feeling would have strengthened her to break her bonds, to carry on the education she had begun, and to wait for the time when Timothy Deering had finished his studies and they could make their way in life together."

not

Martha started, for Timothy Deering was the name of her own grandfather, her mother's father, whom she did remember, but who had named her, his only grandchild, Martha Tryphemia, on his deathbed. The aspen rustled again. "But children, obey your parents,' had been the very bread of my mother's life, and whether it was in the Lord' was a question never raised. When the crisis came and her father ordered her to set her face, because of uncertain fortune, against her growth with him she loved, and take Peter Dunstane, with his money and his narrow views of life and of woman's place in life, she obeyed; and she died, making believe she was happier in obeying than in loving. Poor mother!

She

let me live the same colorless, repressed life; she discouraged every desire of mine for greater independence, and I could not leave her alone at last in her feeble health to the wearing round of household duties and needless petty economies.

"My poor mother! We will now together try to make amends by helping some fresh brave young soul that hesitates at the parting of two ways, to set her feet in that road which is narrow indeed, but ever climbing the heights. I give the secretary and the old housewife with its contents into your hands, dear young struggler. Keep them as a sacred trust which the hands of two still living friends have put in your way, to help you in avoiding their mistakes."

The aspen rustled and sighed again as Martha finished the letter. She dropped it in her lap, sat still on the floor, her chin resting on her hands, and tried to recall what her old nurse had told her about her Grandfather Deering. He was

His own daughter was named Martha, but Martha Lakeman, taking her mother's family name; and Martha Matton remembered that she had often wished she had been given Lakeman instead of Tryphemia for her own middle name.

How strange it all seemed! The old housewife lay in the open drawer. Martha rose. The air of the attic, with its odors of dead herbs and yesterdays seemed oppressive. She took the housewife, locked the secretary, her secretary, and hurried with the silk wallet to her own room, which Jane had told her was old Aunt Martha's summer room. "Too small for Julia," Aunt Josephine had decided; and Martha had rejoiced that she found it so undesirable, for how cosy it was, and how airy too! South and east the windows looked across the meadows to the wooded hillsides; and near the south one, where the big dainty covered armchair stood, a great pine sang its song of the lost sea, and sent in the balsam of its breath for healing. The space between this window and the other on the same side had seemed bare, and Martha had filled it with a table for her books. Now a new thought struck her. "I do believe the secretary would just fit in here," and so Jane was called.

"Of course I knew you'd see where it b'longed," Jane said, "stood there, I guess, more'n forty year, right in that spot. Thomas! Mirandy! Come quick, both o' ye! I want yer! Jest bring the sekertary down to its old place. Things come round, well's people. Many's the time I've seen Aunt Marthy sett'n 'tween them winders, writin' 't thet desk! Look out f'r thet ere leg, Mirandy! Thomas! don't bang the wall! There! don't it look nateral?"

Jane looked on with pride, while Miss Martha praised the beauty of the carving, and Thomas and Mirandy grumbled a bit at the weight.

Never could Martha forget that August afternoon spent in the old-fashioned bedroom. The windows were all open to the breeze that fluttered the muslin curtains at the windows and brought in the fragrance of the pine. The big easy chair took Martha, with the old house

wife in her hands, to its comfortable depths, and the summer stillness was unbroken by a human voice. It was all so strange and story-book like, and in her wildest dreamings she had never seen herself in a story-book. She drew from the faded old wallet a letter, written on paper as yellow as the bit of yellow silk in the housewife, though once it had been as white as that had undoubtedly been. It was folded carefully, as the worn creases showed, and a fragment of the red wax seal still clung to the paper. The letter was dated August 28th, 18—. Again a strange coincidence; for this, too, was August, and the 28th. It was postmarked in a college town in Maine, and the handwriting was clear and firm, only the beginning looked blurred. should say what had fallen on the line?

Who

"MY VERY DEAR TRYPHEMIA: - Önce more I write to you, only once more; for beyond this would be a wrong to you and to my own conscience. I plead no longer for myself; I have struggled, and, I hope, conquered the self which said, 'I cannot and will not give her up, for I know that she loves me, and turns from me only

because she hears the voice of parental authority.

