The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Redemption of David Corson, by Charles Frederic Goss

THE REDEMPTION
OF DAVID CORSON

by

Charles Frederic Goss

1900

The Bowen-Merrill Company

To my friend
William Harvey Anderson

Contents

THE REDEMPTION OF

DAVID CORSON

CHAPTER I.

THIS OTHER EDEN

"This other Eden, demi-paradise, this fortress built by nature." —Richard II.

Hidden away in this worn and care-encumbered world, scarred with its frequent traces of a primeval curse, are spots so quiet and beautiful as to make the fall of man seem incredible, and awaken in the breast of the weary traveler who comes suddenly upon them, a vague and dear delusion that he has stumbled into Paradise.

Such an Eden existed in the extreme western part of Ohio in the spring of eighteen hundred and forty-nine. It was a valley surrounded by wooded hills and threaded by a noisy brook which hastily made its way, as if upon some errand of immense importance, down to the big Miami not many miles distant. A road cut through a vast and solemn forest led into the valley, and entering as if by a corridor and through the open portal of a temple, the traveler saw a white farm-house nestling beneath a mighty hackberry tree whose wide-reaching arms sheltered it from summer sun and winter wind. A deep, wide lawn of bluegrass lay in front, and a garden of flowers, fragrant and brilliant, on its southern side. Stretching away into the background was the farm newly carved out of the wilderness, but already in a high state of cultivation. All those influences which stir the deepest emotion of the heart were silently operating here—quiet, order, beauty, power, life. It affected one to enter it unprepared in much the same way, only with a greater variety and richness of emotion, as to push through dense brush and suddenly behold a mountain lake upon whose bosom there is not so much as a ripple, and in whose silver mirror surrounding forests, flying water-fowl and the bright disk of the sun are perfectly reflected.

In this lovely valley, at the close of a long, odorous, sun-drenched day in early May, the sacred silence was broken by a raucous blast from that most unmusical of instruments, a tin dinner horn. It was blown by a bare-legged country boy who seemed to take delight in this profanation. By his side, in the vine-clad porch of the white farm-house stood a woman who shaded her eyes with her hand as she looked toward a vague object in a distant meadow. She was no longer young, but had exchanged the exquisite beauty of youth for the finer and more impressive beauty of maturity. As the light of the setting sun fell full upon her face it seemed almost transparent, and even the unobserving must have perceived that some deep experience of the sadness of life had added to her character an indescribable charm.

"Thee will have to go and call him, Stephen, for I think he has fallen into another trance," the woman said, in a low voice in which there was not a trace of impatience, although the evening meal was waiting and the pressing work of the household had been long delayed.

The child threw down his dinner horn, whistled to his dog and started. Springing up from where he had been watching every expression of his master's face, the shaggy collie bounded around him as he moved across the lawn, while the woman watched them with a proud and happy smile. They had scarcely entered the long lane leading to the pasture, when a woodchuck shambled out of the corner of the fence and ran lumbering into his burrow. Rushing excitedly after him the child clapped his hands and shouted: "Dig him out! Dig him out, Shep!" Tearing up the ground with his paws and thrusting his head down into the subterranean chamber, the obedient collie yelped and whined. Then backing out and plunging in once more, he yelped and whined again. The hole was too deep or the time too short and the boy became discouraged. Moving reluctantly away he chidingly summoned his companion to follow him. The dog, humiliated by his failure, obeyed, and sheepishly licked his mouth with his long, red tongue.

By this time the sun's disk had sunk behind the hills, its trailing glory lingering above their summits while slowly in the sky faded continents, mountains and spires. The day had died regretfully upon a couch o'erhung with gorgeous canopies, and the ensanguined bier still seemed to tremble with his last sigh. Birds in the tops of trees and crickets beneath the sod were giving expression to the emotions of the sad heart of the great earth in melancholy evening songs. The odors of peach and apple blossoms, wafted by gentle breezes from distant orchards, made the valley fragrant as an oriental garden. The soothing influence of the approaching night subdued the effervescent spirits of the lad, and he began to walk softly, as do nuns in the aisles of dim cathedrals or deer in the pathways of the moonlit forest. These few moments between twilight and dark are pregnant with a mysterious holiness and it is doubtful if the worst of men could find the courage to commit a crime while they endure.

