contrast with his severe dress, a complexion singularly fresh, pure, even brilliant in tone, but colorless,—the complexion of health and innocence; in contrast with this from above, a mass of coarse dark-red hair, cut short and everywhere closely curling. Much physical beauty in the head itself,—the shape being noble, the pose creating an impression of dignity; almost none in the face, except in the gray eyes, which were especially eloquent and true. Yet a face not without moral significance or intellectual power; rugged as a rock, but as a rock is made less rugged by a little vine creeping over it, so his was softened by a fine net-work of nerves that wrought out upon it a look of kindness; betraying the first nature of passion, but disciplined to the second nature of patience; youthful, but wearing those unmistakable marks of maturity which mean a fierce early struggle with that vast, undying monster we call the world. On the whole, with the calm, resolute, selfrespecting air of one who, having thus far won in the battle of life, has only a fiercer longing for larger conflict, and whose entire character rests on the noiseless conviction that he is a man and a gentleman.

But deeper insight would have been needed to discover how sincere and earnest a soul he was, how high a value he set on what life had in store for him and on what his life was worth to himself and to others, and how, loving rather to help himself than to be helped, he loved less to be trifled with, and least of all to be seriously hindered.

At this moment he was thinking, as his eyes rested on the watch, that if this were one of his ordinary days he would pursue his ordinary duties: he would go straight up street to the office of Marshall and for the next hour read as many pages of law as possible; then to supper at the Sign of the Spinning-Wheel near the two locust-trees; then walk out into the country for two hours; then back to his room and more law until midnight by the light of his tallow dip.

But this was not an ordinary day,—being one that he had long waited for and was destined never to forget. At dusk the evening before, the post-rider, so tired that he had scarce strength to blow his horn, had ridden into town bringing the mail from Philadelphia; and in this mail there was news for him. At the thought of this he thrust his watch into his pocket, pulled his hat resolutely over his brow, and started rapidly to Main Street, turning thence toward Cross Street,— now known as Broadway. On the outskirts of the town in that direction lay the edge of the forest, stretching away for hundreds of miles toward the Cumberland Mountains.

But he did not get on as fast as he wished. Main Street was swarming with people. He knew everybody, everybody knew him. A patron of the school stopped him to explain why little Jennie had not come to school that day,—poor little Jennie, in whose organism the mysteries of colic and subtraction seemed to be vitally connected, and by working together caused her many absences. A timid young lady paused to ask that he would lend her his copy of " Romeo and Juliet." A group of married ladies closed in around him with a flurry of questions as to why he always took his walk of late toward the woods on the southwestern edge of the town. An old shoemaker, flushed and angry, jumped from his stool at his front window, and begged him to come in and look at a column of figures that wouldn't "add up right," although he had been adding them ever since dinner. At the new book-store he must stop and examine various classics of English literature lately taken off the pack-horses. And when at last he had reached the long open green common of the town, they were holding foot-races there, and three lithe young fellows, stripped and girt for racing, beheld him from the upper end of the course and ran up with the speed of the wind, bantering him for a contest; for he was one of the best runners in the countryside.

But he disengaged himself as quickly as possible, and was soon climbing with long rapid strides the hill where the Federal fort stood during the civil war. Then he slackened his pace. Before him stretched the primeval forest. He entered it, keeping his face turned squarely toward the lowering sun until, having gone about a mile and a half, he came upon evidences of a clearing: felled trees, fields of young maize, orchards, a garden, and in the midst of these a frame dwelling with various comfortable outhouses.

He went on straight toward the house; but as he passed the garden he saw standing in one corner with a rake in her hand a delicatelyformed little woman in homespun, and near her a negro lad dropping garden-seed: so that he approached and leaned over the picket fence.

"How do you do, Mrs. Falconer?"

She turned with a startled cry, dropping the rake and pushing her sunbonnet from her eyes.

"How unkind of you to frighten me!" she said, laughing, and then she came to the fence and gave him her hand,—beautiful, but hardened by work. "I am glad to see you, but I am still more glad that it is not a Shawnee, come to demand my hair."

"I have come to demand something more beautiful than your hair," he replied, laughing also, and with a flush overspreading his face.