"It is true that I think you are wrong. You will think that my eyes are held from seeing the right way by my affections. Let me suffer this rather than appear to persuade you from the path of what you deem duty.

"But to obey a father's Thou shalt' when it means binding yourself to live a lie, when it bars the way to the growth of your mind and your soul, when it is to make of you a mere titledeed, - this I cannot do without pleading with you for yourself. Such a command is not in the Lord,' and therefore it is not right to obey it. I look forward, and see you, not only giving up that which has been the joy of life, but forced through your own act to serve the things which you must despise. I see your ideals fade and fall before the winds of derisive commonplace, and see you yielding obedience to the laws of a life you were made to accept through a mistaken sense of duty. I implore you to reverence now in yourself the woman that would be, that may be, and accept not this yoke. It may be right for you to see me no more; but to kill

your ideals -no child has a right to give such

obedience, no father or mother has a right to command it. Obey your father, so far as I am in question, and I will believe that as you follow conscience you must so far be right; but oh! do not obey him to the lifelong loss of the spirit that must forever suffer if its grandest ideals are cast out. You will not make any human soul the better by a concession to grasping worldliness. It is difficult to keep back the bitter personal cry as I write, but I will not load your sorrow with my own. I would only bar the way, if I could

with a flaming sword, that leads only to a wasted, loveless life, and point to the higher law that forbids the barter of one's spiritual dower for any mess of pottage, whatever pious praise be written on the contract. In sad sincerity, and with prayer for your welfare, now and always, TIMOTHY DEERING." your friend,

Prophecy fulfilled" was written below the signature in a woman's tremulous hand, with the date, August 28, 18-.

The yellow sheet dropped from Martha Matton's fingers. She sat long, thinking; then folded the letter, replaced it in the old housewife, and returned it to the drawer where it had lain so long. Her bank book she put into another drawer, and turned the key of the old secretary upon her fortune and her oracle.

A week later, Thomas took one day in his cart to the village station, a trunk and something else carefully boxed up,so odd in size and shape that a council of village loafers could not make out what it could be, though they sat on it by turns and in groups all the afternoon.

The next morning Martha Matton walked the three miles from Jane's cottage to the same station, alone, and when the express train stopped, she said goodby to one person only, the young doctor from Kebo Mills, who chanced to be there. No Dunstane was in sight.

For

What Thomas called a "cold strike," came upon the country that night. Jane called it "ridic'lous cold; cold 'nough to skin a dog!"— and at early evening banged the door against the premature chill and frost, and stirred the wood-fire on the wide hearth in her kitchen. her own use she would have no stove till winter reigned, and old bones cried out for heat. The pot-hooks and fire-dogs had served more than one generation in the Dunstane kitchen before the range was thought of. On each side of the chimney was a rocking-chair, black and comely in its antiquity, with a padded back and a plump, feather-cushion, gay with flowered chintz. Tallow dips, in shining brass candlesticks, had been taken down from a high shelf over the dresser, and stood on a round table with remarkable legs, spreading from one central pillar.

Thomas, in his chair, basked in the heat and watched his pipe-smoke as it

At last Jane pushed her spectacles up till they raised the frill of her cap, settled back, slightly off the perpendicular, she never leaned, and began to knit, with the air of one whose work goes of itself. Still Thomas had cleared his throat several times, and yawned several more before she spoke.

I

"Wut ye fidgetin' fur, Thomas? s'pose I ain't no call now to keep back the 'sekal of the story,' 'n' I'll prophesy another; 'n' two sekal's more'n most stories hev. They're a pooty mad lot o' folks at the house to-night, Thomas, 'n' they won't stay there much longer. Wut'd they say to Miss Marthy when they come back? Why she hed the first say, 'n' tol' the whole truth, 'bout the sekertary 'n' bout the bankbook. Not 'bout the letters, thet's her secret now. Miss Julia hed to look onhappy, 'n' so'd Mr. Primes; but there's somethin' atween them two; 'n' the other tailor-made, Mr. Greenfold, he's goin' away to-morrow - won't never be Mis' Dunstane s sonin-law, I guess! Miss Marthy stood all

