through my dinner proved charming. She showed no curiosity about my history, nor the least anxiety to tell me hers. With an air of quiet self-possession she followed the conversation into its natural channels, and sometimes followed it far; for at one time she was describing for me, with admirable vividness, the methods of irrigation in use in Colorado. But she consistently made done do duty for did, and she used, in some of her sentences, negatives enough to satisfy the needs of negation in the purest of Attic speech.

One more incident of the tramp to the Hudson: Late on Friday afternoon, I was nearing Golden's Bridge, a village on the Harlem division of the New York Central Railroad. My road lay over the hills of a rolling farm-region. The fields of corn were radiant with sunlight reflected from great drops of rain which rested on the nodding blades. In the meadows was the rich sheen of the after-growth. Golden-rod and sumach grew thick on the roadside, and half concealed the rails of the

zigzag fences. From the forests there came a breath of fragrant coolness.

After sundown, the twilight soon faded into dark. My efforts to secure further work had been unsuccessful. Once I was nearing the ruin of a little wooden cottage, on the porch of which sat a woman enjoying the cool of the evening. Upon seeing me enter the gate, she fled within, and slammed the door; and I heard the key turn in the lock. I was growing tired. The actual journey had not carried me far, but the long fast of the previous day and the toilsome walking over soft roads had resulted in exhaustion. Scarcely physical strength remained with which to move farther, and I was ready to throw myself down, with infinite relief, under any chance shelter, when I caught sight of the village lights not a quarter of a mile beyond.

I knocked at the first door on the street. A farmer's wife appeared, and kindly offered to consult her husband on the subject of work. She soon returned with a favorable reply, and invited me to follow her into the kitchen. Carpetless as it was, and stained as to walls and ceiling, and low, and dimly lighted, the shelter of that room was like softest luxury. A pitcher of milk and some slices of bread were placed on the table, and I ate ravenously.

At one end of the table sat the farmer in his shirt sleeves, with a newspaper spread before him. He was in the midst of his haying, he said, and had plenty of work, and was willing enough that I should join the other men in the hay-field. The shed for the hands was full, so I offered to go to the barn, and was soon fast asleep on the loose hay in a stall.

As the farmer and I walked to the barn, I had taken occasion to fortify myself in the agreement regarding work. He was an old man, very hale and hearty and genial, and he walked with a curiously stiff movement of the legs, and with his feet nearly at right angles to the line of progress. He set my mind at rest with the assurance that there would be plenty of work for me, if the morning proved good.

The morning was all that could be desired. I got up early, and went to the kitchen, where an Irish maid-of-all-work gave me a bit of soap and some water in a tin basin, with which to finish my preparation for breakfast. She was a beautiful girl, large and awkward and ill-groomed ; but her features were strikingly handsome, and her clear, rich complexion would of itself have constituted a claim to beauty, while sprays of golden hair fell in effective curls about her forehead, and heightened the charm of her deep-set Celtic blue eyes. I was drying my face and hands on a coarse towel which hung on a roller near the kitchen-door, and which was used in common by all of the hired men. She watched me curiously. Presently she ventured an inquiry as to whether "the boss" had given me "a job." I said that he had. "Her eyes were homes" of deep concern, and in her voice was that note of pity so effective in the Celtic accent. She was saying that my hands did not look as though I was used to work. I was blushingly conscious that my hands were against me, but she tactfully tried to relieve the situation by supposing that I was a "tradesman.” Then had to come the damaging confession that I was not. But the other hired men now began to enter, and we sat down to breakfast.

A breakfast on a farm is not always the appetizing reality that the inexperienced imagination paints. The cloth, in this case, was ragged, and showed signs of long use since its last washing, and there were

no napkins. The service was repulsive in its hideous tastelessness. Flies swarmed in the room, and crowded one another into our food. The men were in their working clothes, coatless, sleeves rolled up, and their begrimed shirts open at the neck. When our coffee was poured out and handed to us, each used his own spoon in dipping sugar from a bowl which was passed from hand to hand. The butter, in a half melting condition, and dark with imprisoned flies, was within reach of us all, and each helped himself with his knife, and then used it in conveying food to his mouth. This last feat I did not try. There was in it a suggestion of necromancy, and I had doubts of my success. We ate in silence, as though the gravity of the occasion was beyond speech. The farmer did not appear until we had finished breakfast, and I waited at the kitchen-door for orders from him.

