492 did now, and eyed her in her sober absorbing fashion, feeling herself big and young and useless beside the energetic little woman. A block of unhewn stone, if stone could feel, might have just such a sense of uncouthness and out-of-place-ness beside a sharp little steel chisel tip-tapping and boring into it. Audrey was conscious suddenly that Goddard was beside her, and dropped behind to walk with him, with a brilliant smile of welcome, at sight of which Jane, Kit, and his mother all pricked up their ears. "She is better," said Audrey, nodding to the settle. "Oh, yes," indifferently. "My head," pressing both hands over it, 66 has been oppressed too much. I want relief. Let me hear you talk." She nodded, but walked on so silently that he doubted if she had understood him. The night, after the moon had gone down, was dark. They had left the fires behind them, but a sudden flash of auroral light showed their faces to each other and the dark, scattered figures trooping silently along the beach, the dunes rising in a procession of gigantic white shadows against the vague darkness. "We look like the damned upon the shores of that last sea," said Goddard, determined to make small talk out of the vastness and terror, as he could not shift the scene. "The sky is dead and the sea is dead, and those are but the ghosts of hills, too." Another glimmer of light showed him that Audrey was not looking at sea or sky; her head was bent on her breast, her face thoughtful. He started forward. "I read it in your eyes! learned a new lesson to-night. You can You have never say again that nature suffices to you! Some heroic thought, some human being has touched you closer than ever you were touched before! Audrey?" He took her hand, and when the light died out she had not yet withdrawn it. Kit, turning from them in sullen, dumb rage, saw by the same flash Jane's eyes fixed on the clasped hands, and heard a faint sigh. "What a gesticulating talent your friend Goddard has, my dear," observed Mrs. Graff, calmly. "He ought to turn it to account on the stage. Too much hand wringing there for every day use.' "The man is well enough, mother," said Kit, sharply; he would like to have knocked him down with the axe he held, but he revenges. future," retorted his mother coldly. CHAPTER XII. they halted at the gate of the Swenson uncle, as she pushed open the door of the "She is taking home a sick woman." then." Audrey made no reply. "The Lord have mercy on the sick woman her Aunt Ann and the night's events drop She let rags in anybody's face. at once, having no fondness for waving red In fact, it was the odd sense of security and faith in both what Audrey did not say that gave people her depth and height. Doctor Swenson trotted over to a bookcase, wrapping his faded dressing-gown about him with a shrill little chuckle. drenching people with magnesia, and pills, "Your Aunt Ann is not content with pharmacy. She comes to me with a story and potassium, she dabbles in spiritual of one who has fallen from grace into a state of despair, when I know all that ails the man is too much salt pork; and of anall that she or St. Teresa needed was a other who sees visions like St. Teresa, and husband and a baby. Did you see my slippers anywhere? I began to look for them to go up to bed, and took up my violin, need not dispute the point; there is not a and now it is quite late. No, Audrey, you trait nor a passion in a man's character, as be resolved into an overplus of carbon, or you sentimentalists call them, that cannot ozone, or a lack of phosphorus. anxiously. "Of course I have, though. I'm. ever explain this theory to you before?" Now, Audrey, you are fond of what they a bore to everybody with it, I suppose. call Nature. You look at the clouds or the longings. It is nothing but the matter in river, and have what you deem immortal the trees, or rain, or growing corn attracting similar matter in your body. calls to lime, and oxygen to oxygen. When you or Kit die you will be so much salts, Did I Lime so much phosphates, so much gaseous matter; that's all, nothing more.' The little man stood see-sawing in his gray stocking feet, a candle in one hand, the other grasping his flowered gown, his round cheeks and blue eyes on fire with delight under the wig pulled askew. Audrey laughed. "You are an amiable ghoul! Go to bed, uncle." "I cannot sleep. Neither can you, I'll wager. Now you think it's love or remorse keeps you awake? It's electricity. Why, the sea and sky are alive to-night with it. If I were a sentimentalist like you I should say they were angry-had been disappointed of their prey." "So they were. One of the Cortrells-" She stopped, and laughed. What could the great forces of Nature have to do with poor scribbling Jane, with her shrewd brain and lumpy body? "Cortrell, eh?" eagerly snuffing the candle with his fingers. "Now, do you know there's a great deal of reason in those old superstition.? Sea and sand are made of the same matter as ourselves, so how can we tell how much of the same knowledge they have? You're not sick, my dear? Your nose is pinched, and there are dark rings about your eyes. Liver all right, Audrey?" He took her hand in his, and Audrey was glad to let it lie there, though the pudgy fingers were stained with snuff and candle-wick. She had a curious longing to-night, for the mother she had never known, and could almost have laid her head against the flowered gown, and cried. Instead, she only laughed when he stroked her hand fondly. "Some lime and phosphate is worth a good deal more to you than others. Eh, Uncle Tom?" "I've made such a poor substitute for your mother, child. That's the trouble. Susan would have known how to manage about your lessons, and