their railin's, 'n' jest went ahead 'n' got ready to go. Course she couldn't stay with them creeturs, 'n' you know how tuckered out she wuz here last night. I ain't made no mistake 'bout thet girl's 'bility 'n' true feelin'! Now she's free from the rest, Uncle John' 'll find a way to give her his right hand when she needs it. 'Wut's she goin' to do?' Why, she's goin' to study 'n' fit herself for a doctor. Them new Dunstanes?' Wal, they'll never be old Dunstanes here, I guess. They hate the old place, and say they'll shet it up. Miss Marthy heerd Mis' Dunstane tell Miss Julia she'd hev it sold. I know some one thet'll buy. Uncle John' 'll git a hint o' who wants it from Miss Marthy, 'n't can't be sold 'thout 'Uncle John' says so. Thomas, wouldn't it be a good place fur a doctor, 'n' wouldn't it be a good thing, don't you imagine, for Dr. Pulsewell, with all his practice round here, in Siasville, 'n' Pilotville, 'n' Bondstown, t' take a partner? That's my opinion. 'Aunt Marthy?' She object? Bless ye, 'a growin' 'n' a useful life, Jane,' sez she, ''s wut every woman 's well 's every man, merried or single, should hev, minister or doctor, or anythin' thet grows; but never stay still for half a cent'ry, in a pigeon-hole, like mother's old housewife.""

deep recess among the wooded shores. Now three lines of rail stretch southward to that other city ninety miles away, and in all the luxury of the palace car we welcome the coming or speed the parting guest. Time was, half a century ago, when tourist, settler, or emigrant, one and all, embarked at Buffalo, and in such famous old side-wheel steamers as the James Madison or the Empire State made the nearly week-long voyage, touching at the projecting piers of Dunkirk, Erie, Cleveland, the sandspit of Sandusky, the plain of Toledo, and the old half-French, half-American town of Detroit, twisted and turned through the mazes of the St. Clair flats, steamed forth

upon the broad and often restless bosom of Lake Huron, skirting the pine-covered points of Thunder Bay, calling with the mails and exchanging greeting with the hospitable soldiers under the heights of Michilimackinac, "Gem of the Lakes"; then pushing southwestward picking the way among those oddly named islands and headlands, those Frenchy titles which fresh-water salts could never learn, yet easily mastered; for long since the Isle aux Galets of the voyageur gave way on the government charts to Skilligallee of the sailor, and Seul Choix was metamorphosed into Swishway. Then, southward bound, the glistening white prow split the pale green waters of Michigan, now perhaps turning blue black under the distant windward shore and warning us to heave to for the night, and ride out the coming gale under the friendly lea of the Manitous.

The names of point and headland, of channel and waterway far over on the

the great lakes to the valley of the Father of Waters. In fleets the canoes of the Ojibbeway and Menomonee, and the bateaux of the voyageur once swarmed through these winding streams; but the Indian mothers shuddered as they told their big-eyed broods how one dread day the breath of the Great Spirit lashed into scud and spray the broad channel at the entrance, and, in sudden wrath, overwhelmed the war fleet of their fathers and strewed the stony beach with the corpses of their braves. "Death's Door" the mariner calls it yet. Butte des Morts the missionaries named the point where the winding Fox turns eastward for its final stretch to Lake Winnebago. Many and many a gale did those old-time steamers weather under the lee of the Manitous, and many are the bleaching spars and ribs of the stranded wrecks along their foaming beach to-day.

Once away from the Manitous, with the light at Sleeping Bear just abeam, a straight course over the trackless waters, landless as mid-ocean, "south by west, magnetic," would land the traveller at the mouth of the muddy, turbid stream, oozing from the swampy hummocks about that

western side, tell of Indian tragedy in the years long gone by. Deep down into the heart of the Ouisconsin is thrust an arm of the inland sea; and this, with the chain of placid lakes and rivers, formed the favorite route of the trapper, the trader, and the troops journeying from

Pottawotomie town Chicago; and scores of huge propellers, barges, whole flotillas, freight laden, steer that course to-day, and return loaded to the guards with grain. Not so the steamers of half a century ago. All south at the head of the lake was flat, stale, though, as it