much as any two gals, an' not bein' use to it, it woh upon huh; but dat want de whole ob what broke huh down. You know, Miss Matt, when Mahs Elmore die? Well, she home f'om de school foh Sunday dat day when de news come, an' she 'sisted on comin' down hyah to de fun'ral, an' when huh pappy he won't bring huh, she go an' ax a place in Squiah Monsen's wagon, an' dey say what she dat white an' still an' cur'os lookin' out ob huh eyes dat dey was sohey foh huh, an' dey was wonderin' wheddah she was cahin' enti'ly 'bout Mahs Elmore, ah wheddah she was jes natchly wohn out wid school lahnin'. Then dey reckon she wahn't cahin' so much 'bout Mahs Elmore, 'cause she nebah cry na nothin' at the grabe-dat what Miss Monsen's Milly done tole me. But enhow she kotch cole on de way home,-it uz cole weddah,-an' den she hab de lung fevah an' spit blood. She got up out o' dat, but she ain't nebah quit spittin' blood. She boun' to die foh great space o' time. Don't you want

to roas' sweet tater in de ashes, Miss Matty, like you use? La, no, Miss Matty, she ain't at home. She up on de moontain. Huh pappy mighty exohcised 'bout huh, an' he meck huh stay dah, 'cause she done spit so much blood up dah; an' lawsy massy, Miss Matt, what you 'magine-dat gal, dat little snoopin' white-headed gal ob Tim Nonly's ez teachin' school on dat moontain! Yessum, she ez at de Ridge whah you an' Miss Cla'issa was dat summah. I reckon 't is quite poss'ble dat dat gal do know 'nough to teach dat moontain trash. No'm, I done s'pose she well 'nough, but Miss Monsen's Milly she say she mighty res'less tell she know she got dat school. Likely huh pappy ain' so much money ahtah huh schoolin' an' doctorin' to pay huh boahd up dah."

It was spring before I got to the mountain. The day was soft, though the trees here on the summit were still bare, as I walked through a demoralized bit of encroaching forest to the little pen of a schoolhouse where Patsy Nonly was spending her last stores of mortal strength.

The children were tumbling out, dismissed for the day, as I came in sight. When I stood at the door, I saw her, little Patsy, half sitting, half lying, on a bench against the wall.

Yes, she was ill, she was changed, she was older; but what was the meaning of the exquisite, soft happiness illuminating her face through its weariness?

She opened her eyes,- large and dark they looked, and with a little cry came towards me. The tears were running unheeded down her cheeks when she slipped into my arms.

"Miss Matty, Miss Matty! Ah, how glad I am you come; you come in time for me to see you. Now I can speak to you. I can speak his name, my Elmore's name, to some one."

She slipped down on the floor and buried her face in my lap. She did not know! When she looked up she was shining through

her tears.

"You must n't think I'm unhappy because I cry," she said. "I'm goin' to him soon. God has been mighty good to me. But no one but you knows my heart is in the other world. It would n't 'a' seemed right to make his people mad at him by tellin' what he was to me after he was gone, and it's been most more than I had strength for to mourn him in secret, and

There is an interrogation for you! I wanted to escape saying good-bye to her, but after I was in the little wagon that was to carry me down the greening mountain she came for a last word.

She was worn and wan, but the look of a person with a happy secret was in her eyes. She carried a mass of the early wild pink azaleas; she had gathered them herself,- it was a beautiful, life-stirring, spring day, and her errand was to ask me to lay these for her sake on Elmore Claymore's grave.

Viola Roseboro'.