Unutterable and incomprehensible emotions were awakened in the soul of the boy by the stillness and beauty of the evening world. His senses were not yet dulled nor his feelings jaded. Through every avenue of his intelligence the mystery of the universe stole into his sensitive spirit. If a breeze blew across the meadow he turned his cheek to its kiss; if the odor of spearmint from the brookside was wafted around him he breathed it into his nostrils with delight. He saw the shadow of a crow flying across the field and stopped to look up and listen for the swish of her wings and her loud, hoarse caw as she made her way to the nesting grounds; then he gazed beyond her, into the fathomless depths of the blue sky, and his soul was stirred with an indescribable awe. Everything filled him with surprise, with wonder and with ecstasy,—the glowing sky above the western hills, the new pale crescent of the silver moon, the heavy-laden honey bees eagerly hastening home, the long shadows lying across his path, the trees with branches swaying in the evening breeze, the cows with bursting udders lowing at the bars.

But it was not so much the objects themselves as the spirit pervading them, which stirred the depths of the child's mind. The little pantheist saw God everywhere. We bestow the gift of language upon a child, but the feelings which that language serves only to interpret and express exist and glow within him even if he be dumb. And this gift of language is often of questionable value, and had been so with him. Things he had heard said about God often made the boy hate Him. All that he felt, filled him with love. To him the valley was heaven, and through it invisibly but unmistakably God walked, morning, noon and evening.

To the child sauntering dreamily and wistfully along, the object dimly seen from the farm-house door began gradually to dissolve itself into a group of living beings. Two horses were attached to a plow; one standing in the lush grass of the meadow, and the other in a deep furrow traced across its surface. The first, an old gray mare, was breathing heavily, her sides expanding and contracting like a bellows. Her wide nostrils opened and closed with spasmodic motions. Her eyes were shut and she seemed to be asleep. The other, a young and slender filly doing this season the first real service of her life, pawed the ground restlessly, snorted, shook her mane, rattled the harness chains and looked angrily over her shoulder at the driver. The plowshare was buried deep in the rich, alluvial soil, and a ribbon of earth rolled from its blade like a petrified sea billow, crested with a cluster of daisies white as the foam of a wave.

Between the handles of the plow and leaning on the crossbar, his back to the horses, stood a young Quaker. His broad-brimmed hat, set carelessly on the back of his head, disclosed a wide, high forehead; his flannel shirt, open at the throat, exposed a strong, columnar neck, and a deep, broad chest; his sunburned and muscular arms were folded across his breast; figure and posture revealed the perfect concord of body and soul with the beauty of the world; his great blue eyes were fixed upon the notch in the hills where the sun had just disappeared; he gazed without seeing and felt without thinking.

The boy approached this statuesque figure with a stealthy tread, and plucking a long spear of grass tickled the bronzed neck. The hand of the plowman moved automatically upward as if to brush away a fly, and at this unconscious action the child, seized by a convulsion of laughter and fearing lest it explode, stuffed his fists into his mouth. In the opinion of this irreverent young skeptic his Uncle Dave was in a "tantrum" instead of a "trance," and he thought such a disease demanded heroic treatment.

For several years this Quaker youth had been the subject of remarkable emotional experiences, in explanation of which the rude wits of the village declared that he had been moon-struck; the young girls who adored his beauty thought he was in love, and the venerable fathers and mothers of this religious community believed that in him the scriptural prophecy, "Your young men shall see visions," had been literally fulfilled. David Corson himself accepted the last explanation with unquestioning faith. He no more doubted the existence of a spiritual than of a material universe. He did not even conceive of their having well-defined boundaries, but seemed to himself to pass from one to the other as easily as across the lines of adjoining farms. In this respect he resembled many a normal youth, except that this impression had lingered with him a little longer than was usual; for faith is always instinctive, while skepticism is the result of experience and reflection. Having as yet only wandered around the edges of the sacred groves of wisdom where these pitiless teachers break the sweet shackles of their pupils, he still thought the thoughts of childhood and instinctively obeyed the injunction of Emerson, to "reverence the dreams of our youth," and the admonition of Richter, that "when we cease to do so, then dies the man in us." Whatever might have been the real nature of these emotional experiences, no one doubted that they possessed a genuine reality of some kind or other, for it was a matter of history in this little community that David Corson had often exercised prophetic, mesmeric and therapeutic powers.

