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Gay, intelligent, volatile, kind-hearted, and hospitable, they lack the strength and backbone that characterize the moral energies of powerful peoples. This and the delicious climate, which removes inducement to labor, would seem to solve the problem fully. The great rising industry in the Hawaian Islands at the present time is the sugar-culture. This is believed by the wisest of the natives to be the probable instrument of a great revolution in the beautiful island paradise now laboring under some subtile and nameless blight. Nowhere in the world are the conditions so favorable for raising the sugar-cane. The great difficulty now is the heavy tax which protects American sugar, and the lack of a reciprocity treaty, the principal reason, it is said, which caused the late journey of King Kalakaua to this country.

Let us glance for a moment at the conditions of the sugar-culture in the Sandwich Islands, and journey up to Ouomea in the Hilo district, the little town which contains the finest ferns known in the world, and preents the most favorable specimen of the new dustry.

The traveler climbs six hundred feet up mountain-side from beautiful Hilo, which bers a lotos-like dream in the arms of acific, wrapped in umbrageous silence a.oeauty. The pure, bracing air tells him a different story from the languid winds, heavy with odors, that murmur below. The deep boom of cascades is heard splashing over the hills, and the air is deliciously refreshing. The plantations here enjoy special advantages, for the innumerable mountain-streams are turned into flumes, and a great part of the cane and wood is brought down free of expense; and the labor is performed by natives and Chinese in about equal numbers.

Out of two hundred thousand available acres on the island of Hawaii, only a fifteenth is under cultivation. Were labor plentiful and duties removed, the soil would yield three times as much as the State of Louisiana. The magnificent climate makes it a very easy crop to grow. There is no brief harvest-time, with its frantic rush and hurry, no frost to render hasty cutting necessary. The same number of hands are kept the year through, and the planters can plant, cut, and grind, simultaneously. The little toy kingdom last year exported seventeen million pounds of sugar, and the yield might be made tenfold. This staple is now the great topic of interest on the islands, and Hawaii thrills to the centre at the news of a cent up or down in the American market.

But the pleasure-loving Hawaian is too much of an epicurean, too fond of basking in the dolce far niente of a land where mere living is a delight, probably ever to aspire to those higher enjoyments contingent on the severe expense of toil, ambition, and self-denial. With an infinite variety of delicious fruits to be had for the picking, as from the fabled tree in Mohammed's paradise, an atmosphere of balm, and summer seas where he can happily alternate his amphibious existence, there is nothing left for him to de

sire.

Let us stand on the Hilo beach, and witness an exhibition of the national sport of

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surf-bathing, a most exciting pastime, and needing, in a heavy sea, immense nerve and skill. The surf-board is a plank shaped like a coffin-lid, from six to nine feet in length. Legions of forms, moulded with the lithe and sinuous beauty of classic bronzes, are seen sporting in the waves like born denizens of the foam. A party of forty or fifty, with their surf-sliding boards, come out from the dusky throng, and, with much laughing chatter, prepare for the fascinating game of riding astride the breakers.

Wading out from rocks on which the sea is breaking, the islanders push their boards before them, and swim out to the first line of breakers. Suddenly they dive down out of sight, and nothing more is seen of them till their black heads bob up from the smooth seas like corks, half a mile from shore. Now the fun commences.

Watching for a very high roller, they leap on from behind, lying face downward on their surf-boards. As the wave speeds on, and its bottom touches ground, the top curls into a gigantic comber. The swimmers pose themselves on the highest edge by dexterous movement of hand and foot, keeping themselves at the top of the curl, and always seeming to slide down the foaming hillock. So they come on majestically just ahead of the breaker, borne shoreward by its mighty impulse at the rate of forty miles an hour, yet seeming to have a volition of their own, for the more daring riders kneel and even stand on their surf-boards, waving their arms and uttering exultant cries. Always on the verge of engulfment by the fierce breaker, whose white crest rises above them, just as one expects to see them dashed to pieces on the rocks, they quietly disappear, and emerge again out at sea, ready for another perilous race on their foaming coursers. The great art is in mounting the breaker at just the right time, and to keep exactly on its curl. The leading athletes are always vociferously cheered by the spectators, and the presence of the élite rarely fails to stimulate the swimmers to their utmost exertions. Even the maidens and old men often join in this national amusement. Such is Hawaian life at Hilo.

AGATHA STODDARD.

