The Project Gutenberg eBook of Harper's Round Table, June 30, 1896, by Various.

The only way to prove whether this story is true or not is to find the Professor (who could tell you all about it) and the Quartermaster (who claims to have been an eyewitness), and ask them; or to believe the tale that Billy Schreiber, Jun., and his cousin, Gibson Peters, II., tell, without any proof at all. But the two young gentlemen say they really and truly had this adventure, and that it honestly happened on the Fourth of July.

The Professor had rented the old Hope farm because it was the loneliest place on Long Island; and although he had lots of business on hand, for some reason he did not wish to be caught working at it. Perhaps he was bashful, and did not wish anybody to see him in his shirt sleeves. At all events, he took great precautions.

Now the way that Billy Schreiber and Gibb Peters found out that the Hope farm (it had been deserted for years) was rented was this: They went over there one day, and saw from Trotters Hill that the Hope barn had been reshingled, that the house was evidently occupied, and some men were at work building a road through the apple orchard. It was quite half a mile away, but they could make all this out very plainly.

"Something on the Q. T.," was the answer, "or father would have known about it, you can be sure of that!"

Mr. Schreiber senior was the station agent at the only railroad that came to that part of the country, and he knew the why and wherefore of every parcel that came into the village of Centreport. The boys looked off to the right, and saw piles of new lumber and boxes stored near the[Pg 838] barn-yard, and crawling along the lower road a heavy-laden team that kicked up no small amount of dust.

"Perhaps they brought them in from the south shore by boat," answered Billy, wisely. "'Tain't more 'an fifteen miles."

"Well, the easiest way to settle it," said Billy, "is to go in and ask them what they're doing."

But they were forced by circumstances to abandon this straightforward, fair, and aboveboard way of doing things. They had hardly turned the bend in the road at the bottom of the hill when there, in front of them, stretched a heavy barbed-wire fence, with the strands so close together that no one could possibly get through it or under it. Even climbing looked risky, and on the top of a post was the following legend, in very black letters:

"Trespassing Forbidden. Beware! No one Allowed on this Property on any Pretence Whatever. No Admittance."

"That kind of stops us," observed Billy to Gibb. "Say! what do you suppose is going on in there, anyhow?"

"Counterfeiters!" exclaimed Gibb; "that's what they are. I've read about them hiring lonely houses."

Now Billy Schreiber was the smartest boy in the Northport, Eastport, Westport, and Centreport schools. He read all the newspapers that he could lay his hands on, and, moreover, had the good fortune, of course, to be the son of his father—who had asked so many questions in his life that he could not help having imbibed a vast store of knowledge—and Billy had inherited some of his father's traits.

Why they should be fitting out a Cuban expedition twenty miles from the coast it might be hard to tell, but it sounded nice and adventurous. It was full of possibilities, and the idea struck Gibb at once as being almost worthy of "Old Sleuth, the Guessing Detective," of whose wondrous discernment he had read in a dime novel.

"Let's make believe we are spies," said Gibb, "and find out. Don't let's tell them in the village anything about it."

"All right," answered Billy. "Then get down on your hands and knees and crawl through the bushes."

No sooner said than done, and the boys crept into the thicket of scrub-oak. But the heavy fencing ran completely around the old Hope farm, and they could get no nearer to the house than when they had first sighted it, the distance of fully a quarter of a mile and more. They could see, however, that there were five or six men employed about the buildings, that three or four large wagons were drawn off to one side, and that an object that looked like a steam threshing-machine, and yet a little like a fire-engine, was under a sheltering tent made of canvas.

"But don't you tell him anything," said Gibb, "or you'll have half the village up here pokin' round. My father says your father is a knowin' feller, but he talks too much. I tell you what let's do, let's keep this thing secret."

Now Billy and Gibb had had secrets very often during the course of their acquaintance, but they had never succeeded in keeping them any length of time. But on this occasion they determined to make a compact, sacred and awful, and not to be betrayed, no matter what happened. So that night, after every one else had gone to bed, they drew up a fearful paper in red ink, with skulls and cross-bones, and added the pictures of an eagle, a locomotive, and an American flag as extra decorations.

As it rained all of the next day, they staid in the house, drawing up the plans of campaign, and were near to betraying themselves upon more than one occasion. Gibb proposed to let his uncle into the secret, under a bond of strict adherency to silence, but Billy, maybe because it is a wise child that knows its own father, refused to second the motion, and the conspirators remained two in number.

Everything was arranged for an early start on Saturday morning, in order to make it a day of reconnoitring. But, alas! Billy, who had been ailing, broke out with the measles. This was distressing enough; but as the elder cousin generally led in most things, Gibb felt it incumbent upon himself to follow suit, and three days later he wanted to wager that he was "rasher than Billy, anyhow."

This unforeseen postponement rather reduced the intensity of their curiosity; but when they were convalescing, after three weeks' close confinement, it was decided they must hasten, as rumors of the goings on at Hope farm had already reached the village, and Mr. Schreiber had expressed his intention of harnessing up and driving out that way some time in the near future.

"Our scheme's a goner if he gets there before we do," said William, upon hearing this—and at last a day came when they got away.

They were a little weak in the knees, and the six-mile tramp down the dusty road wore upon them. But at last they arrived at the barbed-wire fence that blocked the old driveway to the farm. Apparently there was nothing unusual going on, although a huge door had been cut in the front of the hay-barn, and through the roof of one of the smaller buildings a tall iron pipe extended, from which white feathery steam was spurting regularly, showing that machinery was at work within.

Through the orchard ran a long board walk, or so it appeared to the boys, at least. They skirted through the underbrush, seeking a place where a brook entered the Hope property, knowing that there they could find out something by closer observation. As they crossed a little path, a man stepped from behind a tree directly in front of them. So intent had been the boys on the idea that they were Spanish spies, that they had been communicating with one another in most unintelligible gibberish, and their first idea was that they must have betrayed themselves. But the man, who was dressed in a very citified fashion, appeared to be rather glad to see them.

The young man did not reply. "What's going on in there?" he asked. "Eh? Go on, tell us."

But Billy had learned something by this time in the question-asking line. "Who are you?" he put in.

"I'm a reporter for the Evening Detector, and have come here to find out what Professor Woerts is doing. Of course I know something about it, but he won't let any reporters on the premises."

It was evident that the Professor had adopted no half-way measures to keep curious persons away, for a man on horseback, with a shot-gun across his saddle, rode around a corner of the woods inside the fence just at this moment. The boys were for running at once, but the young man in the stiff Derby hat hallooed out: "Heigh there, mister! I want to talk to you."

"What's the matter with you fellows, anyhow?" began the reporter. "Woerts ought to know that I'm going to write a story about this, whether I get in or not. Say! I'll give you five dollars to change clothes with me and let me ride up to that stable—I won't steal the horse or the house, either."

"It's agin' orders to let anybody inside here," answered the sentry, with a drawl—"until the day," he added.

"Well, look here," went on the reporter, "tell me something. Has she had a run yet?"

"I won't tell you nothing," the man replied, "and there's nobody ye can see. Me and the Professor's the only folks on the premises. So go on away."

"You're a polite gentleman; I like you," said the reporter, kissing his hand. "Say! I'm going back and write up a story about you all being crazy. The whole thing's a fake; that's my opinion."

At this the man on the horse woke up. "Fake, eh?" he said. "All you fellows will be let in at the right time. No, sir, it's a success. You should have seen last night—"

"Should've seen what?" asked the reporter, putting his hand in his pocket for his note-book.

"Nothing," the man answered. "Keep the other side of the fence!" He touched his horse with the whip and rode away.

Evidently the reporter was chagrined at his lack of success, for he inquired the direction of the nearest port and the time of the trains.

Schreiber, who was a walking time-table, gave him the necessary information, and he strode off. The boys, however, continued their way until they came to the brook. Sure enough, they could get under the wire fence easily if they wished to try it.

But as they were feeling hungry, they determined to postpone further investigations until later. Well, a week went by, and at last the night they had settled upon arrived. It was bright moonlight, and the day had been a very busy and a noisy one. For, as it happened long ago, the signers of a certain important paper connected with our national history had settled on this day to "proclaim liberty throughout the land." It was "the Glorious Fourth!" Billy and Gibb had fired fire-crackers until there weren't any left; had gone in swimming four times, which were three too many; and had told their families that they were going over to Westport in the evening to see the "celebrashun," which was not exactly the truth. But the Hope farm was in Westport, if in any place, and perhaps the result of their visit might be termed a celebration.

It was nearly midnight when they reached the brook, and splashed down it until they came to the wire fence. They ducked under the lower strand, and, soaking wet, they scrambled up the bank on the other side.

"Say! ain't this excitin'?" whispered Gibb, as they peered around the corner of the barn, and saw that the house was still and deserted. The moonlight made everything quite bright, and the boys saw that a track like a railroad switch, only with double rails on each side, ran up to the door of the barn, and extended through the orchard into the meadow a distance of almost half a mile. It was strongly and carefully made, but what it was used for the boys had no idea.

They sneaked out of the shadows, and found a long rope with a cross-piece hanging within easy reach. Billy gave it a pull. There was a creak, and the great doors opened out slowly, exposing the whole front of the huge barn. There before them, they saw a strange object—a flat-boat on wheels it appeared to be at first glance, with a superstructure of tall tubes, strung and guyed with tense wires no heavier than fiddle-strings. But that was not all. A succession of wide flat surfaces stretched one above another. They looked like sails spread the wrong way.

When the doors had swung open so noisily the boys looked toward the house to see if they had been discovered, but not a sound or a stir did they hear or see.

"Come in. Let's look at the thing," Gibb said, entering cautiously, "What under the sun is it?"

Billy followed him, and the boys now perceived that on the deck of the flat-boat which rested on the wheels was something that looked like the engine of a steam-launch, but there was no boiler in sight—three round cylinders of a shining white metal placed one above the other, and overhead a series of complicated belts and cogs. Now four strange-looking objects resolved themselves into four huge twisted fans like propellers.

"Golly! I wish we had more light," muttered Gibb, as he stumbled over something on the floor.

Despite the apparent size and the various complications, the great thing ran as smoothly as a bicycle. In fact, it needed but a little extra pushing to wheel it out on the track into the air.

The sky had clouded a little, but there was enough light to see by. The boys clambered up on the deck, as it were. As they did so Gibb put out his hand to steady himself, and it touched something that moved. Now a strange thing happened. There was a click, a buzzing sound, and a soft whirring began close overhead. Slowly and surely the car began to move. The whirring grew louder, and then with a jump the whole fabric started off at a tremendous pace. The boys clutched two of the uprights in mad terror. Before they knew it they were tearing through the orchard at fifty miles an hour. In fact, it all happened so quickly that the sensations of these first few seconds left but a vague impression.

There was a lifting trembling quiver that caused both the unwilling passengers to hold on tighter, if possible, than before, and all at once there was a crash that almost took out their arms. They had reached the end of the track, but they did not stop. Oh no! As a stone skips off the surface of a mill-pond they left the earth, with a sickening upward swoop that almost stopped their hearts. On and on, higher and higher, with a roaring whirring sound in their ears, and then apparently they reached a height where for a few moments, as Billy afterwards put it, they "kept an even keel." But it was not for long. There was a dip forward, and down they swooped at even greater speed than they had ascended. Gibb began to scream now, and, fell flat, with his arms about the upright and his legs, spread out, clawing with his toes to keep himself from slipping. Billy lost his balance too, and reaching up his hand, caught one of the stays. Instantly there was a great rush of air, a checking of the downward motion, and, as Gibb put it, they "scooped" up again. Maybe the two boys had become more used to this nightmare sort of motion by this time, for they were lying with their faces looking over the side. Far below them they could see the dark shadow that they knew was ground, and little twinkling lights that they knew were houses. Some brilliant-colored fireworks burst in the air beneath them. For some five or ten minutes they kept on a level, and for the first time found a chance to indulge in conversation.

"I dun'no'," chattered Billy, with his hair on end. "Hold tight; the old thing's goin' down again."

Sure enough, the flying-machine had taken a sort of twist off to the eastward, and was descending every second but at such an angle that it would be some minutes before it struck. The fans were working slower, and the great kitelike tail behind sagged slightly. But the stretches of silk were taut, and trembling like tight-trimmed fore-sails. They were skimming now scarcely two hundred feet above the tops of the trees. Half a mile away they saw the waters of the bay. The flight was becoming less swift, and they were sinking downwards with a sliding motion, softly and surely, but still with enough force to crush themselves to pieces should they strike the earth. Beneath them they saw a house. Gibb was whimpering again, and Billy also had begun to blubber.

Oh, what would they not give to awake and find that this was all a dream! But no; here they were holding tight for their lives, and there, below, stretched the pier where the light-house-tender always landed. There was the steamer. Two minutes more and they would—

But here is where Quartermaster Tim Muldoon comes into the story. It was his watch on the deck of the U.S.S. Fern, light-house-tender, and Tim had returned from liberty ashore early in the evening. He was drowsy and tired. Suddenly he was aroused by hearing a sound as if made by giant rushing wings. He raised his head, and then fell backwards flat upon the deck; not forty feet above him a huge thing was shooting along through the air.

Tim closed his eyes, and called in a whisper upon the saints. He would have screamed, but his voice apparently had left him. The first shock over, however, he rose to his feet and rubbed his eyes. No, it was not imagination. There was the huge thing dashing along over the surface of the bay. Then, as Mr. Muldoon watched it, it remained[Pg 840] stationary for a minute, and slowly sank. Tim put his hand in his pocket and pulled something out. There was a splash, and a big black bottle sank alongside the pier-head. Then, with a frightened look on his face, Tim went below and called the other watch.

Half an hour later two dripping boys appeared at the Schreiber house. They were weak and pale, and when Mrs. Schreiber saw them they stood there holding on to the banisters.

"You've been out on the water and upset," said Mrs. Schreiber, emphatically. "William, I'll tell your father to-morrow morning. You'll catch it!"

Now on board the Fern they attribute Quartermaster Muldoon's conversion to the cause of total abstinence to the fact that one night he saw a fish-hawk as big as a full-rigged ship come down out of the sky and sink into the waters of Horseshoe Point, where the charts show no bottom.

Two days after the Fourth of July Mr. Schreiber drove over to the Hope farm. He found the wire across the road had been taken down, and apparently everything hauled away but a few odds and ends of strange-looking timbers and a section of a wooden track.

One of the Sunday papers published, a week or so afterwards, a long article with the following headings: "Professor Woerts's Air-Ship Runs Away! The Professor claims that His Wonderful Invention took Flight and disappeared of Its own Accord. Lost—A Flying-Machine. He says he will make another!"

The other papers commented upon the story, and said, "It is a pretty good yarn." But they all advised the Professor to "chain the shebang down."

Now what I have written here is what I got from the boys, and whether it is a good yarn or not I do not know; but, as I said before, just find the Professor and the Quartermaster; they may help you to decide.

HOW TO ENTER THE NAVY.

BY ADMIRAL BANCROFT GHERARDI, U. S. N.

ome of our young readers would be glad to know how to enter the United States navy. There are two ways—one is through the Naval Academy at Annapolis, in which the young man becomes in time a commissioned officer; the other is through the Training-School at Newport, in which case the young man becomes a sailor, and in time may become an officer known officially as a warrant-officer. A commissioned officer holds an appointment from the President, and is confirmed by the United States Senate. A warrant-officer holds an acting appointment from the Navy Department, and after having served six months on a sea-going vessel, and his commanding officer having made a favorable report as to his fitness to remain an officer in the navy, he is then given a warrant signed by the President, and dated back to the time he received his acting appointment. Warrant-officers are designated gunners, boat-swains, and carpenters, and are officers as much as any other officers in the navy, except that they may not hold commissions.

The history of the United States navy has been particularly glorious. It has traditions of heroism and bravery that are a constant source of pride to those in the service, and that appeal especially to young men who are fond of their country and of achievements in warfare. To become an officer in the service is a most honorable ambition, and one to which thousands of young men aspire. It is for that reason that appointments to Annapolis are always sought eagerly. Each Congressional district is entitled to one cadet at Annapolis at one time, and in addition the President has ten appointments at large. There can be, however, only ten appointees of the President, serving apprenticeship at the same time. The District of Columbia likewise sends one cadet to the Academy. The President usually appoints the sons of naval or army officers.

The Congressmen or delegates to Congress from the Territories recommend the appointment of the other cadets. To avoid favoritism the Congressmen occasionally recommend young men who have passed the best examination in a competition, of which there has been public notice given. Congressmen's appointees must reside in the district from which they are appointed, and all appointees must be between the ages of fifteen and twenty.

When a young man receives his appointment to Annapolis he is required to sign articles binding himself to eight years' service. He must pass an examination in the ordinary English branches, special attention being paid to the history of the United States. He must be sound physically, or his "alternate," the young man who usually passes the next best preliminary examination, takes his place as the cadet, provided the latter is sound physically, and can also pass the entrance examination to the Academy. When a young man becomes a cadet he gets $500 salary each year. The course of study lasts six years. Four of these are passed at the Academy, and two at sea. One of these is the "line" division, and the other is the "staff" division. The line-men are the officers who do the fighting, navigating, and executive work of a ship, and the others become officers who have charge of the machinery of a ship, and are known as engineers. The line division is the favorite, because young men rise to the highest grade, such as rear-admiral, in this branch of the service. The other men become engineers, and cannot reach any grade higher than that of commodore.

After two years' service at sea, during which the young man perfects himself in the problems of seamanship, the cadets receive appointments as commissioned officers, if there are vacancies. If there are not sufficient vacancies to go around, the best men are taken, and the others are discharged, with a certificate of graduation and one year's pay—$1000. We are building and manning ships so fast in these days of the new navy that there are always enough vacancies, and it is rare that any cadets are discharged because there is no room for them in the service. After having become a commissioned officer in the staff or line, the young officer is promoted gradually from grade to grade, usually according to relative rank, except in time of war, when, for especial reasons, the brighter men are pushed[Pg 841] forward because of their exceptional fitness for command or other important work. The officers remain in the service until they are sixty-two years old, unless they resign before that time, and then are retired under three-quarter pay until they die.