falling in love, and diet, and all that. I could only make you sound in your music. As to your knowledge of counterpoint, I'm satisfied. there, quite satisfied. Suppose we try-?" taking down his violin, and opening the old, fine piano that seemed oddly out of place on the bare floor with its strip of rag-carpet. Not to-night. You must really go to sleep." She lighted the candle again, found the slippers, and kissed him goodnight. She did not know what ailed her to-night; even his petting she could not bear. Of the usual nervous, sickly megrims of girls, Audrey, with her light strong frame, and fair firm flesh, rose-tinted and healthy as a baby's, knew nothing; but now a kind touch made her shiver, and, as he opened his door to nod good-night again, her blue eyes filled with tears. Was it only the electricity, as her uncle said? She took up the violin to play the sonata with which she often quieted the old man to sleep, but the notes seemed to have caught the fierce foreboding temper of the night, and shrieked fitfully. The girl listened as though a living being was talking to her, laid down the violin, and, paler than was her wont to be, went out to the garden, which, darkened with the quaint box of the old colony town, sloped down to the sands. If these were the dead sea, and sky of Hades, as Goddard said, they had taken life in the last hour, and, as it seemed to Audrey, the life of a vengeful, malignant purpose. The long stretch of beach and dunes had drawn back into a gray melancholy twilight, and the sea thrust itself into sight, solid and black, yellow flashes of phosphoric light upon the incoming waves, like the fiery crest of Milton's Satan as he rose from the undermost darkness. It muttered with an ominous thunder. Audrey had learned its voices since she was a child, but this was unknown to her. To the north and west, hedging in and driving on the sea, pale columns of auroral light followed each other through the darkness. She went through the gate aimlessly, over the sand, her grave, steady face turned towards them as though some one called her. The village was lost in the fog and silence, the light was out in her uncle's window; she remembered, hardly knowing that she remembered it, that he and Kit, and even her aunt, Ann Graff, were asleep. She was glad that all the world was asleep, and she alone was left to receive the message. Audrey had been abroad in all seasons; in nights when the storms had driven sea-faring men in-doors; when she was a child, frightened at the wind or crash of the waves on the shore, she yet had gone, dragged, as it were, against her will. Now, it seemed to her, she had grown to the age of sea and woods: they had received her into their company: she was one with them. She knew in sun or storm, summer or winter, she must go when they called her, to know what was this word they would have her speak for them. She never had found it. It came near her, often, in sight as in sound, in a nor'-easter whistling through the rigging, in the fretted brown seeds upon a fern leaf, in the glint of sun through the tan-colored bay water upon the kelp below. It was so real a thing to her, they were such actual companions, that she talked of them to no one, just as a man does not talk of the wife whose head lies on his bosom to mere passers-by. Aunt Ann, had she ever sounded the girl's brain, would have called her an idiot, and Kit would not have taken an undeniably mad woman to be his wife. But Audrey kept silent, and looked on their blindness with an amused wonder. "Can they not hear the sea? Does not the sun shine on them as on me? Are these things not as real to them as a Dover's powder, or a box of canned peaches?" The voice she could almost hear, the uncomprehended message was never as near her as to-night. It was as though all the world sang a lofty hymn, in which there was one word lacking left for her to supply. It seemed to her that all nature came close and pressed upon her to give her knowledge of it. She stooped and buried her hands in the warm sand, she touched the thick bay-leaves as she passed; the wet sou'-wester flapped dashes of spray in her face. The cries of the sea grew shriller, as it sent in a heavier tide from its far off caverns; the northern lights, to the north, crossed the unbroken night unceasingly like a troop of pale and vengeful ghosts. She wandered down the beach; she would have penetrated into the heart of this eternal world if she could; its mysteries, its vastness, its infinite, inaccessible repose, even in this transient outcry, reached through her flesh to something within which awoke and answered again. Her blood grew heavy in her veins, vain tears rushed to her eyes. The longing, the hope, which belong to those who are akin with Nature, for which no man has ever found words, oppressed and choked her, "And I," she said, looking up and around her, as one who seeks a familiar face, "I, too!" She would find words for this unknown hope; her message had been close to her to-night. Some day she would reach it. A curious change came upon Audrey from that moment. The forces that had appealed to her might be incomprehensible to others, but their effect upon her was plain and practical enough. She had heard a heavenly call and she would not She sat down on one of the sand-hills overlooking the sea. Strains of simple, powerful harmony were heard, unknown before by her; whether she sang them or not she did not know. If she could make audible to the world the meaning of this night to her? How angry storm and prophetic sea, the malignant wind, and the gracious, comforting earth to its smallest green leaf, summoned alike the unwilling soul to the work which God had given it, and forbade