The life of this young man had been pure and uneventful. Existence in this frontier region, once full of the tragedy of Indian warfare, had been gradually softened by peace and religion. The passions slowly kindling in the struggle over slavery had not yet burst into flame, and this particular valley was even more quiet than others because it had been settled by a colony of Quakers. Into it the rude noises of the great outside world floated only in softened echoes, and what knowledge young Corson had acquired of that vague and shadowy realm had come mainly through traveling preachers, and this, because of their simplicity and unworldliness, was not unlike hearing the crash of arms through silken portieres or seeing the flash of lightning through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral. In such a sequestered region books and papers were scarce, and he had access only to a few volumes written by quietists and mystics, and to that great mine of sacred literature, the Holy Bible. The seeds of knowledge sown by these books in the rich soil of this young heart were fertilized by the society of noble men, virtuous women, and natural surroundings of exquisite beauty.

But however limited his knowledge of men and affairs, the young mystic had acquired an extraordinary familiarity with the operations of the divine life which animates the universe. He seemed to have found the pass-key to nature's mysteries, and to have acquired a language by which he could communicate with all her creatures. He knew where the rabbits burrowed, where the partridges nested, and where the wild bees stored their honey. He could foretell storms by a thousand signs, possessed the homing instinct of the pigeons, knew where the first violets were to be found, and where the last golden-rod would bloom. The squirrels crept down the trunks of trees to nibble the crumbs which he scattered for them. He could fold up his hands like a cup and at his whistle birds would drop into them as into a nest. His was a beautiful soul, and what Novalis said of Spinoza might have been said of him, "he was a God-intoxicated man." He was in that blissful period of existence when the interpretations of life imparted to him by his elders solved the few simple problems of thought and action pressed upon him by his environment. He had never seriously questioned any of the ideas received from his instructors. He was often conscious of the infinite mystery lying beyond his ken, but never of those frightful inconsistencies and contradictions in nature and life by which the soul is sooner or later paralyzed or at least bewildered.

And so his outlook upon the universe was serene and untroubled. As he stood there in the deepening twilight he differed from the child who had approached him in this, that while the boy reveled in the beauty around him because he did not try to comprehend it, the youth was intoxicated by the belief that he possessed the clue to all these mysteries, and had a working theory of all the phenomena in the natural and spiritual world in which he moved. To such mystical natures this confidence is unavoidable anywhere through the period of the pride of adolescence; but it was heightened in this case by the simplicity of life's problems in this narrow valley, and in the provincial little village which was the metropolis of this sparsely settled region. To him "the cackle of that bourg was the murmur of the world," and his theories of a life lacking the complexities of larger aggregations of men seemed adequate, because he had never seen them thoroughly tested, to meet every emergency arising for reflection or endeavor. In this mental attitude of serene and undisturbed confidence that he knew the real meaning of existence, and was in constant contact with the divine mind through knowledge or through vision, every avenue of his spirit was open to the influences of nature. Through all that gorgeous day of May he had been drawing these influences into his being as the vegetation drew in light and moisture, until his soul was drenched through and through, and at that perfect hour of dusk, when the flowers and grasses exhaled the gifts they had received from heaven and earth in a richer, finer perfume like an evening oblation, the young dreamer was also rendering back those gifts bestowed by heaven in an incense of purest thought and aspiration. It was one of those hours that come occasionally in that sublime period of unshattered ideals and unsullied faith, for which Pharaoh and Cæsar would have exchanged their thrones, Croesus and Lucullus bartered their wealth, Solomon and Aristotle forgotten their learning.

Every imaginative youth who has been reared in pure surroundings experiences over again in these rare and radiant hours all the bliss that Adam knew in Eden. To his joyous, eager spirit, the world appears a new creation fresh from the hand of God. He hears its author walking in the garden at eventide, and murmuring: "Behold it is very good." A single element of disquietude, a solitary, vague unrest disturbs him. He awaits his Eve with longing, but has no dread of the serpent.

At sight of this young man the most superficial observer would have paused to take a second look; an artist would have instinctively seized his pencil or his brush; a scientist would have paused to inquire what mysterious influences could have produced so finely proportioned a nature; a philosopher to wonder what would become of him in some sudden and powerful temptation.

None of these reflections disturbed the mind of the barefooted boy. Having suppressed his laughter, he tickled the sunburnt neck again. Once more the hand rose automatically, and once more the boy was almost strangled with delight. The dreamer was hard to awaken, but his tormentor had not yet exhausted his resources. No genuine boy is ever without that fundamental necessity of childhood, a pin, and finding one somewhere about his clothing, he thrust it into the leg of the plowman. The sudden sting brought the soaring saint from heaven to earth. In an instant the mystic was a man, and a strong one, too. He seized the unsanctified young reprobate with one hand and hoisted him at arm's length above his head.