"I shall never get used to it," she continued, not heeding his words and not yet recovered from her fright. "We have been living in Kentucky two years, but I shall never get used to this frontier life. It is not the hardship: it is the terror. I have fortitude; I've no courage. These native Kentucky women no more fear anything than so many she-bears defending their cubs. Sometimes I beg Major Falconer to let me go back to Raleigh, so that for one month I may regain the lost art of sound sleep. Do you really believe that the country is safe? They say there is not an Indian this side of the Ohio River, but I hear and see them all the time. If anything frightens the ducks, I get weak with palpitation; and there are times when my own churn out in the yard looks like a squaw. I believe that I have something like Indian cataract forming on both eyes." And she laughed softly.

She had one of the rarest of feminine virtues: she made sport of her own weaknesses instead of those of other people.

Plainly they were good friends; and as he stood leaning over the fence with his hat in his hand and a smile lighting up his face, she went industriously back to the seed-planting.

"How can you retain your self-respect, to stand there idling and see me toiling here in the sweat of my brow, like Eve after she was cursed?"

"Perhaps it is my duty not to interfere with the operation of a divine command."

"There is no divine command that I should plant corn: it is a necessity of the Kentucky backwoods. If I were in North Carolina, and if the major were not an impoverished patriot of the Revolution, I might be lying on a yellow satin sofa, reading Voltaire. Don't you think that Voltaire and yellow satin sofas go together? And, ah, that prayer,' Give us our daily bread/—not make us work for it! I never omit the prayer; but the bread is never given; either I buy it or I work for it, as though I were under the old curse. Perhaps I am; perhaps I belong to the days of Sarah: this is a very primitive world I'm now in. Besides, this is not my work: it's Amy's work. Aren't you willing to work for Amy, John Gray?"

"I'm willing to work for her. But ought I to do her work, so long as she can do it herself? But if the queen sits quietly in the parlor eating bread and honey"

"The queen's not in the parlor eating bread and honey. She has gone to town to stay with Kitty Poythress until after the party. Her uncle was to take her in to-morrow; but no! she and Kitty must see each other to-night; and her uncle must be sure to bring the party finery in the gig to-morrow afternoon. I'm sorry you've had your walk for nothing; but you'll stay to supper?"

"Thank you, but I must go back!"

"If you'll stay, I'll go in and make you a johnny-cake on a new pine shingle and with my own hands."

"Thank you, I really must go back. But if there's a johnny-cake already made, I could easily take it along with me."

"Do stay! Major Falconer will be so disappointed. He said at dinner there were so many things he wanted to talk to you about. He feels certain that he has at last discovered why Ophelia went mad. He hit upon this theory while he was burning brush in the new field. And, then, we have had no news for weeks. The major has been too busy to go to town, and too tired at night to read; and I!—I am as dry as one of the gourds of Confucius."

"Oh, there's news enough. Tell him that a bookbinder has opened a shop On Cross Street,—a capital hand at the business, by the name of Leischman,—and that he will take in exchange, at the regular market prices, linen rags, maple sugar, and goose-quills. I advise you to keep an eye on your geese, if the major once takes a notion to have his old Shakespeare and other volumes, that had their bindings knocked off in crossing the Alleghanies, elegantly rebound. You can tell him, also, that after a squirrel-hunt in Bourbon county the farmers counted scalps and they numbered five thousand five hundred and eighty-nine; so that he is not the only one who has trouble with his corn. And then you can tell him that on the common the other day Nelson Tapp and Willis Tandy had a fearful fight over a land-suit. Now it was Tandy and Tapp; now it was Tapp and Tandy; but they went off at last and drowned themselves, if not their land, in a bowl of sagamity." "And there is no news for me, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes! Much. I am happy to inform you that at Mcllvain's you can now buy the finest Dutch and English qualities of letter-paper, gilt, embossed, or marbled."

"That is not very important."

"Well, then, a saddlery has been opened by two fellows from London, England, and you can now buy Amy a new side-saddle. She needs one."

"Neither is that important. Besides, the major buys the saddles for the family."

"Well, then, as I came out, I passed on Main Street some ladies who accused me of being on my way here, and who impressed upon me that I must tell you of the last displays of women-wear: painted and velvet ribbons, I think they said, and crepe scarfs, and chintzes and nankeens and moreens and sarcenets, and—oh, yes!—some muslinette jackets tamboured with gold and silver. You see, I am like my children: I can remember what I can't understand."

