visable to take him into custody; for when those who knew old Henry, had known him for so long, reflected on the condition of the county insane asylum, a place, because of the poverty of the district, of staggering aberration and sickening environment, it was decided to let him remain at large; for, strange to relate, it was found on investigation that at night he returned to his lonesome domicile to find whether his wife had returned, and to brood there in loneliness until the morning. Who would lock up a thin, eager old man with long iron-gray hair and an attitude of kindly, innocent inquiry, particularly when he was well known for a past of only kindly servitude and reliability? Those who had known him best rather agreed that he should be allowed to roam at large. He could do no harm. His figure after a time became not so much a commonplace as an accepted curiosity, and the replies, "Why, no, Henry; I ain't seen her," or "No, Henry; she ain't been here to-day," more customary.

He was an odd figure in the sun and rain, on dusty roads and muddy ones, encountered occasionally in strange and unexpected places, pursuing his endless search. Under-nourishment, after a time, although the neighbors and those who knew his history gladly contributed from their store, affected his body; for he walked much and ate little. The longer he roamed the public highway in this manner, the deeper became his strange hallucination; and finding it harder and harder to return from his more and more distant pilgrimages, he finally took a few utensils from his home store and, making a small package of them, carried them with him in order that he might not be compelled to return. In an old tin coffee-pot of large size he placed a small tin cup, a knife, fork, and spoon, some salt and pepper, and to the outside of it, by a string forced through a pierced hole, he fastened a plate, which could be released, and which was his woodland table. It was no trouble for him to secure the little food that he needed, and with a strange, almost religious dignity he had no hesitation in ask

ing for that much. By degrees his hair became longer and longer, his once black hat became an earthen brown, and his clothes were threadbare and dusty.

For all of a year he walked, and none knew how wide were his perambulations, nor how he survived the storms and cold. They could not see him, with homely rural understanding and forethought, sheltering himself in haycocks, or by the sides of cattle, whose warm bodies protected him from the cold and whose dull understandings were not opposed to his harmless presence. Overhanging rocks and trees kept him at times from the rain, and a friendly hay-loft or corn-crib was not above his humble consideration.

The involute progression of hallucination is strange. From asking at doors and being constantly rebuffed or denied, he finally came to the conclusion that although his Phoebe might not be in any of the houses at the doors of which he inquired, she might nevertheless be within the sound of his voice. And so, from patient inquiry, he began to call sad, occasional cries, that ever and anon waked the quiet landscapes and ragged hill regions, and set to echoing his thin "O-0-0 Phoebe! O-0-0 Phoebe!" It had a pathetic, albeit insane, ring, and many a farmer or plow-boy or country housewife came to know it even from afar and to say, "There goes old Reifsneider."

Another thing that puzzled him greatly after a time and after many hundreds of inquiries was, when he no longer had any particular dooryard in view and no special inquiry to make, which way to go. These cross-roads, which occasionally lead in four or even six directions, came after a time to puzzle him. And to solve this knotty problem, he devised the simple system of standing in the center of the parting of the ways, closing his eyes, turning thrice about, calling "O-0-0 Phoebe!" twice, and then throwing his cane straight before him. In whichever direction it fell that way he went, even though, as was not infrequently the case, it took him back along the path he had already come. He was not so far gone in his mind but that

he gave himself ample time to search before calling again, but he had the strange feeling that sometime he would find her. There were hours when his feet were sore and his limbs weary, when he would stop in the heat to wipe his faded brow, or in the cold to beat his arms. Sometimes, after throwing his cane, and finding it indicating the direction from which he had just come, he would shake his head wearily and philosophically, as if contemplating the unbelievable or an untoward fate, and then start briskly off. His strange figure came finally to be known in the farthest reaches of three or four counties. Old Reifsneider was a pathetic character. His fame was wide.

Near a little town called Waltersville, in Green County, perhaps four miles from that minor center of human activity, there was a place or precipice locally known as the Red Cliff, a sheer wall of red sandstone, perhaps a hundred feet high, which raised its sharp wall for half a mile or more above the fruitful corn-fields that lay beneath, and which was surmounted by a thick grove of trees. The slope that slowly led up to it from the opposite side was covered by a rank growth of beech, hickory, and ash, through which threaded a number of wagon-tracks crossing at various angles. In fair weather it had become old Reifsneider's habit, so inured was he by now to the open, to make his bed in some patch of trees of this character, to fry his bacon or boil his eggs at the foot of some tree, before laying himself down for the night. His was a light and inconsequential sleep. More often the moonlight, some sudden wind stirring in the trees, or a reconnoitering animal, would arouse him, and he would sit up and think, or pursue his quest in the moonlight or the dark, a strange, unnatural figure, halfwild, half-savage-looking, but utterly harmless. That particular lull that comes in the systole-diastole of this earthly ball at two o'clock in the morning invariably aroused him, and though he might not go any farther, he would sit up and contemplate the dark or the stars, wondering. Sometimes in the strange processes of his

mind he would fancy that he saw moving among the trees the figure of his lost wife, and then he would get up to follow, taking his utensils, always on a string, and his cane.