"Oh, Uncle Dave, I'll never do it again! Never! Never! Let me down."

Still holding him aloft as a hunter would hold a falcon, the reincarnated "spirit" laughed long, loud and merrily, the echoes of his laughter ringing up the valley like a peal from a chime of bells. The child's fear was needless, for the heart and hands that dealt with him were as gentle as a woman's. The youth, resembling some old Norse god as he stood there in the gathering gloom, lowered the child slowly, and printing a kiss on his cheek, said:

"Thee little pest, thee has no reverence! Thee should never disturb a child at his play, a bird on his nest nor a man at his prayers."

"But thee was not praying, Uncle Dave," the boy replied. "Thee was only in another of thy tantrums. The supper has grown cold, the horses are tired and Shep and I have walked a mile to call thee. Grandmother said thee had a trance. Tell me what thee has seen in thy visions, Uncle Dave?"

"God and His angels," said the young mystic softly, falling again into the mood from which he had been so rudely awakened.

"Angels!" scoffed the young materialist. "If thee was thinking of any angel at all, I will bet thee it was Dorothy Fraser."

"Tush, child, do not be silly," replied the convicted culprit. For it was easier than he would care to admit to mingle visions of beauty with those of holiness.

"I am not silly. Thee would not dare say thee was not thinking of her. She thinks of thee."

"How does thee know?"

"Because she gives me bread and jam if I so much as mention thy name."

This did not offend the young plowman, to judge by the expression of his face; but he said nothing, and, stooping down, loosened the chains of the whiffletree and turned the faces of the tired horses homeward. The cavalcade moved on in silence for a few moments, but nothing can repress the chatter of a boy, and presently he began again.

"Uncle Dave, was it really up this very valley that Mad Anthony Wayne marched with his brave soldiers?"

"This very valley."

"I wish I could have been with him."

"It is an evil wish. Thee is a child of peace. Thy father and thy father's fathers have denied the right of men to war. Thee ought to be like them, and love the things that make for peace."

"Well, if I can not wish for war, I will wish that a runaway slave would dash up this valley with a pack of bloodhounds at his heels. Oh, Uncle Dave, tell me that story about thy hiding a negro in the haystack, and choking the bloodhounds with thine own hands."

"I have told thee a hundred times."

"But I want to hear it again."

"Use thy memory and thy imagination."

"Oh, no, please tell me. I like to hear some one tell something."

"Thee does? Then listen to the whip-poor-will, the cricket or the brook."

"I hear them, but I do not know what they say. Tell me."

"Tell thee! No one can tell thee, child, if thee can not understand for thyself. The message differs for the hearers, and the difference is in the ear and not the sound."

They both paused for a moment, and listened to those soothing lullabies with which nature sings the world to sleep. So powerful was the tide that floated the mystic out on the ocean of dreams, he would have drifted away again if the child had not suddenly recalled him.

"I can not make out what they say," he cried, "and anyhow there is no time to try. Come, let us go. Everybody is waiting for us."

"Thee is right," answered his uncle. "Go and let down the bars and we will hurry home."

The child, bounding forward, did as he was told, and the tired procession entered the barnyard. The plowman fed his horses, and stopped to listen for a moment to their deep-drawn sighs of contentment, and to the musical grinding of the oats in their teeth. His imaginative mind read his own thoughts into everything, and he believed that he could distinguish in these inarticulate sounds the words, "Good-night. Good-night."

"Good-night," he said, and stroking their great flanks with his kind hand, left them to their well-earned repose. On his way to the house he stopped to bathe his face in the waters of a spring brook that ran across the yard, and then entered the kitchen where supper was spread.

"Thee is late," said the woman who had watched and waited, her fine face radiant with a smile of love and welcome.

"Forgive me, mother," he replied. "I have had another vision."

"I thought as much. Thee must remember what thee has seen, my son," she said, "for all that thee beholds with the outer eye shall pass away, while what thee sees with the inner eye abides forever. And had thee a message, too?"

"It was delivered to me that on the holy Sabbath day I should go to the camp in Baxter's clearing and preach to the lumbermen."

"Then thee must go, my son."

"I will," he answered, taking her hand affectionately, but with Quaker restraint, and leading her to the table.