The scarcity of men who go into the engineering department of the navy is such that there is a bill now pending in Congress to admit graduates of colleges where marine and mechanical engineering is taught to enter the navy without passing through the Annapolis Academy. They must pass an examination to show that they are fit for the engineering work, and must spend two years at sea, like the graduates of Annapolis. If this bill should become a law, it will be possible for young men to become officers in the engineer corps in the navy without going through the Annapolis Academy.

When a boy wishes to become a sailor in the navy he applies to one of the three "receiving" ships. They are the Vermont at the New York Navy-Yard, the Wabash at the Boston Yard, and the Richmond at the League Island Navy-Yard in Philadelphia. The boys must be between fourteen and sixteen years of age, sound in health, and be able to read and write to some extent. No distinction is made in race, and it is a singular fact that the colored boys who apply are almost invariably able to read and write better than the white boys. On board the Vermont the only reading test applied is contained on a card, which is as follows:

"'Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled, that fraudulent enlistment and the receipt of any pay or allowance thereunder is hereby declared an offence against naval discipline, and made punishable by general court martial.'

"What I have just read to you is a law of the United States, and it means that if you do not tell the truth about your age, parents, or guardian, or if you are a deserter from the naval or military service, you may be tried by a court martial, be put in prison, or punished in some way."

The last paragraph of this is what boys are usually required to read. The officers are not very strict about the hard words, and so almost any boy can pass the test. After being admitted, Uncle Sam gives each boy an outfit. His parents or guardian must sign a paper giving him to the government until he is twenty-one years of age. He becomes known at once as a third-grade apprentice, and in a few days he is sent to a training-school at Newport, where he is taught rudimentary things about a sailor's life and work. After remaining at Newport for six months he is transferred to one of two training-ships. These are the Essex and the Alliance. He remains on one of these for six months, and takes a cruise. On the voyage he learns how to handle the sails, how to sew and splice, and how to handle guns. Innumerable other things about a sailor's life he also picks up, and when he returns he is transferred to a modern man-o'-war, where he becomes an apprentice of the second class. Here he takes his place with the regular crew, and has his allotted share of the daily routine to perform. He is examined every three months, and usually he becomes an apprentice of the first class in six months, when he has a rank which corresponds to the rank of seaman with sailors.

When a boy becomes twenty-one he may leave the service, or enlist again, and be independent of parents or guardian. There are three grades of enlisted men in the navy—landsmen, ordinary seamen, and seamen. Besides these the following are enlisted: machinists, masters-at-arms, and coal-heavers, and from these classes there are other special classes. The boy who enlists after he has served his apprenticeship usually goes into the highest grade—that of seaman. After a while he may be promoted to be a warrant-officer, and so reach the highest grade.

When a man enters the navy he enters one of the three grades—landsman, ordinary seaman, or seaman. If he has had no experience whatever on shipboard he becomes a landsman, and practically is taught all he knows on shipboard. If he has had some experience on ships, but is not expert in all branches of his work, he becomes an ordinary seaman. If he has served five years at sea and is intelligent, he usually goes to the grade of seaman. Such men are competent to "reef, hand, and steer," as the expression goes; that is, they are competent to do all the work required of a sailor without further instruction. As fast as their terms expire men and boys may re-enlist, and at each re-enlistment they receive a slight increase of pay.

As third-class apprentices the boys get $9 per month; when they become second-class apprentices they get $15 a month, and when they become first-class apprentices they get $21 a month. If they re-enlist after they are twenty-one they get three months' extra pay at the rating they had when they became of age, and, in addition, get one dollar a month more pay than they received as apprentices.

There are other ways for men to get into the navy than those I have mentioned, but these are what might be called special enlistments. For example, a man may enlist as a fireman. There are two grades of these, according to skill and experience. Then there are machinists, who must pass an examination, and stewards, carpenters, musicians, and the like. These special grades require skilled labor to some extent, and of course higher pay goes with their work.

It is imperative when a boy enters the service that his parents or guardian shall sign papers giving him to the government until he is twenty-one. When a boy applies who has no parents or duly qualified guardian the officials supply him with a guardian. They do this through the generosity of a lawyer in New York, named Herbert Van Dyke. He becomes their guardian, and all such boys are known as "Van Dyke" boys—a discrimination which from the name should of itself be quite aristocratic. Mr. Van Dyke has become the guardian of probably 1500 boys since he has been in this kind of work. He does it entirely from motives of philanthropy, and there is no doubt that he is a public benefactor. Many a boy has been started in an honorable career in the navy through his kindness and generosity. He performs a most welcome service not only to the boys, but to his country as well. He does this so quietly that almost nothing is heard of him, and it is simply a matter of justice that credit should be given to him.

It is a mistake to think that there is room in the navy for "bad boys," that is, boys who are unmanageable at home or have done some crime. There is a popular idea that when a boy becomes utterly bad, and fit only for the reform school, his parents may get rid of him, and hope at the same time to make a man of him, by getting him into the navy. No such boys are taken if the officials know of it. The uniform of the United States is honorable, and only honorable persons are expected to wear it. No others are wanted. When the officials find out that a boy has a bad record morally, he is rejected forthwith. Even with the applicants who are fit morally to wear the uniform, only about one-quarter are taken, but no one is rejected so quickly as a boy who ought to go to a reform school rather than into the navy, even though he may be able to pass the mental and physical examination with ease. There is no law to prevent the enlistment of aliens in the United States navy, but it is a singular fact that so popular has this branch of the public service become in recent times that for the last two years practically none but Americans have entered it.

The truth of the old saying "that it is sweet to die for one's country" shows itself in the spirit which animates most of those who compose the navy of the United States to-day, whether they are officers or sailors. A notable instance of this was seen during the recent civil war in Brazil. The rebels at Rio Janeiro blockaded the port, and would not allow our merchant ships to go into the harbor. Admiral Benham, in command of our squadron, notified the ships of the rebels that he intended to take our merchant-men into the harbor, and that if they were interfered with he should fire on the rebel fleet. Our war-ships were cleared for action, and every man waited a single word before he plunged into a fight that must have meant death to many of them. One of the spectators of that scene has declared that he never saw a more inspiriting sight than the way our sailors, probably not a dozen of whom had ever had experience in war, responded to the call of duty. To a man they were ready to die for one's country if necessary. Surely, if it is sweet to die for one's country, it is honorable at all times to wear the uniform of that country, and that doubtless explains why our naval service is so popular nowadays, and is composed chiefly of native-born Americans.

In order to induce good men to return to the service, there is a law of Congress which gives to every man on re-enlisting three months' pay of the grade that he held at the time of his discharge, providing he enlists within three months from the date of his discharge. Then the regulations of the department, as another inducement for men, give a continuous-service certificate to all men receiving honorable discharges, which certificate entitles a man at every re-enlistment to one dollar's additional pay.

OLD TOOLS AND NEW ONES.

BY BARNET PHILLIPS.

I bought a gimlet with a metal handle for five cents, and it turned out to be a good tool. Five cents seemed cheap for a gimlet. Then I read that when manufacturers turned out gimlets in large quantities they could afford to sell them for less than a cent apiece. I happened to remember how a friend of mine showed me, some years ago, a handsome otter-skin pouch neatly ornamented, and told me that when he was in Alaska he had given an Indian a gimlet for it.

"That was a hard trade for the Indian," I said, "for that skin is worth twenty-five dollars."

"I did not take any advantage of the Indian," was my friend's answer. "The man was perfectly satisfied with the barter. A week afterwards I would have given the skin back, and more besides, to have had a gimlet. Skins were plenty in Alaska, gimlets scarce. The real cost of a thing often depends on how much you need it—and that is called the demand; and to something else—the distance from the place where the thing is made. You see, the subject of transportation comes in there, which has to do with supply."

When I thought it over I came to the conclusion that my friend had not got the better of the Indian, and that it was a fair swop.

I have the credit with my own children of being a very poor tinkerer, with a reputation for breaking tools; and I wanted a gimlet, and did not have one, when, strangely enough, the United States National Museum at Washington sent me one, not to use, but to look at, and here is an exact outline of it:

It is a splinter of flint made by primitive man, and he used it to bore holes in wood or as an awl for piercing skins. It came from Boone County, Missouri. It is immensely old, so old that its date, or when it was made, can only be guessed. The antiquity of it in a general way can be insisted upon, because it is what is called "weathered," and by weathered this is meant: that the piece of flint has been so long exposed to the action of the air and moisture that the composition of the flint has altered. If you were to take a piece of freshly splintered flint and put it in a hole in the ground when you were ten years old,[Pg 843] and waited until you were seventy, and then dug it up, the alteration on the outside would be but slight. You might, of course, put it in wet ground where the water was full of lime in solution, and more rapid changes would take place. Anyhow, you would not be likely in a lifetime to see much alteration in the character of your flint. If your great-great-great-grandfather had buried that flint, and you had found it, the changes would have been more evident. Now this gimlet, or borer, is of a white creamy color, and you cannot see that it resembles flint. I could not bore a hole with it, because it would be certain to break.

If I were to guess how old it is I should say, "Fifteen hundred years ago that borer was in use," and then I might not give it age enough. It is a very old-fashioned gimlet, and since we can make gimlets to-day for less than a cent apiece, I wonder what this flint one was worth fifteen or twenty thousand years ago?

You might never have thought about it, but the hardest thing to do to-day is to find out exactly what a thing costs. There are, however, certain things that you do know—the cost of the raw material, and the price of labor. When the gimlet-maker in New England made up the price of his wares by the millions, he had to count up a hundred or more different kinds of expenses before he could settle down to what was about the exact cost of a gimlet.

We cannot apply the same rules exactly to this flint tool. In 1896 you can buy iron or steel everywhere. Flint may seem to you to-day as of no great value, because there is so little demand for it, but in the early history of man it was a substance highly prized. It is not scattered about everywhere. Primitive man made long journeys in order to obtain it. He wanted it badly, not only for his tools, but for the purpose of making a fire. He knew that by striking it with a bit of metal or with certain natural metallic substances he could bring forth sparks. There are often found in the graves of men whose race or tribe or origin is lost bits of flint with fragments of pyrites; and pyrites is a natural combination of sulphur and iron. When you strike them together there is a spark. What is strange about these finds is this, that in the surrounding country there is not to be found a bit of flint or a scrap of pyrites. Primitive man must have set out to find them, or they came to him by barter. I should then think that if we could measure the values of tools in the past with those of to-day, such implements as early man had were expensive, and worth comparatively more to him than our tools are to us. It is, however, a puzzle. Labor must have been cheap, because savage people take little account of time. To-day we know how these flint tools or weapons are made, and coarser ones can be fashioned by us in a short time. There must have been developed, however, great skill in the long past, and for this simple reason: The flint tools broke so easily that there was always a demand for new tools, and so the old gimlet business must have been always brisk.

Another illustration is a scraper, and belongs also to the United States National Museum. It served for dressing skins, in removing the hair and grease, before the rough process of tanning. These stone scrapers are found of all sizes, and as implements might have served for a variety of purposes. This bit of flint is as old as the gimlet or borer, being white with age.

Here is a chisel, or gouge, and, compared with the other tools, this may be called an implement made the day before yesterday. Those who have studied this kind of tool, found in the Swiss lakes, say it is not more than 2500 or 3000 years old. Ages on ages ago there was a race of people who lived in houses built on piles which stood in the water of the Swiss lakes. Nobody ever thought such a race existed until the level of one of the lakes was lowered, and then the secrets of a long-forgotten people were discovered. This tool is made of a piece of green serpentine embedded in a handle, which socket is a portion of the antler of a deer. It has still a good edge on it, though it has remained under water thousands of years. I might scrape off a bit of wood with it to-day. The handle, however, is weak, rotten through age, and would crumble.

This is what I should like to impress on my readers: Our work to-day is what is called specialized. By that is meant that everybody has a special or particular trade or occupation. I should not want a carpenter to make my clothes, or a locksmith to make my boots. Men become skilled because they exercise one craft, doing it quicker and better. In those old days there must have been artisans, as the stone tool maker, who made blunt implements, and nothing else; but from the nature of things those who used the tools had many occupations. Having but few tools, one implement served various purposes. The edge of the drill might be used to cut with, or, attached to a stock, could be converted into a weapon. Primitive man, then, had to be a "Jack of all trades," and was not, as in the old adage, "master of none," for he was forced to turn his hand to many different kinds of occupations.

INDEPENDENCE DAY.

With pomp of waving banners,
With beat of throbbing drums,
And shouts of happy people,
The joyous morning comes;
The very air is thrilling,
And every heart is gay,
For once again we welcome
Our Independence day.

'Twas a very little nation
That set apart "the Fourth";
'Tis a nation strong and mighty
Which keeps it, South and North.
Our flag of stars is floating
From surging sea to sea,
And beneath its folds we gather,
A people great and free.

Not the older Magna Charta
Was a pledge of braver hearts
Than the later Declaration
From which this proud day starts.
Stout souls they were that framed it,
Stout hands that signed and sealed,
And the birthright thus they gave us
We never more will yield.

So to gallant martial music
We are stepping down the street,
With the shrilling bugles calling,
And the drum's exulting beat,
While from every spire and steeple
There flutters, blithe and gay,
The flag we love and honor
This Independence day.

Margaret E. Sangster.

THE AMERICAN NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS.

LEXINGTON ON FOURTH OF JULY.

BY EMMA J. GRAY.

ell you what, fellows, I mean to have a rousing good time this Fourth of July, and no mistake. I'm tired of just torpedoes, crackers, and cannons. What do you say to joining me?"

"Joining you, Alec? Of course we will," was the hearty response given by Sam Thayer, with a hurried look at each of the boys, as if to make doubly sure of their assent; and a second afterwards they all shouted, as if they had practised in concert, "You can make sure of me"; while a later voice added, with a face full of mischief, and a sly wink to the boy at his left, "Catch any of us missing Alec's fun"; and then, turning towards Alec, he asked, "Do you remember last Fourth how we scared cats with torpedoes until, notwithstanding their nine lives, I think some of them gave up the ghost? And do you remember, too, how we watched out for policemen before touching off our crackers? Whew!"

"Oh, that was the time," Alec laughingly responded, "when, to quote from my recitation to-morrow,

"'The boys turned out
With noise and rout,
And loud halloo, and lusty shout,
And racket of crackers, and boom, and pop,
And ringing of bells, and sizz, and splutter,
Till good folks trying to sleep would stop,
And get up, and close the windows and shutter.'

The group numbered fifteen. They had been taking a spin on their bicycles, and now had stopped to rest, to lay plans for the coming Fourth, and also to get comfortably cool under the long branches of this welcome grove of maple-trees.

Alec was undoubtedly the ringleader, but Sam Thayer, John Sinclair, and Clarence Bruce were his right-hand men, so whenever an unusually big scheme was on foot Alec always bided his time until being sure of their support.

"Hurrah for Alec!" suddenly ejaculated John Sinclair, tossing his cap ten feet or more upward; and a tremendous whoop, followed by three times three cheers and a tiger; but Sam Thayer, not yet satisfied with the stir already made, thought he would continue, and picked up a stick and tin pan lying on the road, and, making believe he was a drummer-boy, banged away with all his might, rat-ta-tat-tat, rat-ta-tat-tat—and marching to his left and so around, he speedily made a circle which enclosed the group.

"Thayer is anticipating part of my programme, boys." These words were sufficient, for in a trice the stick and pan were thrown as far as Sam's strong arms could pitch them, while Sam, first having turned a summersault, threw himself on the soft grass, thus joining the other expectant listeners.

"Fine!" And the very suggestion threw the little group in such disorder and hubbub that Alec laughingly but decidedly called "Order," adding, "The time is rapidly passing, and if we are to go to war we must prepare. You are sure you will not fail me, boys?"

"My plan is very simple. It is to divide ourselves into two armies. One army will represent the British, the other the United States. Make believe that Congress has commanded us to fortify the farm that belongs to my father. You know the location?"

"Suppose we name the place Lexington. You each know that it was at Lexington, Massachusetts, that the first skirmish in the War of American Independence was fought.

"Well, the United States army must occupy the farm, and the British force must attack it; and, of course, the United States army must win.

"The British will simply respect the action of the Revolutionary period at the time of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis—they will run away, but not, like the boy in the story-book, 'come to fight another day.' In order to make it really jolly, though, we should enlist fifty boys, and more if possible, and, to make it a fair fight, divide them evenly.

"You'll have to be General-in-chief of the whole, Alec," interrupted one of the listeners.

"All right; as you have decided to adopt my plan, I cannot do otherwise than accept such a position. I'm bound on having a good time, and if you'll honestly join me, we'll have one.

"Now, by right of office, and to get the thing started, I appoint as head of the British army Clarence Bruce, and as head of the army of the United States Samuel Thayer. As General-in-chief of both armies I would further state that the said officers must secure the requisite number of men, and see that they are provided with suitable uniforms and flags. In order not to make ourselves a nuisance to our mothers and big sisters, adopt as uniform our very oldest clothing; then we'll not have any advice or fuss as to care. We can show our colors by means of flags, banners, and a short scarf of bunting tied around our left arms: or what's the matter with basting a narrow strip of bunting around our jackets or on the outside seams of our trousers? Everybody must be provided with a wooden gun, as neither balls, cartridges, nor shot of any sort will be allowed. But both officers and privates may use large fire-crackers, any amount of torpedoes, and cannon, for war is not altogether[Pg 845] fun; and the soldiers on both sides must show pluck. My plan of battle would be the following, but the officers in charge must arrange for themselves: Commence hostilities at nine o'clock Fourth of July morning, thus enabling our parents and friends to watch, at which time half of the United States army will be hidden back of the rocks which skirt the southeast side of the farm, and most of the others will be in the old barn that my father has been trying to tear down for the last two years. A sentinel should pass to and fro before the barn, and back of him other men should occasionally appear. The onslaught should be made by the British throwing handfuls of torpedoes against the rocks; but on the same rocks the United States army will have previously placed cannon, which, at a few moments after nine, will go off with a tremendous bang. The British will continue the hurling of the torpedoes until they are satisfied that all of the United States men are about the barn, and then they will recklessly march directly on the forbidden territory. At this moment the hidden soldiers will jump to their feet, and those at the barn will come to assist them. Thus action will determinedly commence. The English, being surprised, will soon be surrounded, and a fierce battle will ensue. The United States soldiers are now firing, and it seems a veritable blinding hailstorm, so thick and fast the white torpedo shells shower down, and the noise from the occasional fire-cracker not only increases confusion, but creates dismay. In the excitement the English make a mad rush for the barn; but that action has been anticipated—indeed, so much so that one of the privates had staid behind with the express purpose of firing it. And what a magnificent conflagration it will make, fellows, for we must carefully prepare it with a coating of tar and long wisps of tarred paper!

