"Peter," he suddenly said, squaring himself and hitching his chair confidentially, " I'm going to let you into a secret."

"I don't want to know any secrets," replied Peter. "I don't want to know anything I can't tell."

"You don't know any secrets? You don't know that last week Horatio Turpin sold a ten-dollar horse in front of your shop for a hundred because he had"

"Oh, I know some horse secrets," admitted Peter, carelessly.

"Exactly! It's a horse secret I'm going to tell you."

He made an awkward stumble as he crossed the room; and he fumbled awkwardly in a dark corner at a frame-work of pigeon-holes nailed against the wall. But finally he came back with two pieces of writing-paper, which he spread out on the slab. Then he reached for the brandy with a cold formal bow to Peter, who accepted the attention with equal coolness.

"Now for the secret! Here, Peter, is an advertisement that has been left here to be inserted in the next paper: 'Lost, on Tuesday evening, on the road between Frankfort and Lexington, a bundle of clothes tied up in a blue-and-white checked cotton handkerchief, and containing one white muslin dress, a pale-blue silk coat, two thin white muslin handkerchiefs, one pair long kid gloves,—straw-color,—one pair white kid shoes, two cambric handkerchiefs, and some other things, not distinctly remembered. Whoever will deliver said clothes to the printer, or give information so that they can be got, will be liberally rewarded on application to him.'

"And here, Peter, is another advertisement to be inserted at the same time: 'Found, on Tuesday evening, on the road between Lexington and Frankfort, a bundle of clothes tied in a handkerchief. In the bundle were noticed some gloves and handkerchiefs and shoes, a green silk apron, and some other things which the finder wishes to say that he did not separately examine. The owner can recover property by calling on the printer.'

"Now for the secret I" He pushed the papers away from him and wheeled on his listener. He was losing what little control over himself he had hitherto kept. * His eyes flashed with an expression of humorous revenge. He threw his head back and laughed loud and slapped Peter familiarly on the knee. Then suddenly he laid his hand on the Jamaica rum.

"Rum," muttered Peter, with admirable brevity, and held out his horn cup.

"Now, Peter," said Stafford a minute later, " set your cup on the table and listen. <

"Yesterday morning who should slip around here but that high and mighty little mistress, Amy Falconer. But I hardly believed my eyes! No dimplings and poutings, no setting her head on one side, no mischief, no airs, no vanity, no smiles, no anything but red swollen eyes, a puckered mouth, fear, vexation, disappointment, despair! A more lost and ruined soul may I never behold! And then, in such a voice, she begins to tell such a tale: how, oh, Mr. Stafford, she had such a secret to tell me, and wouldn't I do something to help her 1 How, coming to town the day before, she had, contrary to the express orders and .without the knowledge of her aunt, made her old black mammy tie her party clothes up in a blue-and-white checked handkerchief and then tie this to a ring in the side-saddle. Weep, Peter, weep! How on the way this bundle did come untied and fall unnoticed to the road; how, when she reached town and missed it, she had sent some one back along the road, but in vain, somebody else having come along in the mean time and picked it up! Weep, Peter, weep! How she had come to see me to inquire whether any one had left the clothes with me to be advertised; or whether I wouldn't put an advertisement in the next issue of the paper; and whether, if they were left at my office before Thursday evening, I wouldn't send them to her at once. For oh! oh! oh! she couldn't go to the party! and they were so beautiful! and they had cost so much! and she'd have to break her engagement! and her aunt and her uncle! and oh, my! oh, my! Peter, have you no tears for woman's sorrow?"

"Ahem!" said Peter, dryly, but with a good deal of moisture in his eyes.

"Well, she hadn't more than gone before who should come in here but a boy bringing this same bundle of clothes with a note from John Gray, saying that he had found them in the public road yesterday, and asking me to send them at once to the owner, if I should hear who she was; if not, to advertise them."

"That's no secret," said Peter, with contempt.

"Now for the secret! I might have sent that bundle right around to my Mistress Amy, and that would have been the end of it. But, Peter, let me tell you one thing: when an editor has anything against a man, he always forgives him, but—he gets even with him first. Love your enemies, Peter, but punish them first. Then it comes easier. Then it is not only divine: then it is human. Ha, ha, ha!