it to accept any other. If she could find fit utterance for even so much as this, her life were cheaply given. Morning had broken before she entered the garden again. The box hedges drenched with rain were hung with spiders' webs, and in the early light her cow was fretting in the stable to be sent down to the saltmarsh pastures; they belted the beach with rich browns and purples, covered yet by mist; a biting wind drove the pink clouds from the brightening west to the dark sky overhead; a covey of white sail fled further behind the wall of the breakwater; a flock of kingbirds preparing to go southward whirred from a clump of cedars past her feet. Audrey and they were old friends; their black beads of eyes, full of a courage greater than that of any living creature, were fixed on her with a friendly meaning. Wherever she turned, from the vast, red plane of the sea, with the sandpiper hopping along the white wash of the tide, to the wet poppies and gillyflowers of the beds beside her, all things seemed waiting, glad, questioning, having accepted her as their own. She went down and threw herself into the sea, floated out to deep water; the waves light and buoyant caressing her with fine supporting touches. To Audrey it had the solemnity of a baptism. She came out with a glad bound of her blood from heart to limbs. Beyond the brilliant sky line lay the world. where she must work; she felt the touch of sun and wind as a benediction; even the man she loved, (and in her secret soul Audrey knew she loved him,) would surely bid her God speed. (To be continued.) Rich and Poor. TOPICS OF THE TIME. THE relations of employer and employed have existed since civilization began. Nothing has been done without capital: nothing has been done without labor. To realize what is regarded as the ideal condition, associations of laborers with capital have been organized, co-proprietary and co-operative, with varying results. After all attempts of this kind, the fact seems well established that industrial unicns and partnerships will never become the rule, and that labor and capital will respectively be at the disposal of different men. Those who have labor to sell, without money to invest in the materials and products of their own industry, will always be a large proportion of the community.. If the capital of the world were to be equally divided today, it would not take a month to re-establish the old division of capitalists and laborers. There are organizing, directing, controlling minds, which would manage at once to win capital, and employ the industry of others; and even the accidents of life would make many poor men rich. There is no possibility of maintaining equality of condition among men. The capitalist, with money to be employed in commerce, agriculture and manufactures, and the laborer, with various industry and skill to sell, will live side by side while the world stands. The natural wish of the first will always be to get the best profit he can on his money, and of the other to get the best price he can for his labor. The great, practical question with both classes concerns the relations that exist between them. Shall those relations be friendly and harmonious, or discordant and inimical? Is there any real ground for opposition and jealousy? The strikes of laborers, the formation of trades-unions, the speeches uttered and the editorials published on the tyranny of capital, show that at least a portion of the laboring community consider themselves aggrieved by those who employ them. To some extent this is undoubtedly true. There are men who would make their laborers their slaves, and who would gladly obtain their labor at the lowest price compatible with the maintenance of their laboring power. There are corporations without souls, which have no more consideration for the muscles and the skill which they employ in their mills and shops, than they haye for the horses employed outside. It is entirely natural for labor to organize against such men and such corporations, and to look upon them as enemies. Where personal rights are unrecognized, where capital refuses to see in the laborer anything but its dependent and servant, where oppressions are practiced, there will and must be rebellion. The man or the corporation whose supreme object is to get the most out of the laborer for the least consideration in money, will be sure to have laborers who will aim to get the most money possible for the smallest consideration in labor. Laborers will do this independently or in combination, and their action will be entirely justifiable, though it may not always be wise. The iniquity of trades-unions is that they make no distinction between good and bad employers, and breed universal discontent and demoralization. Even in this day of wide and deep distress among capitalists, this day of shrunken values and business stagnation,-when, but for the sake of the poor, capital would greatly prefer to lie idle, there are bands of men who quarrel with their wages, and feel that they are badly used. Now we believe that the majority of employers intend to do full justice to those whom they employ. We believe that in this day of trial and loss, there are men who are doing more than they can afford to do, in order to keep their laborers from distress. At this time, as at all times, they are the subjects of the inexorable law of demand and supply, and so, with a great supply and no demand, they stagger feebly along with their business, that those dependent on them may be fed. They are men who recognize the inter-dependence of labor and capital, and are willing to share the trials of the time with those who minister to their prosperity in better days. Now labor stultifies