"When the barn is fired the battle will end, for there will be nothing left for the British to do but to surrender. Those who will not willingly give up their guns will drop them in the chase, for the United States Soldiers will be after them sure and fast, and all their banners and flags will be exhibited as trophies."

When Alec concluded, the boys drew a long breath, and then all tongues were loosed, and each one seemed to talk faster and louder than the other in his desire for a hearing, all agreeing, however, that the battle would be "jolly fun," and it was "like Alec" to get ahead of them in planning such grand sport. But what would be done with the rest of the day? This amusement would be but a starter; not a moment must be left for idleness.

And so it was another of the boys that was heard. He had lately been reading, he explained, the story of Mary, the mother of Washington, and he suggested that something should be done in her honor. That so much was always said about General George Washington, the Declaration of Independence, and all that, and he had made up his mind for one that George Washington would have been nowhere without his mother, and that she should be celebrated.

This resulted in tremendous applause, and the calling out of, "Only listen to Mr. Wisdom."

For a second the boy was abashed; but suddenly regaining himself, he added, "I've explained I have only but just finished reading about her, and the book told me of General Lafayette's visit and of the impression she gave him; for on reporting the interview to his friends, he stated, 'I have seen the only Roman matron living at this day!' and it is also said of her that the cause of American Independence had no more steadfast adherent."

So, after a short discussion, the boys decided to follow the battle with a procession, in which every one would be invited to join, even the visitors, whether friends or strangers; these should follow either four or six abreast, as their number would allow. That the boys who had represented the English army should make the necessary change in attire, and march as the United States navy, while the other boys would march as the army. There should be a detachment of cavalry—for a few riders ought to be found somewhere—a battalion of volunteers and several companies of infantry, all followed by the Marine Band.

A banner should lead the procession, bearing the inscription, "In honor of Mary Washington," and the Star-spangled Banner should triumphantly wave throughout the entire line.

One of the younger boys was noticeably uneasy, and in reply to the question, "Don't you want the procession?" said:

"Oh yes! but the battle's far jollier. I like the smell and bang of gunpowder, and I've been studying a receipt for a powerful noise."

"What's that—a good receipt for a noise?" and the next instant the boy was surrounded by his fellows.

"Yes, simple enough too—nothing but chlorate of potash and sulphur mixed; you should put several pieces of paper around it, though, and hammer it down as heavy as you can."

Just then was heard a sharp whistle, and Alec, with a jump on his wheel, called, "Good-by, all; it's time for me to start home." And a minute later those who were watching saw a bicycle-race along the road.

A VIRGINIA CAVALIER.

BY MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL.

CHAPTER III.

ext morning, as usual, George was up and on horseback by sunrise. Until this year he had ridden five miles a day each way to Mr. Hobby's school; but now he was so far ahead of the schoolmaster's classes that he went only a few times a week, to study surveying and the higher mathematics, and to have the week's study at home marked out for him. Every morning, however, it was his duty to ride over the whole plantation before breakfast, and to report the condition of everything in it to his mother. Madam Washington was one of the best farmers in the colony, and it was her custom, after hearing George's account at breakfast, to mount her horse and ride over the place also, and give her orders for the day.

The first long lances of light were just tipping the woods and the river when George came out, and found his horse held by Billy Lee, a negro lad of about his own age, who was his body-servant and shadow.[1] Billy was a chocolate-colored youth, the son of Aunt Sukey, the cook, and Uncle Jasper, the butler. He had but one idea and one ideal on earth, and that was "Marse George." It was in vain that Madam Washington, the strictest of disciplinarians, might lay her commands on Billy. Until he had found out what "Marse George" wanted him to do, Billy seemed unconscious of having got any orders. Madam Washington, who could awe much older and wiser persons than Billy, had often sent for the boy, when he was regularly taken into the house, and after reasoning with him, kindly explaining to him that both "Marse George" and himself were merely boys, and under her authority, would give him a stern reproof, which Billy always received in an abstracted silence, as if he had not heard a word that was said to him. Finding that he acted throughout as if he had not heard, Madam Washington turned him over to Aunt Sukey, who, after the fashion of those days with white boys as well as with black, gave him a smart birching. Billy's roars were like the trumpeting of an elephant; but within a week he went back to his old way of forgetting there was anybody in the world except "Marse George." Then Madam Washington turned him over to Uncle Jasper, who "lay" that he would "meck dat little triflin' nigger min' missis." A second and much more vigorous birching followed at the hands of Uncle Jasper, who triumphed over Aunt Sukey when Billy for two days actually seemed to realize that he had something else to do besides following George about and never taking his eyes off him. Uncle Jasper's victory was short-lived, though. Within a week Billy was as good for nothing as ever, except to George. Madam Washington then saw that it was not a case of discipline—that the boy was simply dominated by his devotion to George, and could neither be forced nor reasoned out of it. Therefore it was arranged that the care of the young master's horse and everything pertaining to him should be confided to Billy, who would work all day with the utmost willingness for "Marse George." By this means Billy was made of use. Nobody touched George's clothes or books or belongings except Billy. He scrubbed and then dry-rubbed the door of his young master's room, scoured the windows, cut the wood and made the fires, attended to his horse, and when George was there personally to direct him Billy would do whatever work he was ordered. But the instant he was left to himself he returned to idleness, or to some perfectly useless work for his young master—polishing up windows that were already bright, dry-rubbing a floor that shone like a mirror, or brushing George's clothes, which were quite spotless. His young master loved him with the strong affection that commonly existed between the masters and the body-servants in those days.

Like Madam Washington, George was a natural disciplinarian, and himself capable of great labor of mind and body, he exacted work from everybody. But Billy was an exception to this rule. It is not in the human heart to be altogether without weaknesses, and Billy was George's weakness. When his mother would declare the boy to be the idlest servant about the place, George could not deny it; but he always left the room when there were any animadversions on his favorite, and could never be brought to acknowledge that Billy was not a much-injured boy. Serene in the consciousness that "Marse George" would stand by him, Billy troubled himself not at all about Madam Washington's occasional cutting remarks as to his uselessness, nor his father's and mother's more outspoken complaints that he "warn't no good 'scusin' 'twas to walk arter Marse George, proud as a peacock ef he kin git a ole jacket or a p'yar o' Marse George's breeches fur ter go struttin' roun' in." Aunt Sukey was very pious, and Uncle Jasper was a preacher, and held forth Sunday nights, in a disused corn-house on the place, to a large congregation of negroes from the neighboring places. But Billy showed no fondness whatever for these meetings, preferring to go to the Established Church with his young master every Sunday, sitting in a corner of the gallery, and going to sleep with much comfort and regularity as soon as he got there. Madam Washington always exacted of every one who went to church from her house that he or she should repeat the clergyman's text on coming home, and Billy was no exception to the rule. On Sunday, therefore, instead of joining the gay procession of youths and young men, all handsomely mounted, who rode along the highway after church, George devoted his time on his way home to teaching Billy the text. The boy always repeated it very glibly when Madam Washington demanded it of him, and thereby won her favor, for a short time, once a week.

On this particular morning, as George took the reins from Billy and jumped on the back of his sorrel colt, and galloped down the lane towards the fodder-field, Billy, who was keen enough where his young master was concerned, saw that he was preoccupied. Contrary to custom, he would not take his dog Rattler with him, and Billy, dragging the whining dog by the neck, hauled him back into the house and up into George's room, where the two proceeded to lay themselves down before the fire and go to sleep. An hour later the indignant Aunt Sukey found them, and but for George's return just then it would have gone hard with Billy anyhow.

As George galloped briskly along in the crisp October morning he felt within him the full exhilaration of youth and health and hope. He had not been able to sleep all night for thinking of that promised visit to Greenway Court. He had heard of it—a strange combination of hunting-lodge and country-seat in the mountains, where Lord Fairfax lived, surrounded by dependents, like a feudal baron. George had never in his life been a hundred miles away from home. He had been over to Mount Vernon since his brother Laurence's marriage, and the visit had charmed him so that his ever-prudent mother had feared that the simpler and plainer life at Ferry Farm would be distasteful to him; for Mount Vernon was a fine, roomy country-house, where Laurence Washington and his handsome young wife, both rich, dispensed a splendid hospitality. There was a great stable full of saddle-horses and coach-horses, a retinue of servants, and a continual round of entertaining going on. Laurence Washington had only lately retired from the British army, and his house was the favorite resort for the officers of the British war-ships, that often came up the Potomac, as well as the officers of the military post at Alexandria. Although he enjoyed this gay and interesting life at Mount Vernon, George had left it without having his head turned, and came back quite willingly to the sober and industrious regularity of the home at Ferry Farm. He was the favorite over all his brothers with Laurence Washington and his wife, and it was a well-understood fact that, if they died without children,[Pg 847] George was to inherit the splendid estate of Mount Vernon. Madam Washington had been a kind step-mother to Laurence Washington, and he repaid it by his affection for his half-brothers and young sister. In those days, when the eldest son was the heir, it seemed quite natural that George, as next eldest, should have preference, and should be the next person of consequence in the family to his brother Laurence.

He spent an hour riding over the place, seeing that the fodder had been properly stripped from the stalks in a field, looking after the ferry-boats, giving an eye to the feeding of the stock and a sharp investigation of the stables, and returned to the house by seven o'clock. Precisely at seven o'clock every morning all the children, servants, and whatever guests there were in the house, assembled in the sitting-room, where prayers were read. In his father's time the master of the house had read these prayers, and after his death Laurence, as the head of the family, had taken up this duty; but since his marriage and removal to Mount Vernon it had fallen upon George.

When he entered the room he found his mother waiting for him as usual, with little Mistress Betty and the three younger boys. The servants, including Billy, who had already been reported by Aunt Sukey, were standing around the wall. After an affectionate good-morning to his mother, George, with dignity and reverence, read the family prayers in the Book of Common Prayer. His mother was as calm and as collected as usual, but in the small velvet bag she carried over her arm lay an important letter, received between the time that George left the house in the morning and his return. Prayers over, breakfast was served, George sitting in his father's place at the head of the table, and Madam Washington talking calmly over every-day matters.

"I do not know what we are to do with that boy Billy," she said. "This morning, when he ought to have been picking up chips for the kitchen, he was lying in front of your fireplace with Rattler, both of them sound asleep."

"I do not know which is the more useless," exclaimed Madam Washington, with energy, "the dog or that boy."

George ceased smiling at this; he did not like to have Billy too severely commented on, and deftly turned the conversation: "Lord Fairfax again asked me, when we were crossing the river last night, to visit him at Greenway Court. I should like very much to go, mother. I believe I would rather go even than to spend Christmas at Mount Vernon, for I have been to Mount Vernon, but I have never been to Greenway, or to any place like it."

"The Earl sent me a letter this morning on the subject before he left Fredericksburg," replied Madam Washington, quietly.

The blood flew into George's face, but he spoke no word. His mother was a person who did not like to be questioned.

It was sealed with the huge crest of the Fairfaxes, and was written in the beautiful penmanship of the period. It began:

"Yes, my son; but, as you know, I am a person of deliberation; I will think it over yet more."

"I have already promised your brother that you shall spend Christmas with him, and I cannot recall my word."

George said no more. He got up, and bowing respectfully to his mother, went out. He had that morning more than his usual number of tasks to do; but all day long he was in a dream. For all his steadiness and willingness to lead a quiet life with his mother and the younger children at Ferry Farm, he was by nature adventurous, and for more than a year he had chafed inwardly at the narrow and uneventful existence which he led. He had early announced that he wished to serve either in the army or in the navy, but, like all people, young or old, who have strong determination, he bided his time quietly, doing meanwhile what came to hand. He had been every whit as much fascinated with Lord Fairfax as the elder man had been with him; and the prospect of a visit to Greenway—of listening to his talk of the great men he had known; of seeing the mountains for the first time in his life, and of hunting and sporting in their wilds; of taking lessons in fencing from old Lance; of looking over Lord Fairfax's books—was altogether enchanting. He had a keen taste for social life, and his Christmas at Mount Vernon, with all its gayety and company, had been the happiest two weeks of his life. Suppose his mother should agree to let him go to Greenway with the Earl and then come back by way of Mount Vernon? Such a prospect seemed almost too dazzling. He brought his horse down to a walk along the cart-road through the woods he was traversing while he contemplated this delightful vision; and then, suddenly coming out of his day-dream, he pulled himself together, and striking into a sharp gallop, tried to dismiss the subject from his mind. This he could not do, but he could exert himself so that no one would guess what was going on in his mind, and in this he was successful.

Two o'clock was the dinner-hour at Ferry Farm, and a few minutes before that time George walked up from the stables to the house. Little Betty was on the watch, and ran down to the gate to meet him. Their mother, looking out of the window, saw them coming across the lawn, arm in arm, Betty chattering like a magpie, and George smiling as he listened. They were two of the handsomest and healthiest and brightest-eyed young creatures that could be imagined, and Madam Washington's heart glowed with a pride which she believed sinful, and strove unavailingly to smother.

At dinner Madam Washington and George and Betty talked, the three younger boys being made to observe silence, after the fashion of the day. Neither Madam Washington nor George brought up the subject of the Earl's visit, although it was a tremendous event in their quiet lives. But little Betty, who was the talkative member of the family, at once began on him. His coach and horses and outriders were grand, she admitted; but why an Earl, with bags of money, should choose to wear a plain brown suit, no better than any other gentleman, Mistress Betty vowed she could not understand. His knee-buckles were not half so fine as George's, and brother Laurence had a dozen suits finer than the Earl's.

"His sword-hilt is worth more than this plantation," remarked George, by way of mitigating Betty's scorn for the Earl's costume. Betty acknowledged that she had never seen so fine a sword-hilt in her life, and then innocently remarked that she wished she were going to visit at Greenway Court with George. George's face turned crimson, but he remained silent. He was a proud boy, and had never in his life begged for anything, but he wanted to go so badly that the temptation was strong in him to mount his horse, without asking anybody's leave, and taking[Pg 848] Billy and Rattler with him, start off alone for the mountains.

"My son, I have determined to allow you to join Lord Fairfax, and I have sent an inquiry to him, an hour ago, asking at what time to-morrow you should meet him in Fredericksburg. You may remain with him until December; but the first mild spell in December I wish you to go down to Mount Vernon for Christmas, as I promised."

George's delight was so great that he grew pale with pleasure. He would have liked to catch his mother in his arms and kiss her, but mother and son were chary of showing emotion. Therefore he only took her hand and kissed it, saying, breathlessly:

"But it is not for pleasure that I let you go," replied his mother, who, according to the spirit of the age, referred everything to duty. "'Tis because I think my Lord Fairfax's company will be of benefit to you; and as there is but little prospect of a school here this winter, and I have made no arrangements for a tutor, I must do something for your education, but that I cannot do until after Christmas. So, as I think you will be learning something of men as well as of books, I have thought it best, after reflecting upon it as well as I can, to let you go."

"I will promise you, mother, never to do or say anything while I am away from you that I would be ashamed for you to know," cried George.

"Your promise is too extensive," she said. "Promise me only that you will try not to do or say anything that will make me ashamed, and that will be enough."

George colored at these words, as he answered, quickly: "I dare say I promised too much, and so I will accept the change you make."

Here a wild howl burst upon the air. Billy, who had been standing behind George's chair, understood well enough what the conversation meant, and that he was to be separated until after Christmas from his beloved "Marse George." Madam Washington, who had little patience with such outbreaks of emotion, sharply spoke to him: "Be quiet, Billy!"

Billy's reply was a fresh burst of tears and wailing, which brought home to little Betty that George was about to leave them, and caused her to dissolve into tears and sobs, while Rattler, running about the room, and looking from one to the other, began to bark furiously.

Madam Washington, standing up, calm, but excessively annoyed at this commotion in her quiet house, brought her foot down with a light tap, which, however, meant volumes. Uncle Jasper too appeared, and was about to haul Billy off to condign punishment, when George intervened.

"Hold your tongue, Billy," he said; and Billy, digging his knuckles into his eyes, subsided as quietly as he had broken forth.

"Now go up to my room, and take the dog, and stay there until I come," continued George.

Billy obeyed promptly. Betty, however, having once let loose the floodgates, hung around George's neck and wept oceans of tears. George soothed her as best he could, but Betty would not be comforted, and was more distressed than ever when, in a little while, a note arrived from Lord Fairfax, saying he would leave Fredericksburg the next morning at sunrise, if it would be convenient to Mr. Washington to join him then.

[to be continued.]

BY MARGARET SUTTON BRISCOE.

he Right Rev. Bishop Hegan and his younger brother were holding a family conclave in the Bishop's library, one at each side of the sermon-strewn writing-table.

"I may be wrong," the younger man was saying, "but I see no better way out of my difficulty. My dear brother, you pray every Sunday for fatherless children and widows; why don't you mention widowers and motherless children; they are in far more need of help."

"It is hard," said the Bishop, sympathetically; "but I am afraid you are making your path harder by this last move."

