Covenanters the Doctor began joking to himself, as he walked along, humming some tune, about how the spirit of every sect came out, always alike, in the temperament, the very cut of the face, or whim of accent. These descendants of the Covenanters, now, - Presbyterian elders and their wives, going down to camp to bid their boys good-bye, devoted them to death with just as stern integrity, as partial a view of the right, as their ancestors did theirs at Naseby or Drumclog their religion loved its friends and hated its enemies just as bitterly as when it scowled at Monmouth; the "boys," no doubt, would call themselves Roundheads, as they had done in the three months' service. Paul Blecker, who had seen a good many sides of the world, laughed to himself: the very Captain here, good, anxious, innocent as a baby, as he was, looked at the world exactly through Balfour of Burley's dead eyes, was going to cure the disease of it by the old pill of intolerance and bigotry. wonder Paul laughed.

No

The sobered Quaker evening was making ready for night: the yellow warmth overhead thinning into tintless space; the low hills drawing farther off in the melancholy light; the sky sinking nearer; clouds, unsteady all day, softened at last into a thoughtful purple, and couching themselves slowly in the hollows of the horizon; the sweep of cornfields and woods and distant farms growing dim, daguerreotype-like; the tinkle of the sheep-bells on the meadows, the shouts of the boys in camp yonder, the bass drone of the frogs in the swamp dulling down into the remoteness of sleep. The Doctor slackened his sharp, jerking stride, and fell into the monotonous gait of his companion, glancing up to him. McKinstry, he thought, was going out to battle to-morrow with just as cool phlegm and childlike content as he would set out to buy his merino ewes; but he would receive no pay,-meant to transfer it to his And he would be in the thickest of the fight, you might bet on that. Umph! his quick eyes darting over the

men.

---

big, leisurely frame, the neat yellow hair, and the blue eyes mildly peering through spectacles. Then, having satisfactorily anatomized McKinstry, he turned to the evening again with open senses, the sensitive pulsing of his wide nostrils telling that even the milky scent of the full-uddered cows gave him keen enjoyment. The cows were going home from pasture, up shady barn-lanes, into the grayer shadows about the houses on either side of the road, in whose windows lights were beginning to glimmer. Solid old homesteads they were, stone or brick, never wood. Out in these Western settlements, a hundred years ago, they built durable homes, curiously enough, more than in the Northern States; planted oaks about them, that bore the strength of the earth up to heaven in sturdy arms, shaming the graceful, uncertain elm of shallower soils. Just such old farm-houses as those, Blecker thought, would turn out such old-time moulded men as McKinstry: houses whose orchards still held on to the Waldower and Smoke-house apples; their gardens gay with hollyhocks and crimson prince's-feather; on the book-shelves the "Spectator" and "Gentleman's Magazine." The women of them kept up the old-fashioned knitting-parties, and a donation-visit to the pastor once a year; and the men were all gone to the war, to keep the Union as it was in their fathers' time, and would doubtless vote the conservative ticket next election because their fathers did, which would make the war a horrible farce. The town, Blecker thought, had rooted itself in between the hills with as solid a persistence as the prejudices of its builders. Obstinately steep streets, shaded by gnarled locusttrees; houses drawn back from the sidewalks, in surly dread of all new-comers; the very smoke, vaporing through the sky, had defiance in it of the outer barbarous world and its vulgar newness. Yet the town had an honest country heart in it, if it was a bit gray and crusty with age. Blecker, knowing it as he did, did not wonder the boys who left it named a village for it out in Kansas, trying to fancy

--

themselves at home, or that one old beggar in it asked to be buried in the middle of the street, "So 's I kin hear the stages a-comin' in, an' know if the old place is a-gittin' on."

There seemed to be a migration from it to-night: they met, every minute, bug gies, old-fashioned carriages, horsemen. Going out to camp," McKinstry said; "the boys all have some one to bid them good-bye."