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have grown, by July, to feel ourselves tried intimates. Everybody knows the sort of compulsory affiliation that lurks in the atmosphere of a small country boarding-house. I have arrived in June, myself, at Mrs. Powerley's Mountain Retreat (consult, as regards further information, this lady's pretty advertisement in the rather obscure newspaper where I found it), having only the most slender of social intentions toward my future fellow-boarders, and an iron resolve to make my portfolio plethoric with industrious sketches; but the general epidemic of good-fellowship promptly does its best to secure me for a victim. Mrs. Mackenzie Small, a diminutive young widow, with her mourning a sea of black furbelows, and her copious hair a receptacle of untold jet gewgaws, makes me an object of flattering

personal interest almost from the first day of my arrival. A certain Miss Aurelia Bostwick, whom time has dragged, much against her will, to the brink of forty, and who now stands in that unpleasant situation, memorially dressed for sixteen, and with manners that retrospectively match her costume-this engaging virgin at once opens over me the vials of her most honeyed politeness. But Mrs. Mackenzie Small's and the elderly Aurelia's are not the only hands that (in metaphor) squeeze mine with tyrannical cordiality; I am at once made to understand that every breath breathed within the Retreat is one fragrant with the balm of unlimited lovingkindness.

Everybody knows how proverbially rainy the mountains are in summer; but this year the month of June is dry to an astonishing degree, and so I have very few occasions to languish under the affable attempts of these good people, for none of whom, it must be confessed, I have conceived very strong liking.

"Mrs. Small and I agree in thinking that you are an out-and-out woman-hater," the fair Aurelia tells me one morning, just before I start forth upon my accustomed tramp, sketch-book in hand.

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I try to smile reproachfully as I answer : "Don't make it harder than it is already, Miss Bostwick, for me to turn over my new leaf of diligence and industry."

"Oh, Mr. Embury!" (with a very infantile shake of the mature shoulders), "I'm not going to be humbugged in that style, neither is Mrs. Small. We both think you shun us. You can't imagine how disappointing we have found it, to hear that a real, distinguished artist was coming to the Retreat, and then to learn afterward that he is so horribly indifferent to everybody."

This sort of thing does not always confine itself to Miss Aurelia. Sometimes little Mrs. Mackenzie Small will do it, waylaying me on staircase, or in hall, or wherever the tender assault chances to be most convenient. Through the peril of these harrowing attacks I manage to pass woundless. Once it occurs to me, while Mrs. Mackenzie Small is saying dangerously fascinating things, that she is the most superb of subjects for a colorist to try his skill upon. What opportunity there is in all this black coquetry of costume, this sombre excess of ornamentation! I imagine her billows of crape - trimmed bombazine changed to the most delicate blue; I transform her prodigality of jet beads into stainless pearls; I turn the jet butterflies in her hair to the brilliancy of reality; and all the while I do silent, artistic reverence to the great powers of color, forgetting the extreme danger of my position, though vaguely conscious that this little widow would probably stamp with rage could she read my actual thoughts.

One day in early July I learn that the exquisite harmony of the Retreat is to be increased, very possibly, by two new arrivals. A father and a daughter are daily expected to fill the two vacant rooms left by asthmatic Mr. Peterkin and his devoted spinster-sister I remember carelessly wondering to myself whether the female portion of the new arrival

will in any way surpass the departed Miss Peterkin's somewhat frosty charms. A day or two later Mr. Albert Stoddard, a widower, arrives from New York with his daughter.

After a day of assiduous sketching and consequent absence from the Retreat, I come back just about in time to dress for tea. When I enter the dining-room the table has only one vacant place, and this is my own. We sup early at the Retreat, and plenty of mellow afternoon light fills the apartment. I bow right and left to familiar faces. Reproachful glances meet me, on more than a single side, whose meaning I have by this time grown well able to interpret.

"The only unmarried gentleman in the house," murmurs a certain stout Mrs. Rankin, whose place is next mine, and who has brought a little invalid husband into the mountains, whom she bullies dreadfully. "I declare, Mr. Embury, it's quite shameful for you to have staid away from us all another whole day!

Miss Bostwick and Mrs. Mackenzie Small are inconsolable. No, Lemuel, my dear" (in sudden address to the little invalid husband on her other side); “no hot biscuits to-night, my dear. I positively protest, now!"

It is sometimes a matter of interest with me whether, during continually-repeated discussions of just this same sort, Lemuel obtains his hot biscuit or whatever happens to be the special craving of an appetite immense and morbid enough to seem the principal distressing feature of his malady; but to-night my attention is suddenly otherwhere directed. Opposite me I discover that the two new arrivals are eating their teas.

The father has, in his day (as we are apt to say of a man evidently sixty), been handsome beyond the common. His shape, you promptly see, is a nice union of grace and height; his bald head, full-browed and finely-modeled, at once impresses, half from its noble outlines, and half from the majestic way in which it is posed on the broad, compact shoulders. Mr. Stoddard's hair, of which certain vestiges show conspicuously about either temple, is almost pure white, but his heavy mustache is iron-gray, making an effect which suggests the powdered heads of old French days, and an effect heightened, as regards sharp contrast, by the extreme darkness and brilliancy of the man's eyes. For the rest, there is a jaded look about his face that can hardly mean health, though it may be little more than fatigue, and a pallor that slightly verges upon a yellowish, sickly tinge.