Mr. Hegan made no effort to contradict his brother. "I see no better way," he repeated. "I went to Mildred's, and there found Tom, a boy of eighteen, eating his ten-o'clock breakfast—quail on toast. I picked Master Tom up with me and went on. At Jane's I found my four other young ones. But you have seen for yourself how I found them."

The Bishop laughed genially. "There was nothing to worry you in their training."

"No, for there was none. Perhaps I ought to have let their mother's sister bring them up as she offered."

"Exactly; that's why I refused. It was good of my sisters to take my children for me; but they are not as their mother left them."

"No," said the Bishop, shaking his head; "they have lost what cannot be replaced. I suppose, Tom, you are not thinking of marrying again?" The brothers talked together with the utmost freedom, the younger answering the point-blank question as frankly as it was asked.

"I had thought of that, but the chances seemed to me as even that a step-mother would make the children unhappy as that my plan may. Joan is now—let me see—sixteen years old. She ought not to study this year; she is not as strong as she should be. She has been growing too fast and thinking too hard. The change to a year of home life and home cares will do her good."

"That was my idea. Jane has been filling her little head with romances, and letting her talk freely with the servants at the same time, until her conversation is a grotesque mixture of cultivation and picturesque terms culled from the servants' hall. Tom hears her in horror. But he needs to be shocked, so that's one good gained. I shall take Tom out to the furnaces with me, and start him with a crowbar in his hand to work his way up. It's the only chance for redeeming him. I haven't broken that piece of news to him yet. He thinks he is to go to college. I don't dare to send him there in his present trim. Milly has meant well, but she has almost ruined my boy with her money. Jane has done less harm to the others, but I must have my children with me for a year at least to straighten them out, and then I can decide what each one needs."

The Bishop looked grave. "It seems to me an awful experience ahead for you, and a pretty hard one for the young people, Tom. Aren't you just a little severe on them?"

"I don't think so; I know I don't mean to be. The truth is they have lost their dear mother, and life must be hard for us all at present. I think they ought to take their share of it. Shirking their burden, as I have been letting them, was certainly doing them harm. We are a motherless brood, and a motherless brood we will be, and work it out together."

The elder brother looked tenderly across the table at the younger. "You are a brave fellow, Tom. God bless you and your undertaking! I can't help feeling it's a wild experiment, but, as you have the courage to conceive it, you may have the character to bring it to a good end. Now that you have your little brood all collected here, let them roost in the garret as long as you like, and draw a free breath before you plunge in. Here come the youngsters now."

The study door was banged open, and three little children, two boys and a girl, hurtled into the room. The elder children were dragging the baby girl between them, and they were followed by Joan, who had plainly set out with the intention of quelling the riot, but forgot her errand by the way, and now wandered in dreamily after the procession. The Bishop's quiet study, kept always by his housekeeper as a half-sacred retreat, buzzed as if blue-bottle flies had flown in.

"Play here? No, my dears," said the Bishop, promptly; "you cannot. See! I tied my manuscript scissors to my desk yesterday, because— Well, you two boys know why; and now somebody has most impudently cut the string with those very same scissors, and they are off again. This will not do, gentlemen—it will not do."

The Bishop was afraid of no man, woman, or child either; for, strange to say, it is not uncommon to find those who are bold with grown people fearful with little folk.

Mr. Hegan laughed to see his two stormy boys stand staring solemnly and guiltily at their uncle. "I wish I had your royal talent," he said. "I never shall make myself loved yet respected as you do. Once, twenty years ago, you found me shoving about some of your papers on this very desk, and I took a long walk afterward, and crept in at the back door when I came home. I loved you just as dearly, but I never touched your desk papers again, any more than my boys will your scissors."

"Dear! dear! I must have a frightful temper," said the Bishop, easily. "Tom, suppose you wake Joan. But the child has a lovely face when she sleeps awake, hasn't she?"

Joan turned with a start. She had been standing gazing up at a picture that hung over the Bishop's head. The painting was a spiritual yet spirited conception of the manly Maid of Orleans, with a peculiarly delicate shading of her womanliness into the warlike pose.

"Father," said Joan, as she turned—her voice cooed like a wood-pigeon's—"did you ever see such a perfect picture? Can't the children go out now? They are getting so fritty in the house."

"I don't know. I always say that. Frightfully fretful, I suppose. They certainly are that. It's not really raining now, father." She walked to the window. "Just a kinder drizzle-drazzle, slightly drippy-drap."

The father and uncle exchanged glances and waited; but Joan, turning back, was again absorbed in the painting above them, and saw nothing.

"We are talking about the weather, my dear," said Mr. Hegan, dryly, and Joan flushed as she roused again. "Does their nurse think the children should go out?"

Joan laughed aloud. She had a child's laugh. "Lolly? Why, father, Lolly doesn't know anything. You wrote Aunt Jane you would rather the children had a stupid nurse than a bright one who would force them forward, so we chose out Lolly, and indeed, father, you've got your rather." She laughed out again—with no impertinence, but an open enjoyment that anything should be expected of Lolly.

Mr. Hegan looked troubled. Joan watched him anxiously, and with a swift keenness of expression that surprised and pleased her uncle.

"Father," she said, seriously, "I haven't asked what your plans are, but whatever they may be, don't part with Lolly. She's half a fool, but she bathes the children beautifully, and keeps their clothes nice, and they love her just as the baby loves her cribby-house. She is so soft and kind and pleasant to them. I always—or Aunt Jane—decide things."

Again the brothers exchanged glances, as Joan stooped to extricate the baby, who had been tilted over into the scrap-basket.

"She looked a woman as she said that," whispered the Bishop, "and like a child the moment before."

"She is both," said the father. "Joan, sit here a moment, my dear. We want to talk with you. Your uncle does not approve what I am going to do, but I have decided, if you feel able to undertake it, to let you drop study for a year, and keep house for me and the children. What do you say? Could you 'decide things' without Aunt Jane?"

To the disappointment of those who were closely watching her on this test question, Joan's radiant delight rose as a screen before any latent capacity she might have shown.

"Oh dear father, is it true? Oh, godfather, I am so happy! Children, children, listen—"

"Let her alone," said the Bishop; "we can only tell by waiting. She is a sweet-hearted child, if she does use extraordinary language, and she still will be sweet if she should utterly fail you in housekeeping. Remember that, Tom."

"But she also shows a lovely and cultivated mind at times," insisted the father.

"Well, not to me as yet," denied the Bishop, laughingly. "'Fritty'—'Drippy-drap'—'drizzle-drazzle'! Nevertheless, you are right to forbid her to study for a time. She has sombre shadows under her eyes that add to her peculiar style of beauty, but they must be painted out by a good common rose-color. Now, Tom, take yourself and your children and your affairs out of my study and my head—out of my heart you never go—but this sermon must be written."

"He is to be with us. I shall take him on the furnace work with me. But don't mention that to him yet, Joan; I charge you carefully not to tell him."

Joan's face was a flushed joy. "Not for the world. How happy, happy, happy we shall all be together! Tom's coming is my last straw of joy."

Godfather flung the baby up to his tall broadcloth shoulder, and the whole cavalcade trooped to the stairs, the baby the centre of attraction. Joan, running on ahead, stood smiling from the upper landing, her arms held down for the crowing baby girl, whom she clasped and carried away to bed.

Presently from the highest landing, where the children were quartered, Joan's still sweet tones floated down as if remonstrating against some action of her brother's.

"Tom, Tom, you mustn't grab baby like that with a pin in your coat. Why, I wouldn't keep pins in my clothes any more than I would a hoppy-toad. Sure to scratch baby. Well, dear boy, if you don't like my ways, don't swing on my gate. When you strain my hinges, they creak."

"No lack of spirit, at any rate," laughed the Bishop. "Cheer up, Tom. I am more anxious now for your boy than for your girl. I think she'll do."

At that moment, in the garret nursery, temporarily fitted up for the children's use, Tom's boy was talking with Joan in a way momentous to both. He was a handsome, finely built young fellow, with the look of half-sulky defiance which marks the boy who, for one reason or another, has yet to earn his real manhood.

"So that's the plan for you and the kids, eh? I'm glad for you, Joan, if you like it. I wish I knew what college father will decide to send me to. I can't understand why he won't let me choose. And he was so odd at Aunt Milly's; he swept me away before I had really finished my breakfast, and sat watching me eat with his face like a thunder-cloud."

Joan's heart contracted with a quick fear of unhappy possibilities which had not before occurred to her. What had seemed ideal to her was not, she began to realize, Tom's ideal. She controlled herself to reply.

"Quail on toast; and there was no harm in that. You would have thought he had caught me picking a pocket. He was closeted for a long time with Aunt Milly, and she came out crying, and told me father meant to take me from her at once. Did you know Aunt Milly wanted to adopt me?"

Joan raised her eyes with the rare searching look her[Pg 851] uncle had admired. "You would not like that?" she stated rather than asked.

"It would mean hearts to burn," replied Joan, quickly. "Tom, would you like it?" She looked in his face with pleading anxiety.

Tom melted. "No, I would hate it. I'm immensely proud of being my father's son. Do you happen to know how father got his first promotion? Uncle told me to-day. He wasn't very much older than I when he went to work. The furnace he was in charge of was cooling fast, and they couldn't control it. He had barrels of oil hoisted to the top of the furnace, and with his own hands he flung them down into the red-hot opening. It saved the company thousands; but what I liked was his doing it himself, and not sending some poor devil of a workman to do it for him."

Joan's dark cheek flushed. "Wasn't that fine? Tom, there are two things I do envy you the chance of doing. Poor me! I shall never be able to do anything fine like that, and I never can knock anybody down. I always wanted to be able to hit out from the shoulder if I needed to, and do deeds of valor like Joan of Arc. Uncle has the most perfect picture of her."

"Don't talk like that, Joan," said Tom, with a humorous look at her. He was at times strikingly like his uncle, with the same unconscious air of gentle breeding, quite different from the man-of-the-world manner he affected whenever he remembered it. "I want you to be like other girls. Fellows don't like peculiar women, and I want my sister to be a toast among my college friends. I suppose father will let me fill the house for the holidays. There's good shooting down there, isn't there?"

"Joan," said Tom, in a still voice, "what are you crying about? You know something you are not telling me, Joan. What is it?"

"Don't try to tell stories, Joan; you don't know how to. Father has some plan for me that I won't like, and you know what it is."

"Nothing. That's just the trouble. If you don't know anything, deny it." Another long and, to Joan, terrible stillness. "Does father want me to go to work half educated, as he did? There is no earthly necessity for it, as there was with him. If you don't answer, Joan, I shall know that's his plan."

"It's a piece of rank tyranny," said Tom, between his teeth. "I won't submit to it, and I shall tell father so this minute. I won't be planned for over my head."

He had accepted the facts as if Joan had told him of them in so many words. Joan had a vague sense that she was being horribly wronged, or that she was wronging some one, her over-tender conscience leading her to settle in the latter conviction. She was trying to clasp Tom's arm and hold him back with sobbing entreaties, but he would not be held. The little baby sister, attracted half pleasurably by the emotion she saw between her elders, had drawn near, and was staring up at them round-eyed. Tom stubbed his toe over her as he made for the door, and did not stop for more than a hasty glance, which told him the baby was more angry than hurt. It was Joan who picked up the child, and the two sobbed together, with their faces tucked each into the other's soft neck.

"Oh," sobbed the elder sister, "don't cry, little sister, don't cry. Big sister wants to think!"

Tom meantime was allowed no preparation between his discovery and his interview with his father, for he stumbled against Mr. Hegan in the lower hall as he had on the baby in the nursery, with the difference that the father not only withstood the shock, but caught his son by the shoulder, steadying him. So the two came face to face and eye to eye in actual arm's-length of each other.

"What's the matter?" asked Mr. Hegan; and Tom knew he was not referring to their bodily encounter.

Mr. Hegan's hands dropped. He knew at once what was referred to. "Joan told you!" he exclaimed.

Tom recovered his wits and his generosity. "No, no! I mean I wormed it out of her. She did not mean to tell anything."

"It amounts to the same thing. As you have succeeded in 'worming out' of Joan—I use your own terms—what I wanted to tell you myself, suppose we talk it all over now and settle it here."

Mr. Hegan moved to the hall window, leaning against one side of the frame. His tone of cold contempt stung like a whip, and matters did not mend as they progressed. To Tom it was as if the world were at stake, and Mr. Hegan, in a few terse matter-of-fact sentences, was making his will known. The boy broke in at last, unable to wait for a proper pause:

"You had not a college education yourself, sir, or you would realize why I feel it so important."

The tone was not respectful, and Mr. Hegan's brow reddened slightly, but his voice was as even as before: "Does the anticipation of a college education give so much experience? Perhaps I value what I lost more than if I had enjoyed it. You cannot possibly place more importance on education than I do, for you have not felt the handicap of its lack. But, though you will not now believe it, there are things more important. For my own reasons, and thoughtfully"—Mr. Hegan's voice grew warmer and his manner more fatherly—"I have decided, Tom, that you must just now begin as your father began."

Mr. Hegan did not again change color, though now the disrespect was marked. He looked at his son calmly, as he might at a stranger.

Tom strove in vain to render his own tones as quiet. "What is there to prevent my refusing? What is to prevent my acceptance of Aunt Milly's offer of adoption?"

"Nothing," answered Mr. Hegan, as quietly as before. "Your Aunt Milly would be glad to take you back on any terms, pleasant or offensive to me, and once back with her, I assure you I would not move a finger to dislodge you."

In spite of his resentment at fatherly control, this announced indifference cut the son to the quick. He flung back his head.

"Why not?" asked Tom, and could have choked himself for the involuntary question.

At the simple words Tom's heart stood still. A quick conviction seized him that he would for some unknown reason have to obey this calm command as absolutely as it was given. At the bare mental suggestion a great anger and defiance surged within him. He knew then that he had touched the crisis. It was then or never—freedom or bondage. Hot words that were to cut him loose from all authority were on his tongue, and he opened his lips to say them. Mr. Hegan's calm eyes were fixed on his face. To the boy's amazement, defiant words would not come. In their place, as he gasped in his effort, there was something else—a wordless, voiceless sound tearing its way through his throat and choking an outlet at his lips. Tom was leaning against the window opposite his father, sobbing like a beaten child. In the depths of his mortification, the confusion of his abrupt downfall, he heard his father's footsteps pass by him, leaving the hall. For the first time in his prosperous life Tom had been knocked down flat—in spirit. He was quivering in every nerve with the shock of failure, yet he felt a strange new sense of power. He had measured his strength for the first time against a more powerful nature, and, though beaten, he was stronger for the struggle, and he knew it. There was something in the experience that had developed while it humbled him.

In the Bishop's study Joan was also taking her first lesson in the new life, but she had a different teacher, and her lesson was shorter. He had always been easy for her to talk with, and a few questions drew forth the true state of the case.

"I don't doubt it for a moment," said the Bishop, cheerfully. "Tom will be treated to just enough punishment, and not a grain too much."

Her uncle laid his hand tenderly on her dark head. "See here, my little girl," he said, "I want you to take life less heroically. I am going to give you a token to remind you of this. You keep looking up at my Joan of Arc. Well, she is yours. No, you must accept it, for I can spare her easily. I don't care to own too many impediments in my walk through the world. You must hang the picture in your own room; and whenever you look at it I want you to say to yourself, not Joan of Arc, but—Joan of Home. You don't understand what I mean just yet, but some day as you say this you will understand suddenly, and better than if I had explained it. Now run away, my dear."

"Dear! dear!" thought the Bishop to himself, as he shut his study door, "Brother Tom has plainly been reading the riot act. I wonder if his boy will ever make him another declaration of independence?" His eye fell on the calendar on his desk, and he raised his eyebrows, smiling. "Why," he said, "what a man of peace I am! It's the great Fourth of July, and I never realized it. Well, Tom and his family have been Celebrating and Declaring enough for us all. I wonder how it will end?"

II.

"Now, Joan, I think the table looks as if a butler had set it," said Tom, as he arranged the napkins in little hillocks.

"You are awfully good to me, Tom. Indeed, I couldn't keep house without you. I hardly knew a carafe from a finger-bowl until you taught me. Aunt Jane never thought or cared for such things."

"Aunt Milly never thought or cared for anything else," said Tom. "If I've taught you some things, you've untaught me more, Joan. Anyhow, what good does it do a man to know how to serve a dinner? It doesn't help me to sledge."

"Perhaps it does. Father said yesterday that you were more accurate in sledging than any man on the works."

Tom glowed with pleasure. "Did he say that?" he said, eagerly; then he laughed. "Suppose a year ago any one had told me I should blush with pride at praise for sledging! By-the-way, I want to remind you, Joan, you mustn't yawn in his lordship's face this evening when you begin to get sleepy. If I know him, he wouldn't like it at all, and it's not polite. I've told you that so often, why don't you stop it?"

"I can't," said Joan, sorrowfully. "I have tried to close my mouth and let it go out at my ears, as you said, but I feel as if I were turning inside out like a popcorn."

"You had better turn inside out than be rude, Aunt Milly would tell you. Joan, do you know we have both changed in this year? Here we are, you sniffing at Aunt Jane's housekeeping, and I at Aunt Milly's eternal little fixings. I don't say that was nice of us, but it does mark a change. You know we have thought our respective aunts perfection."

Joan looked troubled, and was attempting an explanation—she could not think so fast as Tom—when the front door opened, and her father's voice announced the arrival of their expected guest. Joan paused to give a quick glance around the room. Everything was ready: the dinner, she knew, prepared to serve in a moment; the baby in bed; the little boys—externally—in perfect order. "Tom, do you think they'll behave decently?" she asked, with a young mother's anxious glance at the boys.

"Indeed, Tom, Robert sometimes makes me doubt the efficacy of prayer. Every night he asks God to make him a good boy, but I don't see any improvement in him. Do you?"

Joan spoke earnestly, but Tom laughed. "Don't you worry, Joan. Uncle is a man of the world: he always understands everything."