66

What a lonely, reserved voice the man had! Blecker had the curiosity of all sensitive men to know the soul-history of people; he glanced again keenly in McKinstry's face. Pshaw! one might as well ask their story from the deaf and dumb. But that they were dumb, - there was hint of a tragedy in that! Everybody stopped to speak to the Doctor. He had been but a few months in the place; but the old church-goers had found him out as a passionate, freeand-easy, honorable fellow, full of joke and anecdote, shrewd, too. They "fellowshipped" with him heartily, and were glad when he got the post of surgeon with their sons. If there were anything more astringent below this, any more real self in the man, held back, belonging to a world outside of theirs, they did not see it. They knew him better, they thought, than they did Daniel McKinstry, who had grown up among them, just as mild and silent when he was a tow-haired boy as now, a man of forty-five. He touched his hat to them now, and went on, while Blecker leaned on the carriage-doors, his brown face aglow with fun, his uneasy fingers drumming boyishly on the panel. Not knowing that through the changeful face, and fierce, pitiful eyes of the boy, the man Paul Blecker looked coolly out, testing, labelling them. The boy in him, that they saw, Nature had made; but years of a hand-to-hand fight with starvation came after, crime, and society, whose work is later than Nature's, and sometimes better done.

"Fine girl!" said the Doctor, touching his hat to Miss Mallard, as she cantered past. "Got a head of her own,

too.

Made a deused good speech, when she presented the flag to-day."

Miss Mallard overheard him, as he intended she should, and blushed a visible acknowledgment. All of her character was visible, well-developed as her body: her timidity showed itself in the unceasing dropping of her eyelid; her arch simplicity in the pouting lips; a coy reserve well, that everywhere, to the very rosette on her retreating slipper; and her patriotism was quite palpable in the color of her Balmoral. She rode Squire Mallard's gray.

"And very well they turn out," sneered Blecker.

"She is a woman," said the Captain, blushing, - differently from the lady, however.

"And if she is?" turning suddenly. "She has the nature of a Bowery rough. Pah, McKinstry! Sexes stand alike with me. If a woman's flesh is weaker-grained a bit, what of that? Whoever would earn esteem must work for it."

The Captain said nothing, stammered a little, then, hoisting his foot on a stump, tied his shoe nervously.

Blecker smiled, a queer, sorrowful smile, as if, oddly enough, he felt sorry for himself.

"I'd like to think of women as you do, Mac," he said. "You never knew many?"

Only two, until now, my mother and little Sarah. They're gone now.” Sarah? The Doctor was silent a moment, thinking. He had heard of a sister of McKinstry's, sick for years with some terrible disease, whom he had nursed until the end. She was Sarah, most likely. Well, that was what his life had been given up for, was it? There was a twitching about McKinstry's wide mouth: Paul looked away from him a moment, and then, glancing furtively back, began again.

"No, I never knew my mother or sister, Mac. The great discovery of this age is woman, old fellow! I've been knocked about too much not to have lost all delusions about them. It did well

enough for the crusading times to hold them as angels in theory, and in practice as idiots; but in these rough-and-tumble days we'd better give 'em their places as flesh and blood, with exactly such wants and passions as men."

The Captain never argued.
"I don't know," he said, dryly.

After that he jogged on in silence, glancing askance at the masculine, selfassertant figure of his companion, - at the face, acrid, unyielding, beneath its surface-heat: ruminating mildly to himself on what a good thing it was for him never to have known any but old-fashioned women. This Blecker, now, had been made by intercourse with such women as those he talked of: he came from the North. The Captain looked at him with a vague, moony compassion: the usual Western'vision of a Yankee female in his head, Bloomer-clad, hatchetfaced, capable of anything, from courting a husband to commanding a ship. (It is all your fault, genuine women of New England! Why don't you come among us, and know your country, and let your country know you? Better learn the meaning of Chicago than of Venice, for your own sakes, believe me.)

They were near the town now, the road crossing a railroad-track, where the hill, chopped apart for the grade, left bare the black stratum of coal, tinged here and there with a bloody brown and whitish shale.

"Hillo! this means iron," said the Doctor, climbing up the bank, cat-like, to break off a bit; "and here's an odd formation, Mac. Take it in to old Gurney."