It was in the second year of these hopeless peregrinations, in the dawn of a similar springtime to that in which his wife had died, that he came at last one night to the vicinity of this little patch of woods that crowned the rise to the Red Cliff. His far-flung cane, used as a divining-rod at the last cross-roads, had brought him thither. He had walked many, many miles. It was after ten o'clock at night, and he was very weary. Long wandering and little eating had left him only a shadow of his former self. It was a question now not so much of physical strength, but of spiritual endurance that kept him up. He had scarcely eaten this day, and, now exhausted, set himself down in the dark to rest and possibly to sleep. Curiously, a strange suggestion of the presence of his wife surrounded him. It would not be long now, he counseled himself, although the long months had brought him nothing. He fell asleep after a time, his head on his knees. At midnight the moon began to rise, and at two in the morning, his wakeful hour, was a large silver disk shining through the trees to the east. He opened his eyes when the radiance became strong, making a silver pattern at his feet, and lighting the woods with strange lusters and silvery, shadowy forms. His old notion that his wife must be near to him occurred to him as it usually did on occasions of this kind, and he looked about him with a strange, speculative, anticipatory eye. What was it that moved in the distant shadows along the path by which he had entered, a pale, flickering will-o'the-wisp that bobbed gracefully among the trees, and riveted his expectant gaze? Moonlight and shadows combined to give it a strange form and a strange reality, this fluttering of bog-fire or dancing of wandering fire-flies. Was it truly his lost Phoebe? By a circuitous route it passed about him, and in his fevered state he fancied that he could see the very eyes of

her, not as she was when he last saw her in the black dress and shawl, but a strangely younger Phoebe now, the one whom he had known years before as a girl. Old Reifsneider got up. He had been expecting and dreaming of this expected hour all these days, and now, as he saw the feeble light dancing, he peered at it questioningly, one thin hand in his gray hair.

There came to him now for the first time in many years the full charm of her girlish figure as he had first known it in boyhood, the pleasing, sympathetic smile, the brown hair, the blue sash she had once worn about her waist, her gay, graceful movements. He walked around the base of the tree, straining with his eyes, forgetting for once his cane and his utensils, and following eagerly after. On she moved before him, a will-o'-the-wisp, a little. flame above her head; and it seemed as though among the small saplings of ash and beech and the thick trunks of hickory and elm that she signaled with one pale, gray hand.

"O Phoebe! Phoebe!" he called. "Have yuh really come?" And hurrying faster, he fell once, scrambling lamely to his feet,

D

only to see the light in the distance dancing illusively on. On and on he hurried, faster and faster, until he was fairly running, brushing his ragged arms against the trees, striking his hands and face against impeding twigs. His hat was gone, his lungs were breathless, when coming to the edge of the cliff, he saw her below, among a silvery wonder of apple-trees now blooming in the spring.

"O Phoebe," he called. "Oh, no; don't leave me!" And feeling the lure of a world where love was young and Phœbe was as this vision presented her, he gave a gay cry of "Oh, wait, Phœbe!" and leaped.

Some farmer-boys, reconnoitering this region of bounty and prospect, found first the tin utensils tied together under the tree where he had left them. Months after his body was found his old hat was discovered lying under some low-growing saplings the twigs of which had held it back. At the foot of the cliff they found him, pale, broken, elate, a molded smile of peace and delight upon his lips. No one of all the simple population knew how. eagerly and joyously he had found his lost

mate.

IN

N earth and sky and sea are multiplying notices that a new age has come, a new power, a new method of locomotion.

Call this new power gasolene. What its intentions are to us we may justly ask, for a new power is more than an addition to our armament. It does things for us, yes, but it does things to us, too.

What it will do to us will be as if it had all been planned out beforehand by some sentient being. The drastic changes gasolene will make ought not to take us so completely by surprise as steam's changes did our forefathers. We should be a lot more scientific-minded, abler to prophesy. We can see plainly now what twenty years ago they hardly guessed at, that steam's intentions were to break up the home; at any rate, "the home" as

understood by Alexander Hamilton and his modern instance, "the hill-billy"-a place, that is, where industry is carried on, and from which the surplus over the family's needs goes to market.

Steam shelled industry out of the home as one shells peas: put it in the factory; the family, father, mother, and the children tagged after, and home survived merely as a place to eat and sleep.

Applied to transportation, though, steam did even more. It dissolved the population which had caked and clotted in one parish for a thousand years, and made it fluid to run uphill about the earth, uphill from low income to a higher. Nobody lives now where he was born if he can get away. We 're here only till something better somewhere else turns up. The attics under the ancestral shingles,