Decided family resemblance exists between Miss Stoddard and her father, and yet if it be not in a certain expression of the eyes, to define such resemblance is quite impossible. Her eyes, however, are wholly different from his, being of the lightest gray, and filled with a sort of steadfastly-lustrous fire; but her hair is intensely black and of much seeming abundance, and the contrast thus secured is to me a trifle more striking than the similar yet opposite effect of which I have spoken, in her father's face. More striking, for the simple reason that it is less usual, and when seen in the case of Miss Stoddard, seen combined with a face of pale, sculptural regularity, beautiful after a type

that those only would condemn as cold for whom its perfect curves of chin, lip, or nostril were unappreciable charms.

As an artist, I at once become mutely enthusiastic over Miss Stoddard's face. I cannot help giving it one or two long stares over a parapet of teacup, with an impertinence whose æsthetic source she is doubtless far from surmising. The more, too, that I scan this face, the more do I become anxious for some knowledge of its possessor. Here, I tell myself, is no ordinary woman; no plant that could properly flourish in any conventional "rose-bud garden of girls; " no prattling repository of spite, vanity, flirtation, and a rabies on the subject of self-adornment. Whatever she may be it is something womanly, and modest, and noble. Nature sometimes tells sad falsehoods in human countenances; but here you see clearly that she sets for you no snare.

Doubtless the Retreat, considered in a flesh-and-blood sense, is astonished, not to say bewildered, a little later, on seeing me follow Mr. Stoddard and daughter out upon the piazza, and enter into sociable converse with the gentleman. I am the only unmarried man in the house, and it is my firm belief that were I much uglier and more unattractive than God has made me, this isolated position of bachelorhood must still have found the smiles and ogles and would-be petting by which I am surrounded a doom equally unescapable. And so I can aver, without being thought conceited, that this little act of civility extended toward the Stoddards afterward brings down upon Miss Stoddard's unoffending head the jealous rage of our whole sweetly-benevolent and mutually-loving Retreat, spurred on by the efficient generalship of Miss Aurelia Bostwick and Mrs. Mackenzie Small.

Unsuspicious of how dreadful an effect my simple piece of courtesy is producing, I stand and chat for quite a while with Mr. Stoddard and his daughter. We principally discuss the surrounding mountains, which I find that Mr. Stoddard has visited many years ago, and for which, as regards certain points of special interest, he preserves certain half-faded recollections that I take pleasure in retinting with my own fresh experiences. I find this man a most charming person before we have talked ten minutes together. Verily I am rewarded for my course of mild martyrdom among all the bores, male and female, who fill the Retreat. Ease of manner, breadth of observation, unquestionable refinement, and the fullest graces of mental culture, all throw across the surface of his conversation their soft flickerings of suggestion. I begin to perceive that, apart from the pleasure afforded by two congenial intellects meeting each other, there is an equally rare pleasure in the quiet certainty that you have also met that nameless and unexplainable product of modern civilization which we rather symbolize than define by the vaguely-general term of gentleman.

Miss Stoddard does not say much, but her few words make me wish to hear more from her lips. Standing near us, with that exquisitively-carved profile and the richlydusk hair waving off from her pure, pale fore

head past the small, shapely ear, by the royal right of beauty alone she is one who makes her silence felt beyond the speech of many another woman.

Neither that evening nor throughout the next day does any opportunity occur to me of any thing resembling a private talk between herself and me; but the Stoddards have not been a week at the Retreat before I find myself on terms of genial intimacy with daughter, no less than with father. The first impression that Agatha Stoddard produces upon me is of her extreme mental strength. Very soon, however, I find myself silently lauding her sympathetic soul, and telling myself that she possesses the sweetest of all womanly faculties, that of following and grasping thoughts beyond her real intellectual reach, by the charming mystery which we name intuition. And always within this rare-gifted girl there seems a sort of quiet struggle between the forces of intellect and of feeling.

"I am made all wrong," she once laughingly tells me, as we stroll together in the elastic morning air toward a delightful waterfall near the Retreat. "I ought to have been colder or else warmer; cleverer or else more stupid; larger, mentally, or else smaller."

But the more that I see of her the more convinced I become of its being just this delightful dissonance, so to speak, that chiefly makes her charming. I am aware, before long, that the entire Retreat is up in silent arms against me because of my open attentions to Miss Stoddard, and it must be admitted that I attach no special weight to the wrath of Mrs. Mackenzie Small or the rancor of the lovely Aurelia, with her clear case of spretæ injuria formæ. But not until some days later do I discover how Miss Stoddard herself has become an object of universal feminine dislike. One evening, while we are taking a twilight walk together through the slowly-purpling glen in which we are dwellers, we are discussing friendship, and I tell her

"It seems to me that you are one who would make friends almost wherever you choose. Am I not right?"

She laughs. "You are very good to say that, after witnessing my unpopularity at the Retreat; for of course this can't have escaped you."

"Pshaw!" I exclaim. "These people are not to be considered! I was not thinking of them, and indeed they're not worth wasting a thought upon." Then, after pausing for a second, I add: "Surely this isn't the reason, I hope, that you have been so pale and out of sorts for a day or two; and tonight you look quite strangely worried?"

She starts a trifle. "I, out of sorts, pale, worried? Do you really mean it? Why" (smiling a softly-brilliant smile), “I was telling papa only this morning how wonderful I thought this air.”

"Then I am wrong, Miss Stoddard, and glad to learn it. But pray give no further thought to your unpopularity. Console yourself with the truth."

"Which is-?" (while she dimples prettily enough, as if she half scented the coming compliment).

"That you are a pearl before swine. I am sure that if Mrs. Mackenzie Small ever bored you with any of her deadly platitudes you would regret having fallen into her good graces. And as for Miss Aurelia Bostwick-"

I pause here, for while she walks close to my side, so sudden and forcible a shiver passes through my companion's frame, that it almost seems to me like the first symptom of some acute nervous attack. But her voice, a moment later, sounds clear and steady.

'Pray don't let us waste words on these people. I quite share your opinion of them. I don't know why I spoke of them to you."

Her voice ends with a plaintively weary intonation that surprises me not a little. "Let us agree," I make prompt response, "to taboo them from our future conversation. It will be something pleasurable to anticipate."

What I have mentioned regarding my companion's changed appearance and manners during the two past days undoubtedly has struck me more than once, though I have attributed it to solicitude for her father, whose health has hardly altered for the better since he came among the mountains. After she and I pass in-doors together and then separate, this evening, I am attacked by deep yearnings to inflict upon Mrs. Mackenzie Small and the elderly Aurelia some punishment more summary than chivalrous. At one moment the thought of these creatures being jealous of a woman so unspeakably their superior as Agatha Stoddard fills me with the strongest disgust; and a moment later this disgust becomes amusement, pure and simple. For in contemplating my self as the innocent origin of so much malevolence- -as the human apple of discord flung among these rival goddesses at the Retreat-I think it may safely be asserted that only a strong sense of the humor in my situation assails me, without a vestige of vainglorious self-gratulation.

It is an exquisitely fresh evening, and after Miss Stoddard has left me to go and find her father, stroll out upon the piazza with a lighted cigar. A crescent moon of deep warm gold is dropping behind the purplishblack wave of a distant mountain, and bathing the rolling sward of a near valley in the sort of twilight that suggests elves on fernsprays or visions of the "flickering fairycircle" as it "wheels and breaks." With what majesty of tranquillity these stately hills are informed! And what presumptuousness in the Mackenzie-Smalls of humanity to bring among their august dominions their contemptible spites, greeds, and jealousies!

I take a seat just then within a wickerchair, four or five of which stand vacant on the piazza, abandoned to-night on account of the breezy freshness which I myself so enjoy. Right behind me is a window belonging to a sitting-room, though not the general sittingroom of the Retreat, which is in truth a well-sized but barn-like sort of parlor, most cheerlessly ill furnished.

It is some little space before I think at all concerning the clear sound of voices that reaches me through this open window; for

though quite conscious of the voices themselves, my mind instinctively pursues a course of reflections far more interesting than it would seem that these unnoticed murmurings could in any wise be; but suddenly, catching the name of "Stoddard," I at once listen with strained attention. The voice now speaking is Miss Aurelia Bostwick's, and as it progresses I plainly perceive that it is quivering with excitement. A pe. culiarity of the lovely Aurelia's language, when she is at all excited, consists in an utter disdain of all punctuation except a sort of reckless semicolon.

"I am sure that Margaret told the truth; Margaret is an honest girl; Mrs. Powerley says, honest as the sun; she knows all about her ever since she was a mere child; I missed that brooch off my table the day before yesterday; of course it was imprudent for me to leave it there, but then, you know, not a soul in the house has ever even thought of locking his doors this summer, for these quiet mountains aren't a bit like any crowded summer-resort; well, I asked Margaret about the brooch, and she flushed up so that I suspected her, and made some sharp, suspicious remark, I forget what, when the poor girl got very angry, and said she'd seen the brooch in other hands, but she'd never laid the weight of a finger on it herself; she'd rather have been killed than done so !"

Here follows a little pause, broken by a certain tinkle as of jet beads one against the other, and a rustling as of voluminous skirts with much stiffened undergear.

"Well," questions Mrs. Mackenzie Small, "and what happened after that ? "

"Why, Margaret, after a good deal of hesitation, told me the real truth: she said she went in that Stoddard girl's room the morning before-that was yesterday morning, you know—and Miss Stoddard was there get ting something out of her trunk; and Margaret asked if she could clean up the room, and Miss Stoddard said yes; just then, lo and behold, Margaret happened to cast her eyes toward the bureau, and there lay my brooch; Margaret assured me she would have known it anywhere, and she knew it then." More tinkling and rustling.

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Gracious, Aurelia! I declare I'm all in cold chills! Go on."

Miss Aurelia, encouraged by this open confession of its perfect success, continues her narration:

"Well, as I said, the brooch lay on that thing's bureau as bold as you please, and her back was turned, so she didn't see that Margaret had observed it; but presently she got up in quite a hurry, Margaret says, drew near the bureau, and slipped it into a drawer."

"Yes, Aurelia ! My dear, take time. You're quite excited."

"Excited! I should think I might be excited; Margaret can tell you that I felt almost like fainting away this afternoon when she took me into that thing's room while she was having poetry read aloud to her by Mr. Embury, and opened that identical drawer, and there the brooch lay!"

"Gracious, Aurelia! Are you sure?"
"Sure of what, in Mercy's name?"
"I mean sure, quite sure, that Margaret

hadn't put it there herself? She might have got frightened, you know, and-"

"Very true; but what do you think happened to-night just before tea?"

"Haven't an idea."

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'Why, I met that thing-for she doesn't deserve to be called even a creature-in the upper hall near her room, and the thought struck me all on a sudden, you know, and if I didn't go up to her, as brave as could be, and said I, 'Let me show you a pretty present that I received this morning, Miss Stoddard, from my friend, Mrs. Mackenzie Small; she, being in mourning, you know, believes that such lovely trinkets are best disposed of when given to one's friends; isn't it charming?' and, my dear, I thought she was going to faint away, she turned so ghastly pale; and then she began to stammer out something about very pretty,' and a minute later she'd burst into tears."

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"Goodness alive! Then there's no doubt." "Listen, my dear; said she: 'I took it; but, ob, please have mercy on me, won't you, and not tell anybody; for if you do I promise we shall both go at the end of the week; I couldn't help taking it; it's a disease with me; and when I came up here I thought I was cured, indeed I did!'"

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"I'm all in cold chills again!" And, while shivering, Mrs. Mackenzie Small rattles "the bravery of her tinkling ornaments with noise enough for one of the daughters of Babylon. "Perhaps she told the truth, Aurelia. I've heard of such things; there's a word for it a mile long, don't you know?"

"I don't believe she has any such disease at all; but I was somehow sort of touched then by her tears and her tremblings, and I promised her I'd say nothing to any one-I made, though, a kind of mental reservation in favor of you; and, ob, I forgot to tell you that, after she was sure of my secrecy, she was brazen enough to inquire how I found out about the brooch; but of course I didn't tell her. Here comes somebody-hush, not a word more at present!"

The somebody is Mrs. Rankin, the stout lady with the little invalid husband, who enters for no other apparent purpose than to impart the wholly gratuitous intelligence that she has just "put poor Lemuel to bed, and he was so tired with his long ramble this afternoon that he fell asleep like a weary child as soon as his head touched the pillow."

I move away from the window now; a strange cold feeling seems clogging my limbs as I leave the piazza―a feeling not born, either, of the sharp night - air. Has that woman been speaking the truth? Can I doubt her words? Against these self-questionings there rises within me, at first, a very surge of indignant denial. My emotional nature rushes to check the progress of reflection, and closes, upon the thought of Agatha Stoddard's actual guilt, the doors of all reasonable consideration. Her image starts up before me, chaste, pale, beautiful, as some sculptured ideal of old, and seems with its visible purity alone to scorn the possibility of any inward soilure. And it is only when a certain recollection assails me that something more like tranquillity replaces this ob

stinate turmoil of feeling. If an insanity be the terrible explanation of the whole matter, this, most surely, is an explanation far less defiant against probability, and far less repugnant to my most sacred and steadfast convictions. Yes, I tell myself, this proposition may at least be expressed in rational terms; it is thinkable. Poor girl! if it should be true! What a mockery of Nature must then be her strange blending of disease and health-of horrid infirmity and superb vigor! But I deny any thing more than its bare possibility!

I do not see. Miss Stoddard again that night. My sleep is far from peaceful. Dreams haunt it which I afterward recall with undeniable pain; and, during wakeful intervals, I find myself remembering every word of our last interview, and dwelling with a morbid mental persistence on that part of it which concerned Miss Bostwick.

The Stoddards both breakfast late on the following morning. I meet them in the main lower hall as they are leaving the breakfastroom together.

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This is shamefully late for the mountains," I reprove, smilingly. "Shall I shock you by telling you the hour?"

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'No, pray don't," answers Mr. Stoddard, pleasantly enough; and then he glances toward his daughter with a look that strikes me as far less composed or careless than circumstances would warrant. "We are more blamable, too, for appearing so late, as we have decided to leave by about next Saturday."

I feel my color change as these words are spoken. Did not Miss Bostwick state that her detected delinquent had promised-?

But I break off, as it were, in the midst of that mental sentence, and bite my under lip in an access of strong self-scorn. Looking at this nobly-beautiful creature, whose light-gray eyes meet mine with so sweet a candor in the candid morning sunshine, and whose calm curve of brow, over-rippled by its dark tresses, would well befit a Pallas; knowing her intellect, her soulfulness, her delicate sympathies, her brilliant acquirements, I momentarily despise myself for what seems the flippant insolence of my suspicion.

"Next Saturday," I repeat, with a surprise of manner that narrowly misses agitation. "Why, that will only leave you two more days. Isn't the resolution rather sudden ?"

I address this question to daughter, not to father. The self-contempt, of which I have spoken yet possesses me, and it is a question utterly devoid of suspicion, wholly free from any trapping or detective impulse.

Her face takes a pinkish flush as she answers me; and there is something about the way in which her eyes restlessly meet and avoid my own, that I suddenly find myself hating to witness.

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I readily agree. It is my wish to be alone with this man for a few hours. Already we have become very confidentially intimate, he narrating many incidents of his past life as a lawyer in New York, and I reposing in him not a few of the professional dreams, yearnings, and ambitions, with which my brotherhood is sometimes visited. What may he not tell me, I ask myself, if discreetly questioned? For that wave of self-contempt has passed away, and doubt is once more manifest, though far from dominant, within my soul.

A moment after accepting my invitation Mr. Stoddard turns toward his daughter.

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"Very well, papa," comes the quiet an "If Mr. Embury will have me." "You know that I shall be charmed," is what I put into words as a reply, but through my breast sharp, dagger-like distrust passes, which also might be put into words thus: "Is he afraid to leave her at home after what has happened? If not, why should he propose taking her to-day, when a few days ago he pointedly spoke of our going together, without any other companionship?"

We all three start forth about an hour later. As I come down-stairs, attired in my woolen shirt, bearing my great staff, and having strapped across my shoulders the knapsack which is to bear our dinner, I discover that Agatha Stoddard is standing in the hall, and that Miss Aurelia is standing at her side.

Aurelia's face wears an angry flush that she tries to make less evident, as I appear, by smiling an extremely artificial smile. Agatha, quite dressed for her walk, looks paler than I have ever seen her, and the light-gray eyes are shining with a kind of hard brilliancy. Not even the sound of either woman's voice has reached me, and yet I know that there have just been words between them, and that they have doubtless ceased speaking because of coming footsteps.

From that moment I doubt no longer. Some mental process takes place within me which I seem best able to express by likening it to the quiet swinging together of massive doors, or the grating of a key in its lock. I am convinced!

I pass the two ladies with only this quiet question, addressed to Agatha Stoddard: "Is your father ready?

"Yes," she answers; "he will be here in a moment." Then I move into the diningroom, with the purpose of having my knapsack filled by the cold edibles for three, regarding which I have previously instructed Mrs. Powerley. When I return to the hall, Miss Aurelia has disappeared, and Agatha and her father are awaiting me in the open doorway.

I do not think that I recall much of what passes, in a conversational sense, until we reach the glen. Doubtless I am often audible; Mr. Stoddard speaks frequently,

But,

as well; and his daughter rarely. whatever either companion says, and whatever I myself say, strikes upon my thin mood with too languid a dissonance for memory to keep record of the process.

It is a little after mid-noon when we reach the glen-a narrow, shadowful pass nestling between two superb escarpments of densefoliaged mountain. Masses of hoary rock,. greenly arabesqued with an abundance of close-growing moss, lie in beautiful turmoil about what has once been, doubtless, a turbulent water-course, hurrying its white surge down to lower valley-lands beyond our own. But now the quietude of these immobile masses, often water-worn into curves of perfect smoothness, possesses the charm of ruined chambers, where dead voices have once sounded, or dead feet walked; and, if it speaks to the imagination with language only less forceful than that which we seem to hear while watching the stones of some dismantled fortress or castle, this is solely because it lacks the one sympathetic element always investing the footsteps of an extinct humanity.

Everywhere under the noble pines that thickly border this exquisite glen grow ferns, in that prodigal profusion which their slim, feather-like delicacy could scarcely make wearisome, I fancy, even if we found them clothing some limitless prairie. Mr. Stoddard seems filled with quiet enthusiasm over the numberless new and surprising charmsof the place; while his daughter, each cheek flushed into softest rose, wanders, with a childish bewilderment, here and there, gathers a great cluster of mingled ferns and wildflowers, pausing a moment to murmur words of pleasure, smiling, lifting both hands in graceful rapture, and sending a new pang into the concealed torment that I am called upon to suffer!

Mr. Stoddard and I seat ourselves, a little later, on some shawls spread over the most accommodating level of moss-covered rock that we can find. Mr. Stoddard's seat is specially comfortable; it admits, presently, of being changed into a sort of Druidic couch. I perceive, a few moments after having lighted my pipe, that his conversation shows certain drowsy symptoms; and, at length, in the midst of a rather involved and wholly uncharacteristic sentence, he suddenly lapses into abrupt silence. My face is averted from him, for I am watching a trim figure, clad in dark-blue, moving hither and thither among the columnar pines; but turning, as he ceases to speak, I see with some astonishment that Mr. Stoddard's eyes are closed, and that he has dropped into unmistakable slumber.

Scarcely three minutes elapse before Aga-tha comes quietly strolling in our direction. When she is quite near us her face wears a rather anxious look, owing, evidently, to her discovery that her father is asleep.

"Do you think it right?" she asks, seating herself near me on a portion of the shawlcovered rock. "Is he not in danger of taking cold?"

"No," I answer. "This rock is quite dry, and the sun has been warming it; besides, he has that shawl under him. And then, too, the morning was so cool that he

was not at all overheated on reaching here. Perhaps a short nap will give him an appetite."

"Poor papa!" (in a very low and sweet voice). "I am afraid the walk has been too much for him, after all."

"And you are not tired?"

"Oh, no. I am not easily tired with walking. There are many more spots among these mountains, I suppose, just as lovely as this. I am so sorry-"

She pauses, looks at me swiftly, a little across her shoulder, and then drops her eyes upon the great bouquet which she is holding. "You are sorry for what?" I question, watching her face steadily.

I see the infrequent color tinge either cheek very slightly again, as she lifts her eyes and answers:

"I am sorry that we have once more changed our minds, papa and I, about leaving the mountains. Has he not told you?"

"No. You have postponed your departare?"

side me, bending above her faded ferns, and to tell her of my supreme sympathy, my deeply-commiserating love! What restrains me from this? Is it fear of meeting her cold rebuff? or is it reluctance to shame her with allusion to an unhappy infirmity—an organic flaw in what otherwise were so flaw. less-for which she herself can be in no wise morally responsible? I cannot answer which sentiment is more at work within me. I only know that I sit silent for a number of moments longer, and that she is silent as well, aad that the pines are sighing faintly on either side of us, with a suggestive wistfulness by no means lost upon my dreary mood. It is she who at length breaks this silence, turning the clear light eyes full upon my face.

"I never knew you so untalkative for so long a time. Are you having sad thoughts? I saw you looking quite sad while you read a letter last evening; I hope it bore you no bad news."

I had quite forgotten the letter; but I "We have quickened it. We are going remember it now, and with quickening pulses to-morrow."

I make some few surprised comments and then feel a sickening dejection lay its grasp about my heart, its seal upon my lips. Miss Aurelia has forced them to go sooner; that is what her angry look meant, there in the hall; and that explains, as well, Agatha's unwonted expression at the same moment. "Good Heavens!" I tell myself, among all the distressing failures that Nature makes in accomplishing her more perfect creations, has there ever been so terrible a satire upon her own powers as when she gave life to this beautiful, brilliant, lovable girl?"

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We sit for some time in silence. The pines near by murmur rhythmically as fitful breezes move them. Agatha Stoddard seems closely scrutinizing her ferns, which now begin drooping into limp lifelessness.

My own feelings appear a tumult then, though at this later day they yield more readily to the scalpel of analysis. It has possibly been the sharp shock of overhearing Miss Bostwick's words there upon the piazza, which has first brought the truth of my love for Agatha Stoddard out from the vague hues of an attraction, by myself neither allowed nor denied, into the sharper insistent colors of a vividly-conscious state. But the moment, so to speak, that my love sprang into absolute existence it has been called upon to defend its object against a revolting doubt; or rather (with the impetuous idealizing instinct nearly always inseparable from what we call love) it has taken up hot arms to prevent reason from ever fostering an idea of such repellent significance. The result of this mental contest has been a sort of honorable psychical peace-treaty. Reason bas asserted her right to receive the repellent idea, but she has received it under a far less afflicting form-that of Agatha Stoddard's probable insanity. Yet Love, if naturally a defender, is even still more a compassionater; and Pity, ever the alert vassal of Love, has set thrilling by her strong touch what seem like heart-chords over which no emotion has ever swept before. I long to seize the hand of this woman, as she sits be

answer:

"It certainly did not bear pleasant news." And now I proceed, speaking nothing except plain truth: "A friend of mine, a man whom I thought of irreproachable integrity, has committed one of those business dishonesties from which his name can never recover."

She looks interested. "What a bitter disappointment to you!"

I have scarcely thought of the contents of the letter since a short while after its reception, because of weightier trouble by far. But I now answer:

"Bitter enough! And that word disappointment just expresses my feeling. One does so hate to think (for purely egotistical reasons if no others) that one has been throwing away his esteem."

Her glance has returned to her ferns while I am speaking, and as these last words are pronounced a quick start responds to them. She does not lift her eyes again, but speaks in a cold, restrained way, wholly op posite from her wonted voice.

"But are you sure that the esteem was all wasted? Haven't you charity enough to think otherwise? The best fruits have sometimes the deepest flaws. And-and-" (hesitating, here, for one slight instant) "are you sure that your friend's misdeed is as black as they paint it?"

Strong of nerve though I have always prided myself on being, I tremble, and my voice trembles likewise, as these words rush to my lips:

And

"You don't know me if you think I have no charity. Indeed, I have much! pity, too! I can pity where others would condemn and-even sneer!"

She turns upon me a pair of wildlystartled eyes, which tell, almost with the plainness of spoken acknowledgment, that my tones have betrayed me. Just then the quiet form at my side moves, and a moment later Mr. Stoddard is asking how long he has slept. Meanwhile she is busied over her ferns again, fingering them with a hand that I plainly see is far from steady.

Not long afterward we spread out the edi

bles contained in my knapsack, at the laughing solicitation of Mr. Stoddard, who declares himself gnawed by hunger. With her the meal is a farce; I see that she chokes down the few mouthfuls she takes; and I, wretched as it seems to me that never man was wretched before, do hardly better justice to Mrs. Powerley's ample provisioning.

Bitterly blaming myself one momentjustifying my words the next—again, regretting that our further conversation was interrupted-and yet again giving silent thanks that any worse shame was spared her, it will be understood that I am ill in condition to assume, during the rest of our stay in the glen, or during our after-walk homeward, any thing like an easy or tranquil demeanAnd yet I succeed in so conducting myself as to win no comment from Mr. Stoddard, whatever symptoms of mysterious change he may privately notice.

or.

With Agatha, however, it is wholly different. She moves, speaks, and acts, like one stunned. Her eyes persistently avoid my face. She never once individually addresses me after her father's awakening. Mr. Stoddard repeatedly remarks upon her altered behavior. Her first reply is that she has a sudden miserable headache, and all her further replies bear upon the same subject of excuse. I am glad when we reach home, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, and separate in the hall. How I hate that lovely glen! How I resolve never to visit it again while I live!

The rest of the afternoon, until tea-time, I spend in my own room. Father and daughter both appear at tea. Agatha's eyes scarcely once leave her plate while she is seated. Mrs. Mackenzie Small inquires of me across the table, with the characteristic rattling accompaniment, how I enjoyed my walk, and it is by no means easy for me to give the little lady a civil response. Fortunately for my reputation, Miss Aurelia addresses no remark to me, being only conversational as regards her immediate surrounders. Mr. Stoddard is his usual affable self, though now and then I see, or else fancy that I see, a worried look possess his face, as he gives a side-glance toward the pale and crushed-looking Agatha.

They leave the table before any one else, and I almost immediately follow them, with some wild idea of begging her pardon, or at least humbling myself in her presence, no matter how clumsily.

But she is ascending the stairs-has, in fact, almost quitted them-when I reach the ball. Her father stands near the doorway, however, looking out upon the cool commencement of twilight, the darkening slopes of rich green, turfy sward, and the slow brightening of a moon that poises its pearl half-globe high above the same mountain in which it seemed to sink last night.

"Your daughter tells me that you have decided on leaving to-morrow," I at once open conversation, joining Mr. Stoddard.

"Yes," he replies, "it is true. Agatha has an idea that the sea-shore will agree better with us both. She has gone up to pack, now. Poor child, she is feeling wretchedly

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