The Captain cleaned his spectacles with a piece of chamois-leather, put them on, folded the leather and replaced it in its especial place in his pocket, before he took the bit of rock.

"All that finical ceremony he would go through in the face of the enemy," thought Blecker, jumping down on the track.

"Give it to old Gurney, Mac. It will insure you a welcome."

"It is curious, Doctor Blecker. But you".

"I never care to gratify anybody. Besides, the old gentleman and I interdespised. Our instincts cried out, "'Ware dog!' the first day You are a friend of his, eh, Mac?

The Captain's face grew red, like a bashful woman's. He thought Blecker had divined his secret, would haul it out roughly in another moment. If this slangtalking Yankee should take little Lizzy's name into his mouth! But the Doctor was silent, even looked away until the heat on the poor old bachelor's face had died out. He knew McKinstry's thought of that little girl well enough, but he held the child-hearted man's secret tenderly and charily in his hand. Paul Blecker did talk slang and assert himself; but every impulse in him was clean, delicate, liberal. So, Paul remaining silent, the Captain took heart of grace, going down the street, and ventured back to the Gurney question.

"I thought I would accompany you there, Doctor Blecker. They might only think it seemly in me to bid farewell. I"

Blecker nodded. The man had not been able to hide an harassed frown that day under his usual vigor of speech and look. It became more palpable after this; his voice, when he did speak, was fretful, irritable, his lips compressed; he stopped at a village - well to drink, as though his mouth were parched.

you know? Carvings on the walls brought over the mountains, when to bring them by panels was a two-months' journey. There 's queer stories hang about these old Pennsylvania homesteads."

"Bradford? The Gurneys are a new family here, then?"

"Came here but a few years back, from a country farther up the mountains. They 're different from us."

"How, different?" with a keen, surprised glance. "I see they are a newer people than the others; but I thought the village accepted them with shut eyes."

The Captain stammered again.

"Old Father Gurney, as we call him, taught school when they first came, but he gave that up. This section is a good geological field, and he wished to devote himself to that," he went on, evading the question. They live off of those acres at the back of the house since that. You see? Corn, potatoes, buckwheat,-good yield."

ly.

66

She has the upper one for her flowers and her father's birds."

"And Grey, and the twins, and the four boys bedaubed with molasses, and the dog, and the cooking?"

"Stowed away somewhere," the Captain mildly responded.

Dr. Blecker was testy.

"You know Joseph, her brother? I mean our candidate for Congress next term?"

"Yes. Democratic. J. Schuyler Gurney,-give him his name, Mac. Republican last winter. Joseph trims to wind and tide well. I heard him crow like a barn-yard fowl on the Capitol-steps at Washington when Lincoln called for the seventy-five thousand: now, he hashes up Breckinridge's conservative speech for your hickory-backed farmers. Does he support the family, Mac?"

"His election-expenses are heavy."
"Brandy-slings. I know his proclivi-

ties."

McKinstry colored. Dr. Blecker was coarse, an ill-bred man, he suspected, —

McKinstry wondered vaguely at the little Doctor's curious interest in the Gurneys, but went on with his torpid, slow answers. "That eldest girl, I believe, Grey. Cow there, you see, and ducks. He's popular, old Father Gurney. People have a liking for his queer ways, help him collect specimens for his cabinet; the boys bring him birds to stuff, and snakes. If it had n't been for the troubles breaking out, he was on the eve of a most im-por-tant discovery, - the crater of an exhausted volcano in Virginia." McKinstry lowered his voice cautiously. "Fact, Sir. In Mercer County. But the guerrillas interfered with his researches."

"I think it probable. So he stuffs birds, does he?" Blecker's lips closing tighter.