He came at last, kind and cordial as ever, but quite changed in purpose regarding my going to work. He urged my confessed inexperience, and the danger of exposure to the sun. I protested my willingness to assume the risks, and begged to be allowed at least to work for what had been given me. But he would not listen, and appeared to think that he set matters right by assuring me repeatedly that to what I had received I was "perfectly welcome." His wife gave me, at parting, some tracts, and a religious newspaper, and in these I found presented, in somewhat lurid light, the evil consequences of insobriety.

Knowing that I was within walking distance of Garrison's-on-Hudson, I resolved to reach that point before night. My letters had been forwarded there, and my eagerness to get them was of a kind unexperienced before. It was Saturday, and, late in the afternoon, I reached Garrison's after a hard day's march. The heat was intense, and although I walked but a little more than twenty miles, the effort of carrying my pack was thoroughly exhausting. The woman in charge at the post-office was in evident doubt about the safety of giving me so large a packet of letters, but yielded at sight of others which I showed her, and readily agreed to look after my pack until I should call for it.

Between the station and the river was a

tavern, and there I meant to apply for work. As I neared the station platform, a train from New York drew in. Something familiar in one of the passengers who alighted put me on my guard. In a moment I recognized a fellow-guest at a dinner-party of a few evenings before, and I remembered, with an odd sense of another existence, that, over our coffee, on a broad verandah, overlooking a harbor, bright with the night-lights of a squadron of yachts, he had given me the benefit of an amazing familiarity with the details of the recent baccarat scandal. My anxiety was needless, for I easily passed unnoticed in the crowd.

I walked on to the tavern. Its keeper was busy behind the bar when I asked him for a job. He surprised me immensely with a ready promise of work, and he asked me to wait until he could arrange matters. I went into an adjoining room, and took out my letters.

It was the pool-room, and the walls were hung with colored prints of prize-fighters, with arms folded on their bare chests in a way that put their biceps much in evidence. And there were pictures of race-horses which had won distinction. An old, muchbattered pool-table occupied the middle of the room. Around the walls ran a rough wooden bench. Dirt was everywhere conspicuous. The ceiling and walls were filthy. The floor was bare and unswept, and there were accumulations of dust about the table-legs and in the corners under the benches, which could be accounted for only by a liberal allowance of time. The two small windows, through which one could see the dismal tavern yard, apparently had never been washed.

I sat on a bench, and opened the letters. The dim past of my "respectable" life began to brighten with increasing vividness. Quite lost to present surroundings, I was suddenly recalled to them by the appearance of the boss, who came with a cloth in hand, with which he aimlessly dusted the table while he questioned me. I was so absorbed in letters that, for a moment, I could not place myself, nor in the least account for the situation. The keeper was asking me what I could do. This was a natural question under the circumstances; but it took me by surprise, and it staggered me. I covered my con

fusion with a profession of willingness to be useful, and of a desire to work. The boss, a coarse, blear-eyed, sensuous-looking man, eyed me doubtfully, and suddenly concluded that he had no work for me. But I was wide awake now. I knew that the nearest farms were some miles back in the country, and that, except at the tavern, I had slender chance of food or shelter. I said that if there was work to be done, I was eager to do it, and that if, after a trial, he found me incapable, he could dismiss me at any moment.

I fancied that I had gained my point, for he told me to follow him, as he led the way into the kitchen. There we found the cook bending over a range, in which the fire refused to burn. "Mrs. Murphy," said the boss, "here's a man I've hired to help Sam," and then he turned sharply upon me with a "Damn you now, work! if you know how to work!" My opportunity lay in the smouldering fire, so I hastened to the wood-pile, and presently returned with an armful of fine wood which insured a fire for dinner.

Mrs. Murphy was a little, old, emaciated Irish woman, with her thin white hair parted in the middle, smoothed back, and twisted into a careless knot on her crown. Her face was wrinkled almost to grotesqueness, and she had the passive air of one to whom can come no surprises of joy or sorrow, as though the capacity for sensation was gone, and life had reduced itself to mere existence. I watched for opportunities of helping her, and she accepted the services as though she had been accustomed to them always.