If Bishop Hegan did not understand everything, he understood a great deal with no questions asked, and he nodded silent congratulations to his brother across the dinner table. When the meal was ended the Bishop said:

"I think I will go to bed with the chickens and the children," said Bishop Hegan. "I am a tired man to-night. Tom—young Tom, I mean—suppose you come help me to take off my apron. Lord Bishops wear aprons, Tom, don't they?" He looked at his nephew with a twinkle in his eye.

"I don't know, sir; I never unfrocked one before," retorted Tom, and then gasped at his own audacity. He[Pg 853] would never have ventured so reckless a jest with his father. The Bishop was different somehow—more like himself, and in a degree like Aunt Milly. As he led his uncle to his room, Tom felt with a pleasurable excitement that it was to be a brief return to the world from his work-a-day life.

"Suppose we talk about Joan," said the Bishop. "She looks well—very well—quite like a little milkmaid."

"That's just the trouble," said Tom, plunging eagerly into the subject, as one near to his heart. "Why, uncle, she's a perfect tomboy. Do you know, Joan is seventeen years old, and there's not a romance in the house she hasn't read, and not a tree in the country round that she can't and don't climb. You heard her change the subject when father asked where the cherries came from that we had at dinner."

"No," answered the Bishop. "You see, I am not sufficiently a member of the family to take in all these shibboleths."

"They came from a tree she was ashamed to say she had climbed. Those cherries—I recognized them—are almost never gathered, because there's not a boy around here who likes to climb that tree. Do you think she ought to run wild like that? I don't mean she doesn't do finely at home, for she does—just as well as she can—that is—" Tom's truth forced the amendment. "Father's awfully good to her. He keeps a chair by his study desk for her, that she calls her thinking-chair, and when she's in any home trouble she slips in there and sits by him to think it over. Sometimes she consults father, but as often she doesn't say a word. She seems to get help from him without that. I suppose you have seen how very fond they are of each other."

The Bishop was winding his watch, and looking about the bedroom to which Tom had led him. "That's nice," he said. "Where's your thinking-chair?"

The question came so suddenly, and the look which went with it was so kindly searching, that Tom stammered out the truth with a rush: "Father and I are not confidential like that. But it's a mercy that Joan is his favorite. You see, she's so dreamy she's apt to blunder, and if she were not a favorite with him it would be frightfully hard for her."

"Sometimes," said Tom, truthfully. He spoke candidly, but with a reserve which his uncle respected.

"Wouldn't you miss Joan sadly if she were to be sent away?" he asked. "You seem to depend on each other."

"I can't think about that. No human being knows what Joan has done for me this year. She seemed always to divine just when I couldn't stand things any longer, and there she is by me. I suppose I shouldn't let her be around those rough furnaces so much, but I never can send her away. It made me ashamed the other day when I found she could stand as much of the furnace gas in her lungs as I. You see, she always comes at the worst times to bring me lemonade or something of that sort. The thirst in those gases is awful."

But Tom, his tongue once loosened, went on: "Now if she could spend one year with Aunt Milly—"

The Bishop's mouth twitched. "Well, now, it would be rather funny, wouldn't it, to have the life here curing what was bad for you in your Aunt Milly's training, and Aunt Milly's training curing what is bad for Joan in the life here; No, no; your Aunt Milly would suit for some girls, but not for Joan. She is a little oddity, and not very strong in body. She needs odd treatment. Your father sees that. Let her read and climb all she chooses, but a governess with no domestic authority might be an advisable addition to the family. I'll suggest that to your father; and tell him too that while Joan talks more carefully than a year ago, she has to-night informed me that the baby is the 'very spit of father.'" The Bishop smiled at the memory. "That won't do, of course. Why haven't you talked Joan over with your father?"

"I should as soon think of advising the Pope, uncle. My father," he added, with a little unconscious wistfulness that caught the listener's quick ear—"my father is the finest man I know, but he is not easy to talk with, as you are."

The unconscious comparison did not offend the Bishop. He sat thoughtful for a while before he replied. "I want to tell you something to remember," he said at last. "Some day you and your father will come together, and be all the closer for the momentum you get by being separate now. I know he is a silent man, but wait until you get at what is behind his silence, as I have. Did I ever show you any of his letters to me? I suppose he lets himself out in them as nowhere else, and some of them I have laid away for you children when you are older. Let me see; I think I can show you a part of one now. It struck me as so true I almost[Pg 854] stole it for use in a sermon." He drew out some letters from his pocket, and choosing one, he turned it down between certain lines and handed it over to his nephew. Tom read with interest that grew intense as he went on.

"I am sure we both agree," the letter ran, "that the man who earns his education, and his right to eat bread and live, by the sweat of his own brow, has an enormous pull over the man whose education and buttered bread and honey are all paid for by somebody else. At the same time my boy has worked so finely, so manfully and earnestly, at the furnaces this year, I think, and you, my dear brother, will be glad to learn this, that by the coming fall I can venture to send him—"

"Where?" asked Tom, devouring the turned-down page with hungry eyes. His fingers trembled to lift the sheet.

"Dear! dear!" said the Bishop, innocently, taking the paper and folding it away. "Did I leave out something I ought to have folded down? Well, don't ask me any questions. Don't ask me. It's a very imprudent person who tells names and tales the same day. I don't think I left out the name of the college, did I? Now, my boy, be off, before my waistcoat is. How could you respect my cloth if you should see me in flannel? I must go to rest if I mean to climb that cherry-tree with Joan to-morrow, and I certainly mean to try."

Bishop Hegan was always as good as his word, generally a little better; therefore the next morning he and Joan and the little boys and Lolly and the baby were all established under the spreading branches of the cherry-tree—Joan half ashamed of the tree's proportions, but wholly happy.

"Do you always move in a caravan like this?" asked Bishop Hegan, "I felt like Father Abraham establishing a tribe as we trailed over the fields. I don't remember asking any one but you to accompany me, Joan."

"They always come too," said Joan, simply, "wherever I go. Do you really want to climb this tree, godfather? It would be a nice way for you to celebrate the Fourth of July, wouldn't it?"

"For me, as a kind of mild and clerical dissipation, I suppose," laughed the Bishop. "Bless my soul, I don't believe there is such an unpatriotic man in America as I! Last Fourth of July I forgot to celebrate at all, and here's another Fourth hours old before I realize its birth."

Joan looked at her uncle with round shocked eyes. "Why, godfather! I didn't know you'd think that a right way to feel. I make our children pray every night for our country and the President and our continued independence."

The Bishop could not restrain a smile. "My little Joan of Arc," he said, and the words struck a chord of memory with them both. "How is it with Joan of Home?"

Joan shook her head sorrowfully. "Not very well. But indeed I am trying. I keep your letters and read them over, and I say, 'Joan of Home' every time I look at my lovely Joan of Arc; but I don't see yet why you told me to do that, godfather."

"Yes, you do," said the Bishop; "at least your heart has seen, if your mind has not. What do you think as you look at the Maid?"

Joan's eyes kindled; her voice rang: "That I would love to buckle on my armor as she did, and fight for my country as she fought."

"Why, sometimes I think every woman is a fighting patriot, all day and every day. Don't you buckle on your armor every morning and war with the butcher, the baker, and candlestick-maker to defend your little country in this direction and that? Every family is a small state to be governed. Don't you know that?"

Joan's face fell. "Godfather, I don't like that idea," she burst out. "There is nothing glorious in what I am doing. Of course I love helping father, but the dear children and the tradesfolk almost fray me out sometimes. I only war in the way you describe because I know I ought to."

"That's a good enough and glorious enough reason," said the Bishop. "Don't you fret, my little girl. If the chance of any kind of glory ever comes your way—and your cruel old godfather prays it never may—you won't find yourself ill prepared to meet it, if you take care of the peace duties and let the glory take care of itself."

"Yes," said Joan, humbly, "I will try. I am trying to talk better than I did, as you wrote to me I should. Do you think I have improved at all? I know I did sometimes talk to beat the band."

"Well, the last remark was not wholly guiltless," laughed the Bishop. "But never mind. You are doing very well in all ways. What a sweet-tempered child you are making of Teddy! Hear the boy now."

"Bumble-peg, bumble-peg," Teddy was calling to Robert. "Yeth, I want to play it. Oh, come an' leth play bumble-peg. What ith it?"

"He gets that from you, dear godfather," said Joan. "I don't believe there's another bishop in the world that would go out to climb trees with his niece."

"I haven't climbed yet," said the Bishop, looking up at the spreading branches and the huge bare hole of the old tree. "My dear, where do you get your first foothold?"

"Here," said Joan. "I'll show you, godfather. But you mustn't tell Tom. It was half mean of him to tell you on me about climbing this tree."

She had led her uncle to the back of the old tree, where the underbrush clustered thickly, hiding a set of heavy iron pegs, which she had driven into the trunk, one above the other, until they were like an irregular set of steps.

"I did that with a great iron hammer," said Joan. "It took a whole morning. I stood on one as I drove in the other, and I never felt so much like my Joan of Arc as then."

"I should think so," said the Bishop, looking up at the iron perches. "Personally I should think it would have been easier, and certainly more school-girlish, to content yourself with candy at home."

"I know," said Joan; "but then I never did care for candy. I always loved the works of nature better than the arts of man." She spoke so sweetly and simply that though he really started at the last words, Bishop Hegan could not find it in his heart to laugh at them. He set his foot on the first iron peg, which at once yielded under his weight.

"Dear! dear!" he said, drawing back; "my rotundity or the weight of my divinity is too much for your ladder, Joan. No wild celebrating for me to-day. By-the-way, why aren't you children blowing off your fingers and your heads on this glorious Fourth? You, of all people, Joan, should not have a toe or finger left."

"Father doesn't allow fireworks here," said Joan; "you see, he can't make any exceptions for us, as we live on the works. There are never holidays for furnaces, and he can't very well allow the furnace-men to be playing at fire-crackers. Somehow I like it quiet this way much better. We can feel the day more solemnly than if we were playing all the time. I think if everybody would try to do something patriotic on the Fourth of July it would be beautiful, and ever so much better than firing off shooting-crackers. But then it's awfully hard to find patriotic things to do. I've tried every year, and I have never found one yet."

"And then most of us find more satisfaction in shooting-cracker patriotism," said Bishop Hegan, dryly. "Now, little girl, up with you; let me see how you can climb."

He expected a pretty sight, but Joan's climbing was something more than that. She not only swayed from branch to branch, but fitted her slender body against limbs too large to grasp, crawling out on their limits as the tree-toad crawls. For the pure joy of motion, she worked her sinuous way to the tree-top, where no cherries grew, and back again to the limbs where they hung in clusters, which she flung down, laughing. It was not the fearless climbing of a hardy boy, but the poetry of climbing as a delicate girl might be expected to climb, but as the on-looker had never seen one venture to attempt. He felt that in a way it was scarcely human, and was glad when Joan, flushed but not breathless, dropped again at his side.

"Thank you," said the Bishop, as if he had witnessed a special benefit performance. He kept watching the young girl as she walked home quietly by his side.

"Aunt Milly!" he thought. "Fancy this bit of oddity shackled in her house! But she climbs entirely too well. Egad! it's a professional wood-nymph. She must have a governess. I wonder if she is all heroics, or if we have a mute inglorious Jeanne d'Arc in our midst. I almost wish we could prove the child."

"Come, children," said Joan, interrupting the thread of her uncle's thought. "Come, stir your little stumps. We are late for lunch, and I'm hungry. No, Lolly, it won't hurt Ted to run a little. You know, nothing ever hurts our boys. I declare, rattlesnakes run from 'em."

"She's just a little child, after all," decided the laughing Bishop, "Upon my word, I think I caught her heroics for the moment."

"Come on," said Joan, urging on the little ones. "Come on. Father must be at home by now."

She stopped short, suddenly listening, her eyes dilated. Across the fields, blown to them on the wind, came faintly the sound of a sharp shrill whistle, thrice repeated, then silence, and the same signal again.

"It's for father," said Joan, breathlessly. "Something has happened at the works."

All over the great iron-works men were hurriedly calling inquiries to one another as the shrill insistent whistle rang out with that note of alarm which danger signals seem to gain, or which the ear hears in them. The busy place roused as a humming beehive is roused by a sounded gong. All those who could, or who dared to leave their work, ran in the direction where they saw others running. Tom, dressed in his rough overalls, and with face and hands grimy from the great furnace stoves for which he was responsible, was by that responsibility tied to his post until he could leave everything in safe order. He was almost the last man free, and not until long after his patience was exhausted was he able to follow the straggling procession that led to the new fire-proof stock-house in process of erection. As he ran, Tom learned by snatches what had happened. Those dreaded poisonous gases that are the curse of the furnace-man had been insidiously leaking out from the neighboring furnace pipes, and creeping up under the iron roof of the stock-house. There they had collected as in an ether-cone, waiting to do their mischievous work. So slowly and so imperceptibly had they gathered, the men working in under the roof, riveting the huge iron girders, had labored on unconscious of the enemy surrounding them. They were not "iron-men" proper, and so less inured to the gases and less aware of their danger, the peculiarity of which is that the gases do their deadly work so swiftly when once taking hold that a man is unconscious before he knows he is actually attacked. Tom remembered one poor fellow who was sitting on a high wall eating his poor dinner-pail meal, when the gases found and caught him. It was Tom who had discovered him lying at the foot of the wall, a bit of bread still in his hand, and—Tom did not care to remember the rest, and he was glad when he reached the stock-house to see that a piece of tarpauling had been laid over a huddled something on the ground outside the house.

But it was not his father who was standing by the tarpauling. It was Bishop Hegan, who looked up at Tom as he would have hurried by, and beckoned to him. "Find Joan and the children," he said. "They outstripped me, and are here somewhere. Take them home. I must stay here by this poor thing. They say his wife is coming."

Bishop Hegan's face was white with pity. He took a step to the open building, and pointed up significantly. Tom lifted his eyes, and then ran forward where the crowd surged inside.

There had been three men working on the girders; now there were but two, still hanging, no one knew how, astride the great iron ribs sixty feet above the terrified eyes that watched them. They were both unconscious, as was yet another poor fellow who had tried to climb to his comrades' aid, and almost reached them, but turned back just in time, gasping and fainting. Half-way down the wall he was with difficulty rescued and lowered to safety. No one else was volunteering for the dangerous task. To climb those high sheer walls, mounting from ladder to brace, from brace to bracket, was no easy task at best for the coolest heads. The danger doubled when one climbed with nerves unhinged. Outside the building there were scaffoldings in place against the unfinished walls, but the braces on the steep roof had been removed, and to reach the unconscious men from there meant working unstayed on the verge of a precipice, and delving a way through iron plates. There seemed no choice but waiting in sickening suspense for a second tragedy, to be followed by a third.

Under the open windows and along the wall of the house Mr. Hegan was pacing up and down with an excitement which his son had never before seen. His men left a way for him, and watched him with a rude affection. Stern as he was, the safety of his men was dear to him, as they knew. He had vainly striven to raise a rescuing party, but the men hung back, he saw, in earnest. His helplessness seemed to hurt bodily.

Mr. Hegan started and stood still, looking at his son in the first flush of his young manhood. He settled back against the window-frame with a deep breath.

"No," he said, hoarsely, uttering perhaps the first untruth of his manly life. "Any attempt is useless. It is throwing life away. I absolutely forbid it."

As if with a flash of memory, Tom's mind went back to that scene a year before, of which this seemed a repetition. Then, on this same historic July day, he had, with a curious appropriateness, made to his father his declaration of independence, but had met an inappropriate defeat. Then, too, they had stood, as now, by an open window, and, moved by an instinct of repetition, Tom turned to stand exactly as he had before stood, leaning against the opposite side of the frame. As he did so, he saw with what he knew was a foolish but uncontrollable flush of exultation that his eyes were on an exact level with his father's. One ambition he had achieved, but along with this growth had come another so much more important that Tom forgot all else in the exhilaration of its discovered possession.

"Father," he said, in a low tone that none the less rang with determination, "last year I didn't dare to disobey you, because I was afraid, but now—I'm not a bit afraid of you."

Mr. Hegan leaned quickly forward, and laid his hand on his boy's shoulder with a fatherly touch and an anxiety in his eyes that made Tom's heart beat high.

"I must try it, father," he said, gently, answering the questioning look. "There isn't a man here who can stand the gases as I can. I'm used to them."

Mr. Hegan bowed his head. He tried to reply quietly, but his voice broke. "You are a man," he said; "your own master. I haven't the right to say no if your courage says yes. God go with you!" He held out his hand, but turned away as if he could not see the boy's first step toward danger.

Tom grasped the hand, but did not move. "Father!" he cried, in a gasp. "Look! It is Joan!"

Mr. Hegan turned. Tom was pointing up, not at the endangered men, but to a spot on which every eye was now fixed, and to which all were pointing in turn. Further along the building and close under the roof was a small opening, left for some temporary purpose, and through this opening, by which no man could have entered, appeared the slight shoulders and the dark head they all recognized. With strong motions of her slender arms, Joan was dragging her lithe body into the building, until she lay at last flattened on the wide iron beam that separated wall from roof. From there she began to work her way along the beam towards the girder where the men still hung. Her progress, like that of a measuring-worm, was slow but sure. A light rope was coiled round and round her waist.

"She will tie them to the girders," shouted Tom. "Take courage, father; she can stand the gases as I can. Who goes up with me?"

"My goodness!" murmured the father. "Both my children!" But in a moment he was himself again—the master, the director. He stepped forward, as a captain reviewing his troops.

"Volunteers!" his commanding voice ordered, and from the mass of reluctant men sprang a dozen, stung to tardy courage. Mr. Hegan rapidly divided his forces. Half were to go with him to the outer walls and the roof, half to follow Tom, already on his way up the inner wall to Joan.