"That is less important still. I adorn myself in homespun."

"Well, then, the Indians fired on the Ohio packet-boat near Three Islands and killed"

"Oh, mercy! I want foreign news!"

"In Holland two thousand cats have been put into the corn-stores, to check the ravages of rats and mice."

"French news 1 do be serious!"

"In New York some Frenchmen, seeing their flag insulted by Englishmen who took it down from the liberty-cap, went up-stairs to the room of an English officer named Codd, seized his regimental coat, and tore it to pieces."

"I'm glad of it! It was a very proper action!"

"But, madam, the man Codd was perfectly innocent!"

"No matter! His coat was guilty. They didn't tear him to pieces: they tore his coat. Are there any new books at the stores?"

"Many. I have spent part of the last three days in looking over them. You can have new copies of your old favorites, Joseph Andrews, Boderick Bandom, or Humphrey Clinker. You can have Goldsmith and Young, and Chesterfield and Addison. There is Don Quixote and Hudibras, Gulliver and Hume, Paley and Butler, Hervey and Watts, Lavater and Trenck, Seneca and Gregory, Nepos and even Aspasia Vindicated,—to say nothing of Abelard and Heloiise and Thomas a Kempis. All the Voltaires have been sold, however, and the Tom Paines went off at a rattling gait. By the way, while on the subject of books, tell the major that we have raised five hundred dollars toward buying books for the Transylvania Library, and that as soon as my school is out I am to go East as a purchasing committee. What particularly interests me is, that I am to go to Mount Vernon and ask a subscription from President Washington. Think of it! Think of my presenting myself there with my tricolored cockade,—a Kentucky Jacobin!"

She had seen from the outset that his mood was unusual. On his face, in his words, in the playful caprices of his talk,—like little whirligigs of wind among dry leaves,—there was a joyous excitement the true secret mainspring of which had not yet been revealed. At this point his expression for the first time grew serious.

"The President may be so occupied with the plots of you American Jacobins that he will have neither time nor inclination to consider any such petition," she said, divining his thoughts.

"At least I am glad of my mission. I have never set eyes on a great man, and my heart beats quick at the thought of it. I feel as a young Gaul might who was going to Rome to ask Csesar for gold with which to overthrow him. Seriously, it would be a fearful thing for the country if a treaty should be ratified with England. There is not a democratic society from Boston to Charleston that will not feel enraged with the President. You may be sure that every patriot in Kentucky will be outraged, and that the Governor will denounce it to the House."

"There is news from France, then,—serious news?"

"Much, much! The National Convention has agreed to carry into full effect the treaty of commerce between the two Republics, and the French and American flags have been united and suspended in the hall. The Dutch have declared the sovereignty of the French, and French and Dutch patriots have taken St. Martin's. The English have declared war against the Dutch and granted letters of marque and reprisals. There has been a complete change in the Spanish ministry. There has been a treaty made between France and the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The French fleet is in the West Indies and has taken possession of Guadeloupe. All French emigrants in Switzerland have been ordered to remove ten leagues from the borders of France. A hundred and fifty thousand Austrians are hurrying down toward the Rhine, to be reinforced by fifty thousand more."

He had run over these items with the rapidity of one who has his eye on the map of the world, noting the slightest change in the situation of affairs; and she, having left her work and come to the fence, had listened eagerly like one no less well informed.

"But the treaty! The treaty! The open navigation of the Mississippi!"

"The last news is that the treaty will certainly be concluded and the open navigation of the Mississippi assured to us forever. The major will load his flatboats, drift down to New Orleans, sell those Spanish fops his tobacco for its weight in gems, buy a mustang to ride home on, and, if not robbed and murdered by the land-pirates on the way, come back to you like an enormous bumble-bee from a cloverfield, his thighs heavily packed with gold."

"I am so glad, so glad, so glad!"

He drew from his pockets a roll.

"Here are papers for two months back. I'll leave them. Just now there is no time to discuss such trifles as revolutions and navies and dynasties and republics. I have come to speak of something more important. My dear friend, I have come to speak to you about— myself!"

As he uttered the last seutence, his manner, hitherto so full of