The family, consisting of the mother, an adopted daughter Dorothea, the daughter's husband Jacob and son Stephen, sat down to a simple but bountiful supper, during which and late into the evening the young mystic pondered the vision which he believed himself to have seen, and the message which he believed himself to have heard. In his musings there was not a tremor or a doubt; he would have as soon questioned the reality of the old farm-house and the faces of the family gathered about the table. Of the susceptibility of the nerves to morbid activity, or the powers of the overdriven brain to objectify its concepts, he had never even dreamed. He was a credulous and unsophisticated youth, dwelling in a realm of imagination rather than in a world of reality and law. He had much to learn. His education was about to begin, and to begin as does all true and effective education, in a spiritual temptation. The Ghebers say that when their great prophet Ahriman was thrown into the fire by the order of Nimrod, the flames into which he fell turned into a bed of roses, upon which he peacefully reclined. This innocent Quaker youth had been reclining upon a bed of roses which now began to turn into a couch of flames.

CHAPTER II.

AND SATAN CAME ALSO

"It is the little rift within the lute
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all."
—Tennyson.

At the moment when Stephen was sounding the horn to summon the young mystic to his supper, a promiscuous crowd of loafers with chairs tilted against the wall of the village tavern received a shock.

They heard the tinkle of bells in the distance, and looking in the direction of this unusual sound, saw a team of splendid coal-black horses dash round a corner and whirl a strange vehicle to the door of the inn.

There were two extraordinary figures on the front seat of the wagon. The driver was a sturdy, thick-set man whose remarkable personal appearance was fixed instantly and ineradicably in the mind of the beholder by an enormous moustache whose shape, size and color suggested a crow with outstretched wings. As if to emphasize the ferocious aspect lent him by this hairy canopy which completely concealed his mouth, Nature had duplicated it in miniature by brows meeting above his nose and spreading themselves, plume-like, over a pair of eyes which gleamed so brightly that they could be felt, altho' they were so deep-set that they could scarcely be seen.

This fierce and buccaneerish person summoned the dozing hostler in a coarse, imperative voice, flung him the reins, sprang from his seat, and assisted his companion to alight. She gave him her hand with an air of utter indifference, bestowed upon him neither smile nor thanks, and dropped to the ground with a light flutter like a bird. Turning instantly toward the tavern, she ascended the steps of the porch under a fusillade of glances of astonishment and admiration. Young and beautiful, dressed in a picturesque and brilliant Spanish costume, she carried herself with the ease and dignity of a princess, and looked straight past, or rather through the staring crowd, fastened like inverted brackets to the tavern wall. Her great, dreamy eyes did not seem to note them.

When she and her companion had entered the hall and closed the door behind them, every tilted chair came down to the floor with a bang, and many voices exclaimed in concert, "Who the devil is she?" Curiosity was satisfied at eight o'clock in the evening, for at that hour Doctor Paracelsus Aesculapius, as he fantastically called himself, opened the doors of his traveling apothecary shop and exposed his "universal panacea" for sale, while at the same time, "Pepeeta, the Queen of Fortune Tellers," entered her booth and spread out upon a table the paraphernalia by which she undertook to discover the secrets of the future.

When the evening's work was ended, Pepeeta at once retired; but the doctor entered the bar-room, followed by a curious and admiring crowd. He was in a happy and expansive frame of mind, for he had done a "land office" business in this frontier village which he was now for the first time visiting.

"Have a drink, b-b-boys?" he asked, looking over the crowd with an air of superiority and waving his hand with an inclusive gesture. The motley throng of loafers sidled up to the bar with a deprecatory and automatic movement. They took their glasses, clinked them, nodded to their entertainer, muttered incoherent toasts and drank his health. The delighted landlord, feeling it incumbent upon him to break the silence, offered the friendly observation: "S-s-see you s-s-stutter. S-s-stutter a little m-m-my own self."

"Shake!" responded the doctor, who was in too complacent a mood to take offence, and the worthies grasped hands.

"Don't know any w-w-way to s-s-stop it, do you?" asked the landlord.

"No, I d-d-don't; t-t-tried everything. Even my 'universal p-p-panacea' won't do it, and what that can't do can't be d-d-done. Incurable d-d-disease. Get along all right when I go slow like this; but when I open the throttle, get all b-b-balled up. Bad thing for my business. Give any man a thousand d-d-dollars that'll cure me," the quack replied, slapping his trousers pocket as if there were millions in it.