If Joan had stopped to ask herself how she came to be where she was, she could hardly have told. From the moment when she reached the stock-house and saw the poor souls dangling, as it were, between life and death, her brain had worked like a fire. She saw the small opening under the eaves, and remembering the scaffolding on the outside, realized that she could make the height of the walls in pure air. To her the gases were less terrifying because she had formed the habit of visiting Tom when the air was most foul, to carry him cooling draughts. Almost instinctively she caught up a rope, and winding it about her waist, ran to the outer wall, where she was quite alone. Never before in her childish life had she felt so little the need of advice and instruction. As each move occurred to her, she followed it instantly, and with a concise certainty as unusual to her as it was exhilarating. Never before had she climbed with such careful precision or so rapidly. Her whole soul was absorbed in the impulse of succor, which steadied while it inspired her. She did not stop to count the cost, because cost did not exist for her. Once only did she remember herself and her danger, and that was when some instinctive feeling drew her eyes down to the rescuing-band swarming up to her aid. After that one look she did not venture to measure with her eyes the dreadful distance below. She was soon on a level with those she came to reach, and breathing the same air they breathed. Used as she was to the gases, their poison was affecting her. Her breath began to come heavily, and her eyes were now and then playing her false. Joan grasped her dulling senses as with physical hands and forced them to her service until she reached the girder. To climb out upon it and to lash the men in place were all that remained for her to do. Then, if she had the strength left, she would also lash herself, and—she realized dully that she had reached the first victim.

He had fallen forward, and was caught by the breast and between the arms in the frame-work. Joan twined the rope about him and the bar, and with the loose end passed on, crawling to the next man, who lay less dangerously. He was supported astride the girder as by a miracle of balance, his back against an iron bar, his head dropped on his breast. A strange throbbing sound was troubling Joan's ears, and seemed to her to dim her powers, and make the knots her stiffened fingers tied yet more difficult. Her sight, too, was growing dimmer, as the throbbing entered into her brain with hard metallic crashings that increased in force and volume, paralyzing the will-power to which she now felt herself clinging but feebly. She tied the last knot about the unconscious man, and felt herself then stupidly trying to wind the rope's end about her own waist. The clashing in her brain grew terrible. It was like an acute suffering, than which a fall to the depths below was preferable. But, painfully forcing herself to what was now a mere duty of self-preservation, she feebly plucked at the rope, her body swaying back and forth on the girder. Suddenly she realized her swaying motion, and righted herself with a start that roused her to a full, if momentary, consciousness. She had no longer the power to even toy with the rope or stop this swaying, which she knew had begun again. The terrible crashing sound was an unbearable uproar in her ears and brain. Her head fell forward helplessly; she felt her body following, and with a great human cry of mortal fear she struggled desperately[Pg 857] against the sinking impulse which was dragging her down, down—

A strong rough grasp was about her waist, catching her back. Tom's voice was crying her name in her ears, and a moment later the iron roof, yielding to the brave attacking of sledges and crowbars, opened above their heads. But to Joan's sick and giddy senses it was the heavens that were parting, with a tearing, rending sound, and a glory of inrushing sunlight told her that all was over. She closed her eyes, wondering vaguely at the painlessness of death, and while thus wondering lost consciousness.

When Joan awoke it was with a warm rain, dropping on her face, and she looked up into her uncle's eyes. He was kneeling by her side, bending over her. On her other side she recognized the physician of the works, and standing at her feet was Tom, his arm about his father's shoulders, supporting him. Mr. Hegan was trembling, and leaning on that support as gratefully and as naturally as if it had ever been his habit to cling to his son. A dry sob of relief broke from her father's lips as Joan opened her eyes.

"Hush!" whispered the doctor, as she looked around her amazed. A rope was knotted about her waist and the pulley block and ropes by which she had been lowered from the roof were still attached to her rope girdle.

"It is your unbuckled armor, my little Joan," he said. "You have had your wish for glory, Joan."

Joan lay still, looking up at him, her eyes growing larger and deepening with intelligence as her memory returned. Suddenly she cried: "I remember now. Are the men safe?"

"They are recovering," Mr. Hegan tried to say, but his voice failed as he spoke.

"Your brother," answered Bishop Hegan. "Six other men ran to your help, but four gave out, and Tom outstripped the other two by yards of climbing. He caught you just as you were falling, and handed you out to a rescue party on the roof."

Joan looked affectionately at her brother. "I'd have done the same for him," she said, simply. Her glance travelled on to her father's white face and shaking hands. She sat upright suddenly, anxious and inquiring. "Why, father dear, what ever's the matter? You are just as white and jumpity as you can be. I never saw you like this. You haven't had any lunch, have you? Well, I think we all had better go home to eat something. I'm awfully hungry myself. Help me up, Tom." The elders hung back as the two young people drew together.

"God bless my boy!" said Mr. Hegan, feelingly. "He has earned his independence, if ever a man did." The Bishop was openly wiping his eyes.

"God bless my little girl! She may be as romantic as a milkmaid, and talk like a sailor-taught parrot if she chooses, with no more scoldings from me. My dear Tom, it's the Fourth of July. Do you remember how one year ago to-day you were laying down the law to the young rebels?"

"Well, not exactly," said the Bishop. "You see, you were imposing nothing unreasonable last year."

Mr. Hegan laughed. "Exactly what King George said, I have no doubt. Let me acknowledge it when my reign is justly over. Tom shall go to college in the fall, and Joan—she shall decide for herself on a governess. My two eldest are now a man and a woman, not my children after to-day. Shall we go to luncheon? When the heroine of the hour calls loudly for bread and beef we old folks needn't stop to be sentimental."

"I suppose," said the Bishop, "that Independent States and States of Independence are nearly the same thing. Are we to have a celebration?"

"Undoubtedly," laughed Mr. Hegan. "There are our conquerors calling us. Yes, children, we are coming."

FREDDY SOLILOQUIZES—JULY 4, 1896.

He's a very wise man,
The Calendar Man;
He fixes the year just right;
He has a good plan,
As every one can
Discern at the very first sight.

He knows that the very best days of the year
Are Christmas and Fourth of July,
And it would have been very unpleasant and queer
If he'd gone and arranged 'em close by.

But with one in December and the other one now,
The calendar's all right for fun.
There's time to recover from one, anyhow,
Before the other's begun.

RICK DALE.

BY KIRK MUNROE,

Author of "Snow-shoes and Sledges," "The Fur-Seal's Tooth," "The 'Mate' Series," "Flamingo Feather," etc.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

WHAT IS A HUMP-DURGIN?

hen the boys returned to Buck Raulet's shack, which he had insisted they should share with him until they could build one of their own, the first question Alaric asked was in regard to his new employment.

"Ho, ho! With all your learning don't you know what a hump-durgin is? Well, I am surprised, for it's one of the commonest things. Still, if you don't really know, I'll tell you. A genuine hump-durgin is a sort of a cross betwixt a boat and a mule."

"That's what I said. You see, it is something like a boat. I might say a steamboat, or perhaps a canal-boat would be more like it, and it is always sailing back and forth. It often rolls and pitches like it was in a heavy sea; but at the same time it lives on dry land and never goes near the water. It also rears and bucks, and jumps from side to side, and tries its best to throw its rider, same as a mule does, and it wouldn't look unlike one if it only had legs, and a tail, and ears, and hair, and a bray."

"Humph!" interrupted Bonny, who had been an interested listener to this vague description of a hump-durgin. "A log of wood might look like a hump-durgin if it had all those things."

"Right you are, son! A log of wood might look like a hump-durgin, and then again it mightn't. Same time I've often thought that some hump-durgins wasn't much better than logs of wood, after all. Anyway, now that I've described the critter so that you know all about him, you can see why the boss has decided to put our young friend here in charge of one."

"Because of your experience with both mules and boats," laughed the big "faller" teasingly, and that was all the satisfaction the boys could get from him that night.

The next morning, bright and early, the occupants of the camp scattered to their respective duties: the loggers trudging up the skid-road and deep into the forest, there to resume their work of converting trees into logs; the loading-gang going in the opposite direction, to the distant railway landing, where they would spend the day loading logs on to flat cars; the engineers with their firemen to their respective engines; the road-gang up to the head of a side gulch where they were constructing a branch skid-road; the blacksmiths to their ringing anvils; Bonny to the store, where he was to take an account of stock; and Alaric, in company with the man whose place he was to fill, after receiving from him half a day's instruction in his new duties to make the acquaintance of his hump-durgin.

They went a short distance down the skid-road to where one of the relay engines was winding in a half-mile length of wire cable over a big steel drain. This cable stretched its shining length up the gulch and out of sight around a bend. Near the engine-house, and at one edge of the skid-road, was a little siding, or dock, protected by a heavy sheer-skid. In it lay what looked like a log canoe, sharp-pointed at both ends, and having a flat bottom.

"That thing!" exclaimed the lad, gazing at the canoe-like object curiously. "But I thought a hump-durgin went by steam!"

"So it does," laughed the man, "when it goes at all. Just wait a minute, and you'll see."

Almost as he spoke there came a sound of bumping and sliding from up the skid-road, and directly afterwards the end of an enormous log came into sight around the bend, drawn by the cable the engine was winding in. As this log rounded the bend and came directly toward them, another was seen to be chained to it, then another, and another, until the "turn" was seen to contain five of the woody monsters. Attached to the rear end of the last log came another hump-durgin, in which a man was seated, and to the after end of which was fastened a second wire cable that stretched away for half a mile to the next engine above.

Every log was made fast to the one ahead of it by two short chains, each of which was armed at either end with a heavy steel spur having a sharp point and a flat head. These are called "dogs," and, driven deep into the logs, bind them together. The hump-durgin was also attached to the rear log by a chain and "dog," and one of the principal duties of a hump-durgin man is to see that none of these dogs pulls out.

As the "turn" of logs stopped just above the station, the man who had come with them knocked out his hump-durgin dog, while the man with Alaric disconnected the cable that had drawn the logs down to that point, and hooked on the upper end of another that stretched away out of sight down the road. Then he waved to the engineer, who telephoned to the next station down the line, and at the same time to the one above. In another minute the hump-durgin that had just arrived was being pulled back by its cable over the way it had come, and the "turn" of logs was drawn forward by the new cable just attached to them. When the rear end of the last log was passing Alaric's hump-durgin, the man with him hammered its "dog" into the wood, the chain straightened with a jerk, and the novel craft was under way. As it started, both the man and Alaric jumped in, and away they went, bumping and sliding down the skid-road, slewing around corners that were protected by sheer-skids, and dragging behind them a half-mile length of cable attached to the after end of their craft.

In this way they were dragged half a mile down the gulch to a second engine station, where a new relay of cable with a third hump-durgin awaited the logs, and from which their own craft, laden with the chains and dogs just brought up from below, was dragged back up hill to the station from which they had started.

Every now and then on their downward trip the man jumped from the hump-durgin, and, maul in hand, ran along the whole length of the "turn," giving a tap here and there to the "dogs" to make sure that none of them was working loose. As the cables were only speeded to about four miles an hour, he could readily do this; but after he had thus examined one side he had to wait until the whole turn passed him, and then run ahead to examine the other. Alaric asked why he did not run on the logs themselves, and, by thus examining both sides at the same time, save half his work.

"Because I ain't that kind of a fool," replied the man. "There is them as does it; but a chap has to be surer-footed and spryer than I be to ride the logs, 'specially when they're slewing round corners. I reckon, though, from all I hear of you, that you'll be just one of the kind to try it on; and all I can say is, I hope you'll be let off light when it comes your time to be flung. Some gets killed, and others only comes nigh it."

The hump-durgin man at the lower relay station followed the first "turn" of logs to the railway landing, and then went back to the extreme upper end of the skid-road. With the second "turn" Alaric and his instructor did the same thing. The next man above him followed the third "turn" to its destination, while the man farthest up of all travelled the whole length of the road with the fourth "turn," covering its two miles in four different hump-durgins. And at length Alaric had a chance to do the same thing. Thus each hump-durgin driver became familiar with every section of the road, and made six round trips in a day.

At noon of that first day Alaric's instructor in the art of navigating a hump-durgin bade him "so long," and left him in sole command of the clumsy craft. The man had no sooner gone than his pupil began practising the science of log-riding, and before night he had triumphantly ridden the whole length of the road mounted on the backs of his unwieldy charges. To be sure, he sat down most of the way, and was thrown twice when attempting to walk the length of the "turn" while it was slewing round corners. Fortunately he escaped each time with nothing more serious than a few bruises, and that night he drove a number of hobnails into the soles of his boots. These afforded him so good a hold on the rough bark that he was never again flung, and within a week had become so expert a log-rider that he could keep his feet over the worst "slews" on the road.

The hump-durgins brought up many things from the railway landing besides chains and "dogs," for they were the sole conveyances by which supplies of any kind could reach the camp. It often happened that they carried passengers as well, and in this respect running a hump-durgin was, as Alaric said, very much like driving a stage-coach—a thing that he had always longed to do.

Bonny was so envious of his comrade's job that on that very first day he made application for the next hump-durgin vacancy, and two weeks later was filled with delight at receiving the coveted appointment.

By the time that both our lads became hump-durgin boys they were living in their own shack, which stood just beyond Buck Raulet's, and which nearly every man in camp had helped them to build. So proud were they of this tiny dwelling that they nearly doubled their bill at the store in procuring bedding and other furnishings for it.

Although thus amply provided with rude comforts, or, as Bonny expressed it, "surrounded with all the luxuries of life," Alaric fully realized that it would soon be time to exchange this mode of living for another. He knew that he owed a duty to his father, as well as to the station of life into which he had been born; and, having proved to his own satisfaction that he was equally strong with other boys, and as well able to fight his way through the world, he was more than willing to return to his own home. Now that he felt competent to hold his own, physically as well as mentally, with others of his age, he was filled with a desire to go to college. On talking the matter over with Bonny he found that the latter cherished similar aspirations, the only difference being that the young sailor's longing[Pg 859] was for a mechanical rather than a classical education. "Though, of course," said Bonny, with a sigh, "I shall always have to take it out in wishing, for I shall never have money enough to carry me through a school of any kind, or at least not until I am too old to go."

At this Alaric only smiled, and bade his comrade keep on hoping, for there was no telling when something might turn up. As he said this he made up his mind that if ever he went to college Bonny should at the same time go to one of the best scientific schools of the country.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

ALARIC AND BONNY AGAIN TAKE TO FLIGHT.

For a full month had our hump-durgin boys occupied the little cedar-built shack, which now seemed to them so much a home that it was difficult to realize they had ever known any other. By this time too they were exercising a very decided influence upon the character of the camp into whose life they had been so unexpectedly thrown. Light-hearted Bonny, with his cheery face and abounding good-nature, was as full of amusing pranks as a young colt, and from every group that he joined shouts of merriment were certain to arise within a few minutes. Thus Bonny was very popular and always in demand. Nor was Alaric less so, for he could tell so much concerning strange countries and relate so many curious old-world tales, that there was rarely an evening that he was not called upon for something of the kind. He so often said that most of his stories could be found in certain books, related a thousand times better than he could tell them, that in the breasts of many of his hearers he aroused a real longing for books, and a wider knowledge than they could ever acquire without them.

At the same time Alaric was not only appreciated for what he knew, but for what he could do. No one in camp could ride a "turn" of logs, swaying, bumping, and sliding down the skid-road, with such perfect confidence and easy grace as he. Only one of them all could outrun him, and none could catch or throw a baseball with the certainty and precision that he exhibited, although ever since Buck Raulet discovered the ball in his young guest's coat pocket the camp had practised with it during all odd moments of daylight.

So our lads made friends with and knew the personal history of every occupant of the camp save one, and he was its boss. Since the night on which they had taken tea in his house Mr. Linton had hardly spoken to either of them; nor did he ever join with the men in their evening gatherings to listen to Bonny's jokes or Alaric's tales. At first they noticed this, and wondered what reason he had for avoiding them; but they soon learned that it was only his way, and that he never talked with any of the men except on matters of business. Buck Raulet said it was because he was a deputy United States Marshal, and didn't know when he might be called on to arrest any one of them for some offence against the government.

With all their present popularity the boys were growing weary of the monotonous life they were leading, of their good-natured but rough and narrow-minded associates, and of the deadly sameness of the food served three times a day in the dingy mess-room. They also dreaded the approaching winter, with its days and weeks of rain, during which the work of getting out logs for the insatiable mills down on the sound must keep on without a moment of interruption. They listened with dismay to tales of loggers who had not known the feeling of dry clothing for weeks at a time; of "turns" of logs rushing down skid-roads slippery with wet, like roaring avalanches of timber, threatening destruction to everything in their course; and of long dreary winter evenings when the steady downpour forbade camp-fires and prevented all social out-of-door gatherings.

In view of these things, Alaric was determined that the end of another month, or such time as his wages should be paid, should see him on his way to San Francisco and home. He did not anticipate any difficulty in persuading Bonny to go with him, for that young man had already remarked that while hump-durgin riding was fun up to a certain point, he should hate to do it for the remainder of his life. Oh yes, Bonny would go of course; and Alaric's only fear was that his father might not take a fancy to the lad, or hold the same views regarding his future that he did. Still, that was a matter that would arrange itself somehow, if they could only manage to reach San Francisco, and the "poor rich boy" now began to long as eagerly for the time to come when he might return to his home as he once had for an opportunity to leave it.

One day, when matters stood thus, a stranger, past middle age, shabbily dressed, and wearing a peculiarly dilapidated hat, appeared at the railway log-landing, and asked of Bonny, whose hump-durgin happened to be there at the time, permission to ride with him to the upper end of the skid-road. With a sympathetic glance at the man's forlorn appearance Bonny answered,

"Certainly, sir; you may ride with me all day if you like, and I shall be glad of your company."

Thanking the lad, the stranger seated himself in the hump-durgin, and after he had been warned to hold on tight and watch out for "slews," the upper journey was begun. At one of the upper relay stations they waited for a descending "turn" of logs to pass them. Here the stranger visited the engine-house, and while he was talking with the engineer they came in sight. Alaric, who happened to be in charge, was at that moment walking easily forward along the backs of the swaying logs, presenting as fine a specimen of youthful agility, strength, and perfect health as one could wish to encounter. He was clad in jean trousers tucked into boot-legs and belted about his waist; a blue flannel shirt, with a black silk kerchief knotted at the throat, and a black slouch hat.