"And keeps the snakes in alcohol. There are shelves in Miss Lizzy's room quite full of them. That lower room it was, but Joseph has taken it for a study.

eyes, as he stood leaning on the gate, looking in at the Fort, for they had reached it by this time. The Captain looked in, too, through the dusky clumps of altheas and plum-trees, at the old stone house, dyed tawny-gray in the evening light, and talked on, the words falling unconscious and simple as a stream of milk. The old plodder was no longer dumb. Blecker had hit on the one valve of the shut-up nature, the obstinate point of self-reliant volition in a life that had been one long drift of circumstance. This old stone house, shaggy with vines, its bloody script of Indian warfare hushed down and covered with modern fruit-trees and sunflowers,- this fort, and the Gurneys within it, stood out in the bare swamped stretch of the man's years, their solitary bit of enchantment. They were bare years,―the forty he had known: Fate had drained them tolerably dry before she flung them to him to accomplish duty in ;- the duty was done now. McKinstry, a mild, common-faced

man, had gone through it for nearly half a century, pleasantly, never called it heroism. It was done. He had time now to stretch his nerves of body and soul with a great sigh of relief, - to see that Duty was, after all, a lean, meagre-faced angel, that Christ sends first, but never meant should be nearest and best. Faith, love, and so, happiness, these were words of more pregnant meaning in the gospel the Helper left us. So McKinstry stood straight up, for the first time in his life, and looked about him. A man, with an adult's blood, muscles, needs; an idle soul which his cramped creed did not fill, hungry domestic instincts, narrow and patient habit; he claimed work and happiness, his right. Of course it came, and tangibly. Into every life God sends an actual messenger to widen and lift it above itself: puerile or selfish the messenger often is, but so straight from Him that the divine radiance clings about it, and all that it touches. We call that love, you remember. A secular affair, according to McKinstry's education, as much as marketing. So when he found that the tawny old house and the quiet little girl in there with the curious voice, which people came for miles to hear, were gaining an undue weight in his life, held, to be plain, all the fairy-land of which his childhood had been cheated, all fierce beauty, aspiration, passionate strength to insult Fate, which his life had never known, he kept the knowledge to himself. It was boyish weakness. He choked it out of thought on Sundays as sacrilege: how could he talk of the Gurney house and Lizzy to that almighty, infinite Vagueness he worshipped? Stalking to and fro, in the outskirts of the churchyard, he used to watch the flutter of the little girl's white dress, as she passed by to "meeting." He could not help it that his great limbs trembled, if the dress touched them, or that he had a mad longing to catch the tired-looking child up to his brawny breast and hold her there forever. But he felt guilty and ashamed that it was so; not knowing that Christ, seeing the pure thrill in his heart, smiled

just as he did long ago when Mary brought the beloved disciple to him.

He never had told little Lizzy that he loved her,— hardly told himself. Why, he was forty-five, and a year or two ago she was sledding down the street with her brothers, a mere yellow-haired baby. He remembered the first time he had noticed her, one Christmas eve; his mother and Sarah were alive then. There was an Italian woman came to the village with a broken hand-organ, a filthy, starving wretch, and Gurney's little girl went with her from house to house in the snow, singing Christmas carols, and handing the tambourine. Everybody said, "Why, you little tot!" and gave her handfuls of silver. Such a wonderful voice she had even then, and looked so chubby and pretty in her little blue cloak and hood; and going about with the woman was such a pure-hearted thing to do. She danced once or twice that day, striking the tambourine, he remembered; the sound of it seemed to put her in a sort of ecstasy, laughing till her eyes were full of tears, and her tangled hair fell all about her red cheeks. She could not help but do it, he believed, for at other times she was shy, terrified, if one spoke to her; but he wished he had not seen her dance then, though she was only a child: dancing, he thought, was as foul and effective a snare as ever came from hell. After that day she used often to come to

the farm to see

his mother and Sarah. They tried to teach her to sew, but she was a lazy little thing, he remembered, with an indulgent smile. And he was "Uncle Dan." So now she was grown up, quite a woman in those years, when she had been with her kinsfolk in New York, she had been taught to sing. Well, well! McKinstry reckoned music as about as useful as the crackling of thorns under a pot; so he never cared to know, what was the fact, that this youngest daughter of Gurney's had one of the purest contralto voices in the States. She came home, grown, but just as shy; only tired, needing care: no one could look in Lizzy Gurney's face without wishing to com