I

She began to interest me deeply. learned from her that Sam, whom I was hired to help, was a scullion and stable boy. When she had nothing further for me to do in the kitchen, I returned to the wood-pile, and chopped industriously, hoping to give evidence of my fitness for the place. In an hour or more, the proprietor called me, intending, I supposed, to give me a change of work; but, instead, he gave me a quarter, and told me, not unkindly, but firmly, that he did not want

me.

The situation was discouraging. I had tramped some twenty miles through dust and heat over a hilly country, and, since the early morning I had had nothing but

a few apples to eat. Besides, it was fast growing dark, and so too late to look for work on the farms back in the country.

The immediate neighborhood is largely taken up with country-seats, and I made repeated efforts to get work at the hands of a gardener. I soon discovered that I was in a community where special provision is made against my class. At the carriage gates I not infrequently found a notice which warned me of the presence of dogs, and although the dogs gave me no trouble, a lodge-keeper, or footman, or gardener, upon learning my errand, was invariably seized with fervent anxiety for getting me unnoticed out of the grounds.

At night-fall, I walked back to the tavern, and asked the proprietor if I might sleep in his stables. To my surprise, he was exceedingly friendly. He readily agreed to that, and, of his own accord, he invited me to remain at the tavern over Sunday, and to take my meals in the kitchen; and he added that, on Monday morning, he would give me some work to do as compensation.

Already I had made a friend of the cook, and she now received me warmly. Perhaps it was her habitual good-nature, for she had the same kindly manner toward the other men, Sam and the three Irish section hands from the railway, who took their meals with her. More than ever I was attracted to her. She cordially greeted the workmen as they entered her hot, reeking, ill-lit kitchen, addressing them by affectionate diminutives of their first names, as Johnnie and Jimmie and the like. They clearly had a warm regard for her, and they respectfully lowered their voices and said "ma'am" in addressing her. To be sure they swore viciously in her presence; but then she swore too, not ill-naturedly, but simply as an habitual means of emphasizing her usual language.

I watched her for some sign of ill-temper. In stifling quarters and under exasperating inconveniences she toiled on at work far beyond her strength, not patiently merely, but with the cheerfulness which is always thoughtful of the comfort of

others.

In spite of fatigue, that night in the stable was not a restful one. The air lay heavy and hot in the unventilated loft, and through the night the horses, tortured by flies, stamped ceaselessly in their stalls.

the Sistine Chapel. Earnestly and eloquently he pleaded the reality of spiritual things to the minds of men in those ages of belief, and then he solemnly urged a return to the plain truths of inspiration, and to the teaching of the Church, that

The heat and darkness intensified the quiet of the night. The breathless stillness was broken only by the hoarse blasphemies below, and the nervous stamping of the pestered brutes. I tried to shut out the sounds, and at last fell asleep.

In the early morning I woke to a beautiful mid-summer Sunday, the first of my vagrant life. Sam was whistling at his work in the stables and the tramps were gone. I found a path behind the barn leading to a point on the river-bank where I could bathe.

The military cadets were out on Sunday parade, and the music of their band was the summer morning itself, vocal in notes other than the songs of birds, and the soft murmur of the river. The tents of the camp shone spotlessly white on the bluffs above the water. Some of the buildings were visible among the trees. The sheer approach to the post and its dark background of well-wooded highlands threw into strong relief its commanding position. Among the hills to the north the river appears. The immediate section of it might be a lake, girt with steep hills, that are dense with infinite shades of green. About the post the river sweeps in a magnificent curve, and disappears among the hills to the south.

The few books that my pack contained made generous amends, on this day of rest, for the weight which they had added to my load. After breakfast, I took one of them to a shaded corner of the churchyard, and read there until the service hour, and then I slipped into a seat half hidden by the baptismal font.

In his sermon, the rector contrasted the Lemasculated ideas of the present with reference to God's judgment of sin, with the virile thinking of the Middle Ages, expressed in such works of art as Dante's Inferno, and Angelo's Last Judgment in

degree of allowance," and that the punishment of unrepented evil is “eternal death."