"Isn't that extremely dangerous?" asked the stranger, regarding the approaching lad with a curious interest.

"Not for him it isn't, though it might be for some; but Rick Dale is so level-headed and sure-footed that there isn't his equal for riding logs in this outfit, nor, I don't believe, in any other," answered the engineer.

"What did you say his name was?" asked the stranger, with his gaze still fixed on Alaric.

"No. I don't know any one of that name; but the lad's resemblance to another whom I used to know is certainly very striking."

"Yes. It's funny how often people look alike who have never been within a thousand miles of each other," remarked the engineer, carelessly, as he stepped to the signal-box. In another minute Alaric had passed out of sight, while Bonny and the stranger had resumed their upward journey.

That evening Alaric remarked to his chum, "I noticed you had a passenger to-day."

"Yes," replied Bonny. "Seedy-looking chap, wasn't he, but one of the nicest old fellows I ever met. Never saw any one take such an interest in everything. I suspected what he was after, though, and finally we got so friendly that I asked him right out if he wasn't looking for work."

"Yes. He hesitated at first, and looked at me to see if I was joking, and then owned up that he was hunting for something to do. I felt mighty sorry for him, 'cause I know how it is myself; but I had to tell him there wasn't a living show in this camp just now. He seemed mightily taken with our shack here, and said he once had a house just like it, but he was afraid he'd never have another. I invited him to stay with us a few days if he wanted to—just while he was looking for a job, you know—but he said he guessed he'd better go on to some other camp. You'd have been willing, wouldn't you?"

"Certainly," replied Alaric. "I've already been in hard luck enough to be mighty glad of a chance to help any other fellow who's in the same fix, especially an old man; for they don't have half the show that young fellows do."

"I told him you'd feel that way," exclaimed Bonny, triumphantly, "and he said if there were more like us in the world it would be a happier place to live in, but that he guessed he'd manage to scrape along somehow awhile[Pg 860] longer without becoming a burden to others. I did insist on his taking a hat, though."

"Yes. We were down at the store, and he was asking the price of things, and looking around so wistful that I couldn't help getting him a new hat and having it charged; for the one he wore wasn't any good at all. He hated to take it, but I insisted, and finally he said he would if I'd keep his old one and let him redeem it some time. Of course I said I would, just to satisfy him, and here it is."

Alaric looked carelessly at the dilapidated hat as he said: "It was a first-class thing to do, Bonny, and I only wish I had been here to give him something at the same time. But, hello! this is a Paris hat, and hasn't been worn very long, either. I wonder how he ever got hold of it? Never mind, though; hang it up for luck, and to remind me to do something for the next poor chap who comes along. I heard to-day that the president of the company was in Tacoma, on his way to make an inspection of all the camps."

"Yes," replied Bonny. "They say he is an awful swell, too, and I heard that he was coming in his private car. I only hope he is, and that I can get a chance to look at it, for I have never seen a private car. Have you?"

At noon of the following day, while a fifteen-minute game of baseball was in progress after dinner, the boss of Camp No. 10 received a note from the president of the company, requesting him to report immediately in person at Tacoma, and bring with him the two hump-durgin boys Dale and Brooks.

Mr. Linton, being a man who kept his own business to himself as much as possible, merely called our lads and bade them follow him. Of course this order broke up the game they were playing, and as they hastened after the boss, Bonny, in whose hands the baseball happened to be, thrust it into one of his pockets. Although curious to know why they were thus summoned, the boys learned nothing from Mr. Linton until they reached the railway log-landing, when he told them that they were wanted in Tacoma, and that he was instructed to bring them there at once.

From the landing they proceeded by hand-car to Cascade Junction, where they boarded a west-bound passenger train over the Northern Pacific. Even now Mr. Linton was not communicative, and after sitting awhile in silence, he went forward into the smoking-car, leaving the boys in the passenger coach next behind it. Now they began to discuss their situation, and the more they considered it, the more apprehensive they became that something unpleasant was in store for them.

"Yes," replied Alaric; "I've been thinking of that. Do you suppose it can have anything to do with that smuggling business?"

The train was just leaving Meeker, where a passenger had boarded their car, and was now walking leisurely through it toward the smoker. It was he who had attracted Bonny's attention, and at whom he now pointed a trembling finger.

Alaric instantly recognized the man as an officer of the revenue-cutter that had so persistently chased them in the early summer. Without a word, he left his seat and followed the new-comer to the smoking-car, where a single glance through the open door continued his worst suspicions.

The officer had seated himself beside Mr. Linton, and they were talking with great earnestness.

"They are surely after us again," Alaric said, in a whisper, as he regained his seat beside Bonny; "but I don't intend to be captured, if I can help it."

Thus it happened that when, a little later, the train reached Tacoma, and Mr. Linton returned to look for his lads, they were nowhere to be found.

[to be continued.]

The first meeting of the National Interscholastic Association was held at the Columbia Oval, New York, June 20, and the records established on that occasion are something that every school-boy in the country may well feel proud of. The day was perfect and the track was good; and although there were only five associations represented, the teams present were undoubtedly made up of the best scholastic athletic talent in the United States. As had been anticipated, victory went to the New-Englanders, with a score of 46 points; the Connecticut H.-S.A.A. took second honors with 25 points, New York following with 23, while the Long Island I.S.A.A. was fourth with a score of 7, and the sandy team from Iowa closed the list with 6 points.

NATIONAL I.S.A.A. GAMES, COLUMBIA OVAL, NEW YORK, JUNE 20, 1896.

Event.	Winner.
100-yard dash	W. H. Jones (P.A.), N.E.			10-1/5	sec.
220-yard dash	W. H. Jones (P.A.), N.E.			22-2/5	"
Quarter-mile run	H. L. Washburn (B.), N.Y.			51-2/5	"
Half-mile run	W. S. Hipple (B.), N.Y.	1	m.	59-3/5	"
One-mile run	D. T. Sullivan (W.H.), N.E.	5	"	10-1/5	"
120-yard hurdles	A. F. Beers (D.L.S.), N.Y.			16-4/5	"
220-yard hurdles	J. H. Converse (E.H.-S.), N.E.			26-2/5	"
One-mile walk	A. L. O'Toole (E.H.-S.), N.E.	7	"	53-2/5	"
One-mile bicycle	O. C. Roehr (P.P.), L.I.	2	"	36	"
Running high jump	F. R. Sturtevant (H.), Ct.	5	ft.	8	in.
Running broad jump	H. Brown (H.H.-S.), Ct.	21	"	1	"
Pole vault	R. G. Clapp (Will.), N.E.	10	"	5	"
Throwing 12-lb. hammer	F. C. Ingalls (H.), Ct.	129	"	10	"
Putting 12-lb shot	F. C. Ingalls (H.), Ct.	43	"	4	"

Event.	Second.
100-yard dash	R. W. Moore (B.), N.Y.
220-yard dash	R. W. Moore (B.), N.Y.
Quarter-mile run	G. G. Whitcomb (P.E.), N.E.
Half-mile run	R. F. Hanson (E.H.-S.), N.E.
One-mile run	———————————
120-yard hurdles	F. A. Edmands (W.A.), N.E.
220-yard hurdles	A. F. Beers (D.L.S.), N.Y.
One-mile walk	G. A. Blakeslee (H.H.-S.), Ct.
One-mile bicycle	M. W. Forney (A.), L.I.
Running high jump	T. Flournoy (C.), Io.
Running broad jump	H. Moeller (C.G.), N.Y.
Pole vault	B. Johnson (W.A.), N.E.
Throwing 12-lb. hammer	W. B. Boyce (B.H.-S.), N.E.
Putting 12-lb shot	F. A. Edmands (W.A.), N.E.

Event.	Third.
100-yard dash	Hugh Jackson (C.R.), Io.
220-yard dash	Hugh Jackson (C.R.), Io.
Quarter-mile run	C. F. Luce (H.), Ct.
Half-mile run	C. A. Brown (S.C.), Io.
One-mile run	———————————
120-yard hurdles	F. W. Shirk (W.A.), N.E.
220-yard hurdles	J. J. Peters (P.A.), N.E.
One-mile walk	———————————
One-mile bicycle	E. A. Strong (H.), Ct.
Running high jump	———————————
Running broad jump	W. Hersey (W.A.), N.E.
Pole vault	F. R. Sturtevant (H.), Ct.
Throwing 12-lb. hammer	F. A. Edmands (W.A.), N.E.
Putting 12-lb shot	C. Leo (C.R.), Io.

NATIONAL I.S.A.A. GAMES, JUNE 20, 1896.

TABLE OF POINTS SCORED.

Association.	First.	Second.	Third.	Total.
	Five	Two	One
	Points.	Points.	Point.
New England I.S.A.A.	6	6	4	46
Connecticut H.-S.A.A.	4	1	3	25
New York I.S.A.A.	3	4	0	23
Long Island I.S.A.A.	1	1	0	7
Iowa State H.-S.A.A.	0	1	4	6
				—-
				107

School.	First.	Second.	Third.	Total.
	Five	Two	One
	Points.	Points.	Point.
Hartford School	3	0	3	18
Barnard, N.Y.	2	2	0	14
English High-School	2	1	0	12
Phillips Andover	2	0	1	11
Worcester Academy	0	3	3	9
De La Salle, N.Y.	1	1	0	7
Hillhouse High-School	1	1	0	7
Worcester High-School	1	0	0	5
Poly. Prep., Brooklyn	1	0	0	5
Williston	1	0	0	5
Cedar Rapids	0	0	3	3
Adelphi, Brooklyn	0	1	0	2
Phillips, Exeter	0	1	0	2
Brookline High-School	0	1	0	2
Col. Grammar, N.Y.	0	1	0	2
Clinton High-School	0	1	0	2
Sioux City High-School	0	0	1	1
				—-
				107

Now that the meeting is past and gone, it is very easy for most of us to make comments and suggestions about what should have been done, but these suggestions can be of little use to-day, unless they serve to help matters for next year. Hind-sight is very much better than foresight, and experience is much more valuable than either. If the officers of the National Association, and all who are interested in the welfare of that body, will work next year with wisdom acquired from this year's experience, the field day of '97 ought to be a perfect one of its kind. There are a great many things that I should like to say in this Department about the meeting of the N.I.S.A.A., but there are none of these reflections which cannot just as well be made a week or two hence, when there will be more space at disposal, and when there will have been more time for reflection with all of us. For the present I think that, in spite of all the shortcomings of the first meeting, we have reason to congratulate ourselves over the success of the day, and the promise it holds out for the future.

The New York school-boys need waste no time in regret over the defection of the Berkeley and Cutler teams. It is certain that had they been present at the National meet, they could not have altered the result, so far as victory is concerned. It is possible—it is even probable—that New York might have secured second place, but nothing better. The hurdles were 3 ft. 6 in. and 2 ft. 6 in. in the long and short events, respectively, so that it is not exactly fair to compare the performances in these events at the National games with those of the New York Interscholastics, where the hurdles are lower. Nevertheless, Converse in the low hurdles made better time than Harris, who won at the Interscholastics.

To make a just comparison, we must leave the hurdles out of our calculation and take only the other twelve events, which are the same on both the National and the New[Pg 862] York schedules. Of these twelve events the performances at the National meeting were better in ten cases than they were at the New York Interscholastics a few weeks ago. The two which were not surpassed were the pole vault and the mile run. It is probable that Hurlburt of Berkeley could have defeated Clapp. I am not so sure that Turner of Cutler's could have defeated Sullivan, who won the mile in 5 min. 10-1/5 sec. Turner could certainly not have defeated Mills, but Mills was unfortunately ill, and unable to be present. Sullivan ran second to Mills at the New England Interscholastics, Mills's time being 4 min. 33-4/5 sec. Turner's time at the New York Interscholastics was 4 min. 49-3/5 sec.

But it is hardly fair to compare Sullivan's time at the National games with Turner's at the New York games, because Turner was pressed very hard, and did his very best, whereas Sullivan ran around the track alone at the Columbia Oval, there being no other contestant in the mile event; furthermore, at the stretch of the third lap he thought he had finished his mile and spurted, and almost stopped in front of the judge's stand, when the officials called out to him that he still had another lap to go; then he merely trotted the remaining 440 yards, so that of course good time could not be expected. To carry on the speculation further, and to make the comparison more complete, it may be stated that the performances at the National games, besides being better in ten cases out of twelve than the performances at the New York Interscholastic, were better in six cases out of twelve than the N.Y.I.S.A.A. records. The superiority is in the two dashes, the quarter, the half, the hammer, and the shot. In the hammer, both first and second men at the National games made better throws than Irwin Martin did, a few weeks ago, when he set up the New York Interscholastic record at the Berkeley Oval. In the shot, all three point-winners at the National games surpassed the New York Interscholastic figures.

It may clearly be seen from this that the field work at the Columbia Oval was of a very high order. But better still were the performances in the dashes and the middle distances. Jones of Andover defeated Moore of Barnard in both the 100 and the 220, running the shorter distance both in his heat and in the final in 10-1/5 sec. Jones is beyond any doubt the best sprinter in the schools to-day, and gets down the path in beautiful form. Moore was never so hard pushed in all his life, and also ran beautifully, making a close race every time, and his defeat in his heat was doubtless due to his desire to save his strength rather than to the superiority of Robinson, who, however, ran much better in his heat than he did in the finals. The 220 was anybody's race for three-quarters of the distance, Moore and Jones running about even, with Jackson barely a yard in the rear; but Jones, being much the stronger man, and with decidedly more reserve force than Moore, managed to pull out a winner by a couple of yards.

The quarter-mile was hotly contested, and proved a very pretty race. Washburn of Barnard was the favorite, but he had two good men against him in Robinson of Worcester and Luce of Hartford. The bunch went around the turn at a brisk pace, and when half the distance had been covered Whitcomb of Exeter developed unexpected speed, and pushed the New-Yorker strongly. It was plain then that the real struggle was between these two, and it was not until the last three yards of the race that Washburn could feel sure of victory. Luce came in a good third.

The half-mile was probably the hardest race of the day, and Hipple won only after the hottest kind of a struggle with Hanson. The bunch started off at a good pace, as may be seen from the record-breaking time made, Bedford setting the pace. The Barnard man kept well in the lead for the first lap, and then surrendered his position to his schoolmate. But the New-Englanders had no idea of letting Hipple have an easy time of it, and Hanson, Albertson, and Brown at once began to swing out for position. Hipple stuck to his colors, however, and strained every nerve, running beautifully, and on the stretch he[Pg 863] and Hanson pulled away quite perceptibly from the others. Hipple finished about five feet ahead of the Boston man, and both were entirely played out when they crossed the line, Hipple so much so that he was unable to enter the mile, a little later.

Both the hurdle-races furnished fine sport. Shirk of Worcester Academy took the first heat, not being pressed very hard by O'Rourke, and the second heat was an exceedingly hot race between Beers and Edmands, the time, .16-3/5, being even faster than that of the final. In the final struggle the race was clearly between Edmands and Beers, and the New-Englander certainly ran in far better form than did the victorious New-Yorker. Beers knocked over fully half the obstacles, whereas Edmands only toppled one. I should pick Edmands as the winner in a contest with Beers, both men being fresh. At the National games Edmands was throwing the hammer when the hurdles were called, and he had to leave his exhausting field work, without a chance for a rest, to start in his heat, and again in the final. Considering this, his performance over the sticks was exceedingly creditable. There were only three starters in the low hurdles, and Beers got off the mark first. He had not gone far, however, before Converse overtook him and soon passed him. Converse won in the excellent time of 26-2/5 sec., Beers finishing about six yards behind, with Peters almost on his heels. Beers ran in better form in the low hurdles, although doubtless a little fagged from his two high-hurdle heats. It is only fair to say for Beers that he has been in the habit of running over the dwarfed high hurdles of the N.Y.I.S.A.A., and thus Edmands, who has enjoyed the benefit of belonging to an association which uses recognized standards in athletics, had a slight advantage over the New York man.

The walk was a gift to O'Toole of English High, there being only one other contestant, Blakeslee of Hillhouse. Inasmuch as the faculty of the Hotchkiss School, Lakeville, did not allow any of the Hotchkiss men to come down to the meeting, Eels, who made such a good record at the Connecticut games, was not present. This is greatly to be regretted, for he and O'Toole would doubtless have had a close struggle in that event. The Boston man was pressed at no time, but he kept up a good pace, and when he crossed the line he was half a lap ahead of Blakeslee.

There were no accidents in the bicycle race, for a wonder, and the contestants actually raced from start to finish. The riders remained pretty closely bunched for half a mile, Roehr of Long Island leading. At the three-quarter post Poillon of New York dashed from the rear and took the lead, but he was able to hold it for only half a lap, when the others all put on steam and left him again at the tail. Roehr won in good style, with another Brooklynite, Forney of Adelphi, second, and Strong of Connecticut third.

The field events developed some excellent performances. There were only two men who answered to the call in the high jump—Sturtevant and Flournoy. The Connecticut man had the greater reputation, and the event was conceded to him at once, although the Iowa athlete struggled bravely, and cleared the very creditable height of 5 ft. 7 in. Sturtevant showed good form, and went an inch higher. The pole vault was also well contested, but the winner did not go so high as might have been expected from the various performances that have occurred at interscholastic meetings this year. Clapp, the winner, cleared 10 ft. 5 in., although he did an inch better at the New England Interscholastics, where he vaulted 10 ft. 6 in., and took second to Johnson of Worcester Academy. At the National games Johnson could only clear 10 ft. 3 in., and took second to Clapp.