"Now, Peter, I've got no favors to ask of Mistress Amy Falconer, and I've none to grant. I don't forget the past as easily as she does." The result of Stafford's precipitate suit was known to the town. "And as for this Pennsylvania school-teacher,—this red-headed Scotch-Irishman"

"Hold on !" cried Peter, quickly. "Not a word against him I I won't like it."

"We won't like it, won't we? Oh, no! We won't like it! We are getting to be such meek and pious New Jersey Lutherans in these days of the Kentucky millennium. We are getting to be such twocheeked saints in the days of the Cherokees. We are getting to be such accomplished blacksmiths and such humble mumblepegs! How many of the Psalms of David are you the author of? Oh, no! Not a word against him! Well, I can tell you, my aged paragon of infantile virtue, that not two days ago I heard this same Pennsylvania woodpecker, this long-legged, black-legged snipe, this soft sly cuckoo, this twilight whippoorwill of a pedagogue,—I heard him tell four men that Jerry Neave was the best blacksmith in town! Oh, no! Not a word against him. We won't like it."

Poor Peter! The best of his faculties had already sunk beneath the level of the deluge which was now rising rapidly and threatened to become universal. Still, he merely gave several threatening sidewise shakes of the head, and his neck seemed io swell a little.

"And if you have to stand this from him, think of what I—a Virginia gentleman! I tell you, Peter, when a man of my family connections !But I don't want to go too far. I only want to have

a little fun out of him."

"Yes; let's have a little fun out of .him," assented Peter, beguiled.

"That's just what I was going on to tell you. When he sent the bundle of clothes here yesterday morning, I laid it away in that closet. There it will stay, said I to myself, and Mistress Amy and berjschoolmaster and the party may go to the devil!"

From this point Stafford so fell under the influence of his cups that his further confidences were hard to follow through their wanderings. Being of an affectionate nature, he several times tenderly took Peter's hand, which Peter several times withdrew.

The idea of keeping the bundle hidden at his office until after the party was one of those crude pranks that occur naturally to a certain order of mind, and that were peculiarly characteristic of that place and time.

Teasing of a sentimental sort is always a common resource in village humor; and in the little frontier town of Lexington at that period young men were many, young women few, and rivalries bitter and keen; so that the least event in the career of a beautiful girl became for weeks the nightly talk at the riotous inns and taverns.

And then Stafford was one of those men—if men they may be called—who love to figure as the hero of a small annoyance. Manly tragedy was beyond him. The fibre of his nature was too weak and flimsy to stand the strain of any great passion, good or bad. But had he been forced to become a member of a circus-company and been left free to choose his part, he would have chosen to be ring-master, for the satisfaction of standing at the small centre of things and cracking a long whip at every feature of the passing show,—cracking it playfully, but now and then a little cruelly, as if by accident. And if he could not have been ring-master, he would have liked to be the clown, for the sake of having the greatest number of people on his side and of raising the laugh at everybody else.

To have seen John Gray annoyed for a day,—that would have been a week's joy. To have caused Gray any final disappointment in his love-affair,—that would have furnished him satisfaction for the rest of his life.

Therefore, the bundle having been lost on Tuesday, and been sent to his office by Gray on Wednesday, his plan was to keep it until Friday, the day after the party. But on Thursday, with much inward enjoyment of his scheme, there suddenly came to him the idea of making it still better, and he turned his steps to a quarter of the town where Joseph Holden was shingling a new house.

"Halloo, Joseph!" he said, as though stopping casually. "Don't work too hard to-day, or you won't be able to dance all night."

"I can do both," Joseph had called down to him, meantime sending a nail home at a blow.

"And sing"all day in the bargain. You are a strange fellow, Joseph! Another man is going with the woman you love, but you are as happy as though it were yourself."

Joseph kept steadily on at his work.

"There's one girl that neither of you will dance with to-night."

"Who's that?" asked Joseph, in a tone which showed his indifference.

"Amy Falconer. She has broken her engagement with Gray, and is not going to the party."

The hammer dropped from Joseph's hand to the ground, and he sat staring down at nothing. Then he jumped off the roof of the house as lightly as though it had been five feet instead of fifteen, picked up his hammer, and came close up to Stafford.

"What do you mean? Have they quarrelled?" In his look and tone there was the revelation of a love that had no hope except through the failure of a rival.