The church was well filled, and I looked it over with a quickened interest. The sexton and I, so far as I could see, were the only representatives of the poor. Outside were a number of coachmen and grooms and nurse-maids; but these, it is likely, were of another persuasion. Certainly they would have looked curiously out of place to our Protestant eyes among that well-dressed, prosperous company. I knew this body of worshippers at a glance; some of them I knew personally. It was easy to follow them all in imagination to country houses where the afternoon would be spent in what escape there offered from the heat. On the next day would be begun again the round of wholesome recreation and of social intercourse, relieved from the formality of town life, which makes up the summer rest, and which implies the leisure which is rendered possible only by the continuous work of a multitude of the poor, who constitute the parts of intricate social and domestic machinery. I seem to be dwelling upon a costly immunity from physical labor. It was not this that appealed to me. worshippers had leisure, but they were far from being idle. My personal acquaintance went far enough to recognize among them persons whose lives are full of strenuous activity in channels of splendid usefulness. It was the social cleavage which yawned to my vision from the new point of view. The rich were there in the house of God, but not the poor; and the very atmosphere of the place seemed to preclude the presence of the poor.

me.

These

I had asked Sam to go to church with Sam had been watering the horses, and now had an empty bucket in each hand and some tobacco in his mouth. He stood still for a moment, regarding me intently, and shifting the tobacco from one cheek to the other. Then he asked me with much directness if I took him for a

"dude." I said that I should then go alone. "That way?" asked Sam, with an eye to my gear.

T was glorious!" thought Henriette Vischer, with exultation, as she mechanically smoothed her iron-gray hair, put on her plain dress and prim collar, set her room-austere as an anchorite's cell-to rights, opened her casements, and turned back her bed to air.

"It was so strong, so vivid. I never had a stronger. It was wonderful. It will last till I get there. Ach, grosser Gott im Himmel, to think I am going! What will Ottilie and Miezle say? How will they bear the surprise? It seems a crime to undertake it all alone. Twenty-two hours by rail. Du, meine Güte! Two days there to spend exactly as I like. Twentytwo hours back-remembering. How I ever got so far as to plan it and set the day I don't know, and I feel like the Prodigal Son. Yet if you've hungered and thirsted for just one thing all your life, and are sixty-eight years old, and never saw the day you could do it, and now you can with a clear conscience, at least so far as the money is concerned-well, selfish or not, I'm going to behold it once with waking eyes before I die!"

With an expression of singular determination even for Henriette Vischer, she went briskly downstairs to see that Fritz, the little apprentice and errand-boy, had opened the shop and properly begun his day's work.

Her mouth looked grim, but the deep wrinkles about her shrewd eyes were benevolent and humorous. The grimness had, of necessity, waxed strong, confronting the inordinate silliness of the two sisters she was trailing through life, and,

Heaven knows, daily intercourse with those dames required a liberal seasoning of benevolence and humor to make it in anywise palatable. She had an excellent head, both in its outward form and interior furnishings, a resolute profile, and a still erect and vigorous figure. In her little shop she sold lamp-shades, be-ribboned boxes, photograph-frames, leather handkerchief and glove cases, and other very clean and respectable objects of home manufacture, besides cards for birthdays, confirmations, Christmas and the like. Hers were the patient old hands that might always be depended upon to complete embroidered tokens of affection for blushing girls to present to their lovers. In the background was a somnolent bookbindery, relic of her husband-dead these thirty years-and still conducted by his old foreman. together, she enjoyed steady patronage, much respect, and had no fault to find with her modest humdrum business in a back street of a small inland town, except in the most secret chamber of her heart -that the town was inland.

Al

"Eberhard not yet down?" she asked, glancing into the work-rooms.

"No," grumbled old Gottlieb, "and I never set eyes on him yesterday and hardly on Monday, either."

He's younger than you and I,” she responded, with so strong a note of good cheer that the old man looked up from his work and smiled.

In the breakfast-room, her sister Ottilie, a heavy woman with blurred features and a sententious manner, was talking thus, between large sips of coffee and liberal mouthfuls of bread :