itself and makes itself an object of contempt when it fails to recognize and reward a just and generous disposition on the part of capital. A laborer who will join a band of fellow-craftsmen in the attempt to extort an increase of wages from an employer who uses him well in adversity and fairly in prosperity, surrenders his manhood, either to his own selfishness, or to the despotism of his fellows. We hope strikes have done good. It would be a pity that the amount of suffering they have caused should have been of no avail. If they have checked any tendency to oppression on the part of capital; if they have taught the holder of money not to claim too much of the profits of industry, we are glad. But we are sure there is a better way, and that now is a good time to enter upon it. It is a good time for capitalists to ask themselves the question whether they have always recognized the rights of labor, and given it an appropriate reward-whether they have ever tried to win the heart of labor-whether they have given it brotherhood and endeavored to minister to its comfort, happiness and elevation. It is a good time, too, for the laborer to ask himself the question whether he has always sufficiently considered the fact that capital runs all the risk, while he runs none; that it is liable to be destroyed by flame, or dissipated in financial disaster; and that his ability to feed and clothe his wife and little ones depends upon the prosperity of capital. It is a good time, too, for him to remember that capital bears the great burdens of society, that it pays the enormous taxes of the time, that it supports all the charities, and that, whether there is labor for the laborer or not, the laborer is fed. It is a good time for him to remember that in the last resort of necessity, capital does not permit him or his children to go houseless and without bread. In short, it is a good time, in their common trouble, for the capitalist and the laborer to learn that they are brethren, and dependent in many ways upon one another. When this period of depression passes away, as it must soon,-for the world moves on, it is quite possible that work will be recommenced upon a more modest basis of wages on one side and profits on the other. We hope, then, that employers and employed will lay aside all the old jealousies and resentments, and learn to be not only just but generous towards each other. There are communities in America, blessed by capitalists who share in many ways with their laborers the fruits of their prosperity. Public halls, reading rooms, libraries, comfortable houses and the best schools, bestowed by employers, have made some manufacturing villages a collection of intelligent and happy homes, and even labor itself a choice privilege. There is nothing that the laborer wants so much as recognition as a man, and a chance for his family. When the employer has the power to give both and gives both, he ought not to be troubled with strikes or jealousies, or the inefficiency of those who do his work. Organs. of organs. What we have said of the political party press is quite true of the religious party press. It has come MACHINE music is not as popular as it was. The to be absolutely essential that, in order to the old-fashioned hand-organ has become a bore, even achievement of a large success in religious journalto the children; and unless it be supplemented by ism, the journal shall be independent. The stricta knowing monkey, with appeals to the eye, the ly sectarian newspapers are not regarded at all with grinding goes on without reward. This confinement the respect which was formerly accorded to them. of musical execution to certain tunes, for which the It is only the independent religious press that wins player is not responsible—this circumscription of subscribers by the hundred thousand. Men have the limits of emotion by a foreign manufacturer- ceased to be interested in the discussion of questions this reiteration of the same jingle from street to from a sectarian stand-point. Their sympathies street, at all times of the day and in all months of have surpassed sectarian bounds, and their interest the year, to ears that are dainty and ears that are goes deeper than creeds. They want to know what dull-all this conspires to make the organist an the independent thinker thinks. They would read offense and the hand-organ a nuisance. There what he writes. They have learned that the organ really was a time when things were different. When of a sect is as much a slave as the organ of a party. children heard no music in the school and none in They have learned to think little of the conflicting the home, when brass bands were scarce and church- systems of theology, and are anxious to know someorgans were supposed to be an invention of the thing about religion. They are less anxious about devil, or one of the seductions of the Woman of any particular "ism," and more interested in Babylon, it was quite nice to be assured by a dirty | Christianity. Orthodoxy and heterodoxy mean Italian, who never had a home in his life, that there was no place like it, even when his reluctant instrument groaned and fainted away on the last syllable. What has happened with regard to the handorgan has also happened with regard to party organs of every kind, political and religious. The fact can be no longer ignored that the people are tired less to them, and truth, more. In brief, they have ceased to pin their faith to sectarian leaders, and are thinking for themselves. Now, all this is undoubtedly true, and what is to be done about it? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing? Without any question it is a good thing. It marks an era in the development of Ameri |