"Who knows? She has broken her engagement with him. She is not going to the party with him. And she will be by herself all the evening at the house of Kitty Poythress, who is going with Horatio Turpin."

"It is none of my affair," remarked Holden, after a moment of thought, and, climbing to the roof, he went on with his work without taking any further notice of Stafford, who moved away.

"Our young carpenter is as wise as a dove and as cunning as a squab." And he laughed to himself. "He is as hard to drive into a little scheme as a tenpenny nail through a thin shingle. There are only two things that I'd stake my life on: that the sun will set to-night, and that when it does he'll go to spend the evening with Amy Falconer."

It turned out as he had expected. A little after seven o'clock that evening, Stafford, who was watching, saw Joseph enter the yard of Father Poythress. At once he hurried to his office, and gave the bundle to his negro boy with a note stating that he hoped it would be received in time for her to go to the party. He himself followed the boy under cover of darkness some yards behind.

The Poythress homestead had a front veranda in the old Maryland style, and there was shrubbery in the yard. As the boy stepped upon the veranda, where the voices of Joseph and Amy could be distinguished talking, Stafford waited behind these bushes. He heard the girl's cry of surprise and delight as she read his note by the light from inside the house, and as she beheld her lost treasure; he heard her say, joyously, "You can go with me to the party, Joseph, and when we get there we can explain everything to John, and he can come home with me;" he heard Joseph repeat her very words, and then he stole out of the yard, —satisfied; for John Gray had told him that he was not going, and John Gray would know nothing of all this till the next day, when the whole town would be laughing at him.

During the forenoon Gray had indeed said to Joseph that he expected to drop in late at the party out of respect to his host and hostess, —thinking to himself that this would be after his interview with Amy; and as he stepped into the school-room in the afternoon he had said the same thing to Stafford, who stopped to ask him. But Stafford had replied that his post-rider left with the mail at four o'clock the next morning, and that if Gray had letters to send they must be ready. Gray _ had letters of the utmost importance to write,—to his lawyer, for one, regarding the late decision in the will case, and to the secretary of the Democratic Club in Philadelphia touching the revival of activity in the Clubs throughout the country on account of the expected treaty with England: so that he had said to Stafford that, this being the case, he would not have time to go to the party at all, but would have his mail ready by twelve o'clock,—thinking again to himself that he would write his letters after his interview with Amy.

Thus in more than one way Stafford's cup of pleasure overflowed that evening. He did not foresee the possible consequences of his pleasantry. He was not a man to realize that nothing may be more serious than a coarse unreckoning jest.

It was now about eleven o'clock. The forgotten wick of the lamp was charred and smoking, the bottle of rum was far from being full, and in the flickering light of the room the heads and bodies of Stafford and Peter, drawn close to the oak table and close to each other, bobbed and swayed vaguely, like two enormous sandpipers about to take flight for a safer shore.

For an hour Stafford had been trying to get himself started to the party; but he was never to reach there. He had just taken his last cup, and sat glaring at Peter in a stubborn incompetence of ideas, until his vacant eye noticed the smoke with which the room was filling. Then he suddenly called out, in a key of high comedy,—

"Peter, you've got a halo. Hail, St. Peter!"

"I haven't got a halo!" swore Peter, who didn't know what a halo was, but didn't fancy having one, and, besides, was no admirer of St. Peter.

"I decline to quarrel with you, Peter, about anything so light as a halo," observed Stafford, with some disgust.

All at once he leaned over and let his head rest on Peter's shoulder.

"Peter," he murmured, caressing one of the young blacksmith's bare arms, "you have never known the great Passion. You have never felt what the great Sappho sings of. You don't even know the divine Sappho."

"Don't know her!" cried Peter, cruelly stung by the accusation. "Haven't I got to shoe her at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning?— John Barnett's yellow sorrel, with a nick in her left ear, a swelling in her groin, a blaze in her forehead, and a white foot? Don't know her!"

Stafford slowly raised his head from Peter's shoulder and gazed solemnly at him with open mouth and wondering eyes, in a last vain attempt to grasp the clue to this fresh misunderstanding.

"Who'd you say Sappho was, Peter?" he asked, meekly. "Who'd you say Sappho was?"

"What'd I come here for, anyhow?" abruptly inquired Peter,