Ingalls of Hartford, with Jones of Andover, enjoyed the honor of scoring a double win. He took first place in both the hammer and the shot, and his performances are something to be proud of. He established records in both events which will probably stand for some years to come. Boyce of Brookline High-School threw 125 ft. 3 in., and took second in the hammer, Edmands of Worcester being third. The latter also took second in the shot, coming within eight inches of the winner. Edmands is a very good all-round athlete. Leo of Iowa took third in the shot, and was only an inch behind Edmands.

Although every athlete who appeared at the National games is to be congratulated on his sportsmanship, and on the determined way in which he set about his work, especial commendation is to be given to the four young men who came on all the way from Iowa. They were outnumbered by every team, but they nevertheless succeeded in making creditable performances, and in carrying off six points. They are not of the stuff that goes home with a zero, and we may confidently expect, if Iowa sends on a team next year, that the experience of the Iowans this spring will have been profited by, and the Westerners will put up even a stiffer competition than they did a week ago.

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It is advisable at this point to leave Connecticut and Massachusetts and describe one of the best—and practically the only—ways of going on a wheel from the Hudson River to the Berkshire Hills. We have already given in former numbers of Harper's Round Table the route from New York city to Hudson, on the Hudson River. For any one making the trip from New York city to the Berkshire Hills, the best route is to follow this already described, and at Hudson to take the following trip to Pittsfield.

Leave Hudson by Warren Street, and run along the trolley-line to the Boston-Albany railroad tracks, and then make for what is called the Columbia turnpike by turning to the left around the park, and still keeping to the left into Green Street. Continuing along this road, you will run into Claverack, four miles away. The road is good, but begins to be hilly towards the last. Claverack is then left, the rider moving eastward and taking the right turn, which carries him by the Red Mills. Then comes a long ascent, and at the end of three miles Hollowville is passed. The road runs clearly, and is practically unmistakable to Martindale, and with the exception of the few hills, it is capital bicycling. Four miles further on, Craryville is reached, the hills becoming a little more frequent, but the road-bed is in such good condition that all are rideable. Three miles further on you pass through Hillsdale, and then run into South Egremont, and then, keeping to the right on leaving South Egremont, climb a long hill with a long coast on the other side, and by Maple Avenue run into Great Barrington. From Great Barrington the road to Pittsfield, through Stockbridge, is along the railroad track through Van Densenville to Housatonic, thence through Glendale to Curtisville, through Stockbridge, and leaving Stockbridge Bowl on the right, up West Street to Lenox. To go from Lenox take Main Street and run direct into the town of Pittsfield itself.

One of the stamp papers reports that a Washington philatelist has had two U.S. 1847 ten-cent stamps made up into a pair of cuff-buttons. This is an old idea. I remember seeing a number of similar buttons many years ago in Germany.

A rumor is current that a new series of stamps is under contemplation by the U.S. government, or that there will be a change in the color of several denominations.

The Olympian stamps continue to be used on letters received in New York, and several foreign papers state that the set will be used until next October, and possibly longer. The official report of the number printed of the different denominations shows clearly that the speculating element was in the mind of the officials of the Greek government. For instance, they printed 20,000 of the 60-lepta stamp (12c.), and 50,000 of the 10 drachmai ($2). The 60 lepta advanced in price to $1.25 within a few days, as all the 60 l. were sold out on the first day to a few favored ones. The outcry from the other speculators was so loud that the government ordered 50,000 more printed, and the price dropped to 30c. It is a pity that the Greek government should humiliate itself in this way, and the first step to make these Olympian stamps "regular" should be an order to print as many copies of any denomination as may be asked for. The stamps themselves are so pretty and interesting that every collector wants to see them established as a regular issue.

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50 Per Cent. Discount.

A. VANCE PIERSON, Morristown, N. J.

STAMPS! 100 all dif. Bermuda, etc. Only 10c. Ag'ts w'td at 50% com. List free. L. Dover & Co., 1469 Hodiamont, St. Louis, Mo.

HARPER'S

PERIODICALS

They are handsome and delightful all, and are as friends that one is glad to see. They please the eye; the artistic sense is gratified by them; they overflow with varied material for the reader. They educate and entertain. They are the well-known and well-liked literary and artistic chronicles of the time. They are a credit to their publishers and to the discernment of the public that approves them. May they continue to be as admirable as they have been and as they are. Better could hardly be wished for them.

FOR SALE EVERYWHERE.

Bringing up a Humming-bird by Hand.

In Distant Australia.

The Music Rack.

Why He Sawed Wood.

The Bishop of Pennsylvania was formerly a frontier or missionary bishop in Nevada. While in the West he had a loyal friend in a man noted for his big heart and his wonderful combination of profane words. He was the possessor of a good carriage and a pair of fast horses, and was always ready to stop swearing for half a day or long enough to take the Bishop, whom he greatly admired as a man, out on worthy errands.

One day the Bishop had accepted the use of the team to go in search of funds to build a small chapel. Passing a rough shanty at a smart pace they saw a man before it sawing wood. The day was hot and the man bareheaded.

"Stop a moment," said the Bishop. The team was halted. "My good man," said the Bishop, addressing the wood-sawyer, "put on your hat. The sun will bake your brain."

"D'you s'pose," said he, "that 'f I had any brains I'd be sawing wood in this land of silver?"

SEPARATING GOLD FROM ALLOY.

Gold coins and gold jewelry always contain alloy. Gold being too soft a metal to use alone is mixed with some harder metal, so that the article will wear longer. Pure gold is 24 carats fine. Before the metric system was adopted, a mark—a gold coin—was used as the unit of standard weight, and a carat is 1/24 of the weight of a mark. A carat is used to express the proportion of gold in the alloy. If a coin is 22 carats fine, it means that it contains 22 parts of pure gold. An article that is 18 carats fine contains 18 parts of pure gold and 6 parts of alloy. Gold coins contain so little alloy that it is not necessary to separate the gold from the alloy; but if one is preparing chloride of gold from old jewelry, in which are found perhaps only nine parts of pure gold, it is best in using it for special work to separate the two metals. This can be done with very little trouble.

Dissolve the gold in "aqua-regia," according to the directions given in the last number of the Round Table. When it is dissolved and the acid evaporated, dilute the chloride with clear water, and add a small quantity of ferrous sulphate. This will cause the gold to be precipitated, and it will settle to the bottom of the vessel in the form of a brown powder, while the alloy will remain in solution. It will take some time for the gold to settle, and when it is all deposited or precipitated turn off the water carefully, wash the gold in distilled water, and then redissolve it in fresh aqua-regia, following the directions in our last paper on preparing chloride of gold. Ferrous sulphate, the substance which precipitates the gold, is also called sulphate of iron. It is a chemical compound, and the chemical formula is FeSO₄+7H₂O, meaning that one atom of iron, one of sulphur, and four of oxygen are added (+) to 7 molecules of water (7H₂O).

In the directions for preparing printing-paper for violet prints the directions for the coloring-bath read as follows:

SEL D'OR (DOUBLE SALTS OF GOLD).

Sel d'or	7½	grs.
Distilled water	15	oz.
Hydrochloric acid	1	drachm.

A member of the Camera Club, wishing to try the formula, wrote to the editor that he went to a druggist for the "sel d'or," but was unable to obtain it, nor could the druggist tell him what it was. An explanation was sent by mail, but we repeat it for the benefit of the club. "Sel d'or" is a double salt of hyposulphite of soda and gold chloride. It is formed by adding chloride of gold to a hyposulphite solution, and mixing with alcohol. Take three parts of concentrated solution of chloride of gold and one part of concentrated solution of hyposulphite of soda. Mix thoroughly, and add alcohol till it is well covered. Shake well, and then set it aside. The alcohol will cause the chloride of gold and sodium sulphite to be precipitated in the form of delicate needlelike crystals, almost transparent, and readily dissolved in water.

If one cannot, obtain "sel d'or" ready prepared, it is not much work to prepare it. This double salts of gold is the form in which gold was used for toning daguerreotypes in the early days of photography. The silvered plate on which was the picture was coated with a solution of "sel d'or," and then heated. The gold was melted or decomposed by the heat and deposited on the picture, giving it not only a beautiful tone, but also preserving it. That this preparation made the picture durable is shown from the fine daguerreotypes which, though taken so many years ago, still retain almost their first freshness.

THE PUDDING STICK.

I am fond of perfumes myself, and so I know just what Elizabeth Rosa means when she sighs: "Oh, how I wish I could have all the violet extract I want! But I cannot afford to buy it, and nobody ever gives me any, except sometimes Aunt Susie at Christmas. There is Lettie, whose writing-paper always reminds you of flowers, a faint far-away sweetness, and Norah, who leaves a dream of roses in the room she has been sitting in, and Eleanor, whose gowns have a delicate fragrance; but there, it's of no use; I am poor, and I can't compete with those girls!"

Really, my dear, your style is poetical. A dream of roses is very impressive. Now let me give you one or two secrets of perfume.

To have your writing-paper, whether note or letter size, or a plain businesslike pad, carry with it a breath of dainty sweetness, you must keep it in tightly closed boxes in which are little packets of orris powder. Your bureau drawers will be perfumed, and the perfume will creep into your handkerchiefs and ribbons and your under-clothing if you will line the drawers with tissue-paper; sprinkle this with powdered orris, and lay a sheet of tissue-paper above it. A prettier way is to make a sachet the exact size of your drawer by quilting orris powder between folds of China silk. Little bags of silk filled with orris and kept in the pockets of your gowns will give them a very delicate fragrance.

A pronounced perfume is vulgar. You must have merely a suggestion of it—a whiff—gone in a breath, not a coarse heavy odor which makes your friends think of musk or patchouly. Perfume poured from a bottle is apt to scent a handkerchief too strongly to please a fastidious taste. You may use your cologne or your violet essence a few drops at a time in the water in which you bathe, or you may finish your toilet by wetting your hands with a tiny drop or two of your favorite perfume. Liquid perfumes must be used sparingly.

In toilet soaps for the face and hands select the nicest you can afford. Do not be afraid to use soap on your face. At least once a day wash it thoroughly with warm water and soap, as only thus can you get rid of the dust which clogs up the fine lace-like net-work of the skin. Make a lather and rub the face thoroughly. Then wash it off with clean water.

I may add that fresh rose leaves sprinkled plentifully in bureau drawers or in the linen closet give a very agreeable perfume to their contents. And we have all heard of the delicate sweetness of sheets and pillow-slips laid away in lavender.

Remember that the nicest people are fastidiously clean. The dainty girl uses a dash of ammonia in the bath, and keeps everything belonging to her spotlessly neat. Clothing should be frequently changed, and every detail of a girl's should be fresh and pure. One who is careful in this way needs no perfume in her toilet.

No other soap is found in so many homes.

EARN A BICYCLE!

We wish to introduce our Teas, Spices, and Baking Powder. Sell 75 lbs. to earn a Bicycle; 50 lbs. for a Waltham Gold Watch and Chain; 25 lbs. for a Solid Silver Watch and Chain; 10 lbs. for a beautiful Gold Ring; 50 lbs. for a Decorated Dinner Set. Express prepaid if cash is sent with order. Send your full address on postal for Catalogue and Order Blank to Dept. I

W. G. BAKER, Springfield, Mass.

JOSEPH GILLOT'S

STEEL PENS

Nos. 303, 404, 170, 604 E.F., 601 E.F.

THE MOST PERFECT OF PENS.

HARPER'S

BAZAR

The great fashion magazine of the world. None excels it in its field.—Chicago Inter-Ocean, Feb. 22, 1896.

10 CENTS A COPY - $4.00 A YEAR

Charles Carleton Coffin's

FASCINATING HISTORICAL WORKS

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

THE BOYS OF '76.

THE STORY OF LIBERTY.

OLD TIMES IN THE COLONIES.

BUILDING THE NATION.

DRUM-BEAT OF THE NATION.

MARCHING TO VICTORY.

REDEEMING THE REPUBLIC.

FREEDOM TRIUMPHANT.

Mr. Coffin avoids the formality of historical narrative, and presents his material in the shape of personal anecdotes, memorable incidents, and familiar illustrations. He reproduces events in a vivid, picturesque narrative.—N. Y. Tribune.

Mr. Coffin writes interestingly; he uses abundance of incident; his style is pictorial and animated; he takes a sound view of the inner factors of national development and progress; and his pages are plentifully sprinkled with illustrations.—Literary World, Boston.

Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York.

The Professor was crossing a small lake in Ireland. After admiring for some time the way his boatman, John, handled the oars, he thought he would like to try and row. John, nothing loath, surrendered the blades, and the Professor essayed the task of rowing. Things developed rapidly into a shower-bath as the oars splashed this way and that, and finally catching a crab, the learned gentleman landed with a crash in the bottom of the boat, very nearly upsetting it.

"Well, well," said the Professor, "rowing is quite a difficult thing, after all. Dear me, how my back aches!"

The Professor is still pondering over what John said; whether he meant the oars or the heads of the oarsmen. The sly twinkle of John's eyes when he said it rather inclines him to believe the latter.

A PISCATORIAL OBSERVATION.

Patrick was lying in bed in a hospital. He had been brought in a few days before after a severe fall from the top story of a building on which he had been working. With all his suffering he never lost his cheerful spirits, and livened up many of the other patients with his bright remarks and short stories. The doctor happened along, and asked him how he felt.

"Fairly well, doctor; this right leg of moine is a very ungrateful spalpeen consitherin' that it wuz only broke in wan place whin it moight have been smashed in a dozen."

"Well, oi wuzn't so sure before I fell, but I wuz thinkin' comin' down that it wuz near dinner hour, an' oi wuz convinced of that same as oi passed the second story, fer oi saw the people in there atin' dinner."

In the days of Emperor William the cadets in Berlin were obliged to adhere very closely to the rules of their respective academies. They were not allowed to go to entertainments at night without the escort of an elder relative. One evening, a cadet thinking he would escape observation, slipped into an entertainment, and taking a back seat quietly enjoyed the performance. He presently entered into conversation with his neighbor, a very pleasant gentleman. An academy officer passing spotted him, and the cadet, seeing that he had been observed, whispered to his new acquaintance, "Will you be my uncle?"

The gentleman, understanding the position of the cadet, smilingly agreed to be his uncle. Next morning the cadet was sternly called from the ranks.

"Hum! Well, your uncle last night happened to be the Crown Prince, and he wrote me this morning begging that you should be let off. Remember next time that your alliance with the royal family is a strict military one only."

THE REASON.

THE PIN-WHEEL.

I love to watch the pin-wheel go
A-spinning round so free,
To make its goldfish dive into
The starry night's black sea.

A ticket-seller in a theatre once owned a parrot that was quick at learning to repeat the phrases he heard. Thus, among other things, he was soon able to exclaim, "One at a time, gentlemen! one at a time, please!" for this sentence was constantly in the mouth of his master. The ticket man went to the country for a summer vacation and took the educated parrot along with him. One day the bird got out of his cage and disappeared. His owner searched all about for him, and finally toward evening found him despoiled of half his feathers sitting far out on the limb of a tree, while a dozen crows were pecking at him whenever they could get a chance. And all this time the poor parrot, with his back humped up, was edging away and constantly exclaiming, "One at a time, gentlemen! one at a time, please!"

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In Washington's will he mentions "my man William, calling himself William Lee," and gives him his freedom, along with the other slaves, and an annuity besides: "and this I give him as a testimony of my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful services during the Revolutionary war."

published weekly.	NEW YORK, TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1896.	five cents a copy.
vol. xvii.—no. 870.		two dollars a year.

INQUISITIVE BILLY AND HIS COUSIN GIBB.

BY RICHARD BARRY.

BY ADMIRAL BANCROFT GHERARDI, U. S. N.

BY BARNET PHILLIPS.

LEXINGTON ON FOURTH OF JULY.

BY EMMA J. GRAY.

BY MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL.

CHAPTER III.

[to be continued.]

BY MARGARET SUTTON BRISCOE.

I.

II.

BY KIRK MUNROE,

Author of "Snow-shoes and Sledges," "The Fur-Seal's Tooth," "The 'Mate' Series," "Flamingo Feather," etc.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

WHAT IS A HUMP-DURGIN?

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

ALARIC AND BONNY AGAIN TAKE TO FLIGHT.

[to be continued.]

NATIONAL I.S.A.A. GAMES, COLUMBIA OVAL, NEW YORK, JUNE 20, 1896.

NATIONAL I.S.A.A. GAMES, JUNE 20, 1896.

TABLE OF POINTS SCORED.

SICKNESS AMONG CHILDREN

ADVERTISEMENTS.

Arnold

Constable & Co

SUMMER

UNDERWEAR.

HOSIERY, GLOVES.

Broadway & 19th st.

NEW YORK.

Royal Baking Powder Co., New York.

Harper & Brothers, New York.

ADVERTISEMENTS.

Better

Most Bicycles

$50 Hartford

POPE MFG. CO.

THE ORIGINAL SINGLE-TUBES

THE HARTFORD RUBBER WORKS CO.

HARTFORD, CONN.

Postage Stamps, &c.

$117.50 WORTH OF STAMPS FREE

C. W. Grevning, Morristown, N. J.

APPROVAL SHEETS!

50 Per Cent. Discount.

A. VANCE PIERSON, Morristown, N. J.

HARPER'S

PERIODICALS

FOR SALE EVERYWHERE.

Bringing up a Humming-bird by Hand.

In Distant Australia.

The Music Rack.

Why He Sawed Wood.

SEPARATING GOLD FROM ALLOY.

SEL D'OR (DOUBLE SALTS OF GOLD).

No other soap is found in so many homes.

EARN A BICYCLE!

W. G. BAKER, Springfield, Mass.

JOSEPH GILLOT'S

STEEL PENS

Nos. 303, 404, 170, 604 E.F., 601 E.F.

THE MOST PERFECT OF PENS.

HARPER'S

BAZAR

10 CENTS A COPY - $4.00 A YEAR

Charles Carleton Coffin's

FASCINATING HISTORICAL WORKS

Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York.

A PISCATORIAL OBSERVATION.

THE REASON.

THE PIN-WHEEL.

FOOTNOTES: