wind, such as blows only on great mid-continent plains, or at sea. There was no cloud in sight, but the pall of haze was over the whole sky. The Old Man recognized it as smoke from distant prairie-fires. He looked about, but saw only a dull glow in the sky far to the south, which showed a fire there, but many miles away. Sometimes a tumbleweed, that odd but intelligent prairie product which spends the summer in growing round and bigger than a bushel-basket that it may break off at the top of the ground in September and travel with the wind for two or three months - sometimes one of these vagrant weeds would bound across his path and go rolling on in the darkness toward the north. This was the nearest approach to life which greeted the Old Man. He noticed that the lights of the hopeful young city of Broken Bow were extinguished. He walked straight to the grave, which was on slightly higher ground than the little clump of houses. The long grass had been trampled down for a few feet around the low mound. The Old Man stood and looked down upon it for several minutes. Then he placed the yellow flowers near the head. He stepped back, and sat down on a sod which had not been replaced. He clasped his hands about his knees, his head bent forward, and he sat gazing at the dim outlines of the mound before him. Tige, who had followed him from the house, crept up, and lay down with his head on his master's feet. The wind swept over them, the dog crept closer, and the Old Man's head gradually sank lower. Soon both slept, the man deeply, the dog lightly, and the blundering tumbleweeds were left in possession of the scene.

Three hours later the Old Man was awakened from his heavy slumber by a dismal howl close to his ear. He started nervously, turned his head, and found himself face to face with the dog, which sat on the ground in apparent deep distress of mind. The Old Man started to bestow a malediction of a highly profane nature upon the animal, when he caught sight of his own and the dog's shadow upon the mound before him. He raised his eyes to the northern sky, but it was even darker than when he had gone to sleep. The truth rushed in upon him. He leaped to his feet, and turned to the south, and saw a prairie-fire coming up with the wind. It seemed scarcely a half-mile away. Black, burned-out grass stems were falling all about. To the east and to the west, as far as he could see, there was the same wall of fire, the tongues of flame leaping up fiercely and lapping up the long, dry grass before them. And back of them was the wind with its sweeping rush. The Old Man first thought of his own house, but he remembered that one of the last

things which his wife had done before her sickness was to make him build a fire-brake around it, something he was ever adverse to doing till the fire was actually in sight. Then he thought of the rising city of Broken Bow, lying all unprotected. And here I may crave a line to say that the prairie community is usually like the Old Man in the matter of fire-brakes: it needs the stimulating influence of the approaching fire to make it go out and plow the two circles of furrows and burn the grass between them necessary for protection. And though Broken Bow had during the fall constructed (on paper) a court-house and several other important buildings, and had welcomed (in the imaginative columns of the " Van-Guard") the entrance of two railroads, she had utterly failed to provide the means of preserving the eleven houses which she really possessed. The Old Man did not pause after he realized the condition of the town. He seized his hat from where it had blown on the ground, and rushed away to give the alarm. In a few minutes he was pounding on the door of Judge Barlow's house. This able jurist put his head out of the window, instantly grasped the situation with his fine judicial mind, and retreated to clothe himself properly for the occasion, while the Old Man hurried away and beganthundering on other doors. Tige began a judicious barking, which aroused the town dogs, and aided the good work of waking the other inhabitants from their dreams of city halls, trunk-lines, and so forth. In five minutes Broken Bow was making vigorous arrangements to welcome the coming fire. But Old Man Doggett was not among his fellow-citizens. He was rushing away across the prairie, straight toward the fire, to warn Miss Holley.

MR. PETER GATCHELL.

I suppose that the Old Man ran faster than he ever had run before. Already a great cloud of smoke rolled above his head, and the grasscinders, still glowing, fell around him. He could see the little square, shed-roofed house ahead of him, standing a small black cube against the horizon of flame. The fire seemed almost upon it, but the Old Man did not despair of reaching it first. Tige kept well in advance, barking wildly. As they drew nearer, and the Old Man felt the hot breath of the fire in his face, the dog caught the idea of the proceedings, and

headed by Justice Barlow, was appointed to present them to the Old Man. As the sun, big and red, rose up out of the blackened plain, the committee started for the home of the individual to be honored. When they arrived, knocking having brought no response, they pushed open the door and entered. The room was bare of even the little furniture which it usually held. The rifle was gone from its place. Neither the Old Man nor Tige was anywhere visible. But, pinned to the wall by a two-pronged fork, they found this:

Fellow Citizens and ladys and gentlemen:
Tige done it.
Yurs respeckfully,
A. DOGGETT.

P. S. We hev gone West.

So the committee went back and reported a failure.

But the next afternoon the news came that the Old Man's horses had wandered back

alone, and were at their late home. A party, headed by Morton, were soon galloping over the trail to the west. They wound down a ravine to the Missouri just as the sun was sinking behind the barren bluffs on the other side. A little down the stream, near the swift-flowing, milky waters, they came upon the Old Man's covered wagon. The camp-fire of the night before had gone out. The horses' harness lay on the ground, and the yellow leaves from a giant cottonwood were scattered over it. The gurgle of an eddy in the river was the only sound. Tige stood sullen guard under the wagon, and growled angrily when the men came nearer and dismounted. But he knew Morton, and allowed him to go to the front of the wagon. He drew aside the flap and looked in. Then he let it fall, and said:

"It was too much for the Old Man. He will never go West again."

In his pocket they found a faded daguerreotype in an old-fashioned black case. The women at Broken Bow said it was a school-girl picture of the Old Man's wife.

HE recruiting-office at Rivermouth was in a little unpainted, weather-stained building on Anchor street, not far from the customhouse. The tumble-down shell had long remained tenantless, and now, with its mouse-colored exterior, easily lent itself to its present requirements as a little military mouse-trap. In former years it had been occupied as a thread-and-needle and candy shop by one Dame Trippew. All such petty-shops in the town were always kept by old women, and these old women were always styled dames. It is to be lamented that they and their innocent traffic have vanished into the unknown. VOL. XLIV.-116.

The interior of the building, consisting of one room and an attic covered by a lean-to roof, had undergone no change beyond the removal of Dame Trippew's pathetic stock at the time of her bankruptcy. The narrow counter, painted pea-green and divided in the center by a swinging gate, still stretched from wall to wall at the further end of the room, and behind the counter rose a series of small wooden drawers, which now held nothing but a fleeting and inaccurate memory of the lavender, and pennyroyal, and the other sweet herbs that used to be deposited in them. Even the tiny cow-bell, which once served to warn Dame Trippew of the advent of a customer, still hung from a bit of curved iron on the inner side of the street door, and continued to give out a

petulant, spasmodic jingle whenever that door was opened, however cautiously. If the good soul could have returned to the scene of her terrestrial commerce, she might have resumed business at the old stand without making any alterations whatever. Everything remained precisely as she had left it at the instant of her exit. But a wide gulf separated Dame Trippew from the present occupant of the premises. Dame Trippew's slight figure, with its crisp white cap and apron, and steel-bowed spectacles, had been replaced by the stalwart personage of a sergeant of artillery in the regular army, between whose overhanging red mustache and the faint white down that had of late years come to Dame Trippew's upper lip it would have been impossible to establish a parallel. The only things these two might have claimed in common were a slackness of trade and a liking for the aromatic Virginia leaf, though Dame Trippew had taken hers in a dainty idealistic powder, and the sergeant took his in realistic plug through the medium of an aggressive clay pipe.

In spite of the starry shield, supported by two crossed cannon cut out of tin and surmounted by the national bird in the same material, which hung insidiously over the transom outside; in spite of the drummer-boy from the fort, who broke the silence into slivers at intervals throughout the day; in brief, in spite of his own martial bearing and smart uniform, the sergeant found trade very slack. At Rivermouth the war with Mexico was not a popular undertaking. If there were any heroic blood left in the old town by the sea, it appeared to be in no hurry to come forward and get itself shed. There were hours in which Sergeant O'Neil despaired of his country. But by degrees the situation brightened, recruits began to come in, and finally the town and the outlying districts-chiefly the outlying districts-managed to furnish a company for the State regiment. One or two prominent citizens had been lured by commissions as officers; but neither of the two Rivermouthians who went in as privates was of the slightest civic importance. One of these men was named James Dutton.

Why on earth James Dutton wanted to go to the war was a puzzle to the few townsfolks who had any intimate acquaintance with the young man. Intimate acquaintance is perhaps too strong a term; for though Dutton was born in the town and had always lived there, he was more or less a stranger to those who knew him best. Comrades he had, of course, in a manner: the boys with whom he had formerly gone to the public school, and two or three maturer persons whose acquaintance he had contracted later in the way of trade. But with these he could scarcely be said to be intimate. James

Dutton's rather isolated condition was not in consequence of any morbid or uncouth streak in his mental make-up. He was of a shy and gentle nature, and his sedentary occupation had simply let the habit of solitude and unsociability form a shell about him. Dutton was a shoemaker and cobbler, like his father before him; plying his craft in the shabby cottage where he was born and had lived ever since, at the foot of a narrow lane leading down to the river-a lonely, doleful sort of place, enlivened with a bit of shelving sand where an ancient fisherman occasionally came to boil lobsters.

In the open lots facing the unhinged gate was an old relinquished tannery that still flavored the air with logwood, which lay here and there in dull-red patches, killing the grass. The undulations of a colonial graveyard broke tamely against the western base of the house. Headstones and monuments-if there had ever been any monuments had melted away. Only tradition and those slowly subsiding wave-like ridges of graves revealed the character of the spot. Within the memory of man nobody had been dropped into that Dead Sea. The Duttons, father and son, had dwelt here nearly twenty-four years. They owned the shanty. The old man was now dead, having laid down his awl and lapstone just a year before the rise of those international complications which resulted in the appearance of Sergeant O'Neil in Rivermouth, where he immediately tacked up the blazoned ægis of the United States over the doorway of Dame Trippew's little shop.

As has been indicated, the war with Mexico was not looked upon with favor by the inhabitants of Rivermouth, who clearly perceived its underlying motive-the extension of slave territory. The abolition element in the town had instantly been blown to a white heat. Moreover, war in itself, excepting as a defensive measure or on a point of honor, seemed rather poor business to the thrifty Rivermouthians. They were wholly of the opinion of Birdofredom Sawin, that

Nimepunce a day fer killin' folks comes kind o' low fer murder.

That old Nehemiah Dutton's son should have any interest one way or the other in the questions involved was inconceivable, and the morning he presented himself at the recruitingoffice a strong ripple of surprise ran over the group of idlers that hung day after day around the door of the crazy tenement, drawn thither by the drum-taps, and a morbid sense of gunpowder in the air. These idlers were too sharp or too unpatriotic to enlist themselves, but they had unbounded enthusiasm for those who

On the afternoon of his enlistment he was met near the post-office by Marcellus Palfrey, the sexton of the Old Granite Church.

"What are you up to, anyhow, Jemmy?" asked Palfrey. "What's your idee?"

"My idea is," replied Dutton, "that I've never been able to live freely and respectably, as I've wanted to live; but I mean to die like a gentleman, when it comes to that."

"What do you call a gentleman, Jemmy?" "Well, a man who serves faithfully, and stands by to lay down his life for his duty-he's a gentleman."

"That's so," said Palfrey. "He need n't have no silver-plated handles, nor much outside finish, if he 's got a satin linin'. He's one of God's men."

What really sent James Dutton to the war? Had he some unformulated and hitherto unsuspected dream of military glory, or did he have an eye to supposable gold ingots piled up in the sub-basement of the halls of the Montezumas? Was it a case of despised love, or was he simply tired of reheeling and resoling the boots of Rivermouth folk; tired to death of the river that twice a day crept up to lap the strip of sandy beach at the foot of Nutter's Lane; tired to death of being alone, and poor, and aimless? His motive is not positively to be known, only to be guessed at. We shall not trouble ourselves about it. Neither shall the war, which for a moment casts a lurid light on his figure, delay us long. It was a tidy, comfortable little war, not without picturesque aspects. Out of its flame and smoke leaped two or three fine names that dazzled men's eyes awhile; and among the fortunate was a silent young lieutenant of infantry,—a taciturn but not unamiable young lieutenant,- who was afterward destined to give the name of a great general into the keeping of history forever. Wrapped up somewhere in this Mexican war is the material for a brief American epic; but it is not to be unrolled and recited here.

With the departure of Our Country's Gallant Defenders, as they were loosely denominated by some, the Idiots, as they were compactly described by others,-monotony again settled down upon Rivermouth. Sergeant O'Neil's heraldic emblems disappeared from Anchor street, and the quick rattle of the tenor drum at five o'clock in the morning no longer disturbed the repose of peace-loving citizens. The tide of battle rolled afar, and its echoes were not of a quality to startle the drowsy old seaport. Indeed, it had little at stake. Only four men had gone from the town proper. One, Captain Kittery, died before reaching the seat of war; one deserted on the way; one, Lieuten

James Dutton was left to represent the land force of his native town. He might as well have died or deserted, for he was promptly forgotten.

From time to time accounts of battles and bombardments were given in the columns of "The Rivermouth Barnacle," on which occasions the Stars and Stripes, held in the claws of a spread eagle, decorated the editorial page— a cut which until then had been used only to celebrate the bloodless victories of the ballot. The lists of dead, wounded, and missing were always read with interest or anxiety, as the case might be, for one had friends and country acquaintances, if not fellow-townsmen, with the army on the Rio Grande. Meanwhile, nobody took the trouble to bestow a thought on James Dutton. He was as remote and shadowy in men's memories as if he had been killed at Thermopylæ or Bunker's Hill. But one day the name of James Dutton blazed forth in a despatch that electrified the community. At the storming of Chapultepec, Private James Dutton, Company K, Rivermouth, had done a very valorous deed. He had crawled back to a plateau on the heights, from which the American troops had been driven, and had brought off his captain, who had been momentarily stunned by the wind of a round shot. Not content with that, Private Dutton had returned to the dangerous plateau, and, under a heavy fire, had secured a small field-piece which was about to fall into the hands of the enemy. Later in the day this little howitzer did eminent service. After touching on one or two other minor matters, the despatch remarked, incidentally, that Private James Dutton had had his left leg blown off.

The name of James Dutton was instantly on every lip in town. Citizens who had previously ignored his existence, or really had not been aware of it, were proud of him. The Hon. Jedd Deane said that he had long regarded James Dutton as a young man of great promise, a er- most remarkable young person, in short; one of the kind with much- er-latent ability. Postmaster Mugridge observed, with the strong approval of those who heard him, that young Dutton was nobody's fool, though what especial wisdom Dutton had evinced in having his leg blown off was not clear. Captain Tewksberry, commanding the local militia company, the Rivermouth Tigers, was convinced that no one who had not carefully studied "Scott's Tactics" could have brought away that gun under the circumstances. " Here, you will observe, was the exposed flank of the heights, there, behind the chevaux-de-frise, lay the enemy," etc., etc. Dutton's former school-fellows began to remember that there had always been something tough and gritty in Jim Dutton.