"Co-co-couldn't go q-q-quite as high as that; but wouldn't mind a hu-hu-hundred," responded the landlord cordially.

"Ever hear the story about the landlord's troubles in the Mexican war?" asked one of the by-standers turning to the quack.

"Tell it," he responded laconically.

Several members of the group looked at each other and exchanged significant winks as the narrator began his tale.

"They made him sergeant of a company, but had to reduce him to the ranks, because when he was drilling the boys one day they all marched into the river and got drowned before he could say h-h-halt."

The doctor laughed and the others joined him out of courtesy, for the story was worn threadbare in the bar-room.

"Tell about his going on picket duty," suggested some one.

"Captain ordered him out on the line," said the first speaker, "and he refused. 'T-t-tain't no use,' says he.

"'Why not?' says the captain.

"'C-c-cause,' says he, 'if some d-d-dirty Mexican g-g-greaser should c-c-come along, he'd run me through the g-g-gizzard before I could ask him for the c-c-countersign.'"

More tipsy laughter followed.

"Tell you what it is, b-b-boys," said the quack, growing communicative under the influence of the liquor and the fellowship, "if it wasn't for this b-b-blankety-blanketed impediment in my s-s-speech, I wouldn't need to work more'n about another y-y-year!"

"How's that?" asked someone in the crowd.

"C-c-cause if I could talk as well as I c-c-can think, I could make a fortune 'side of which old John Jacob Astor's would look like a p-p-penny savings b-b-bank!"

"You could?"

"You bet your sweet life I c-c-could. And I'm just keeping my eyes open for some young f-f-fellow to help me. For 'f I can find a man that can do the t-talking (I mean real talk, you know; talk a crowd blind as b-b-bats), I've got something better'n a California g-g-gold mine."

"Better get Dave Corson," said the village wag from the rear of the crowd, and up went a wild shout of laughter.

"Who's D-D-Dave Corson?" asked the doctor.

"Quaker preacher. Young feller 'bout twenty years old."

"Can he t-t-talk?"

"Talk! He kin talk a mule into a trottin' hoss in less'n three minutes."

"He's my man!" exclaimed the doctor, at which the crowd laughed again.

"What the d-d-deuce are you laughing at?" he asked, turning upon them savagely, his loud voice and threatening manner frightening those who stood nearest, so that they instinctively stepped back a pace or two.

"No offence, Doc," said one of them; "but you couldn't get him."

"Couldn't get him! Why couldn't I g-g-get him?"

"He's pious."

"Pious! What do I care?"

"Well, these here pious Quakers are stiff in their notions. But you kin jedge fer yourself 'bout his talkin', fer there's goin' ter be an appinted Quaker meetin' to-morrow night, and he'll speak. You kin go an' listen, if you want to."

"I'll be there, boys, and d-d-don't you forget it. I'll hook him! Never saw anything I couldn't buy if I had a little of the p-p-proper stuff about me. Drink to my l-l-luck, boys, and watch me!"

The landlord filled their glasses once more, and low gurglings, smothered swallows, and loud smacking of lips filled the interim of interrupted conversation.

"I say, Doc, that daughter of yours knows her biz when it comes to telling fortunes," ventured a young dandy, whose head had been turned by Pepeeta's beauty.

"D-d-daughter!" snapped the quack, turning sharply upon him; "she's not my daughter, she's my wife!"

"Wife! Gosh! You don't say?" exclaimed the crestfallen dandy.

"Yes, wife! And I'll j-j-just warn any of you young f-f-fellers that if I catch you trying to p-p-plow with my heifer, you'll be food for buzzards before sun-up!"

He swept his eyes savagely round the circle as he spoke, and the subject dropped.

The conversation turned into other channels, and flowed in a maudlin, sluggish manner far into the night. Every member of the bibulous party was as happy as he knew how to be. The landlord's till was full of money, the loafers were full of liquor, and the doctor's heart was full of vanity and trust in himself.

CHAPTER III.

THE EGYPTIANS

"Steal! to be sure they may; and egad, serve your best thoughts as gypsies do stolen children,—disfigure them to make them pass for their own."

—Sheridan.

In order to comprehend the relationship of this strangely mated pair, we must go back five or six years to a certain day when this same Doctor Aesculapius rode slowly down the main street of a small city in Western Pennsylvania, and then out along a rugged country highway. A couple of miles brought him to the camp of a band of gypsies.

A thin column of smoke ascending from a fire which seemed almost too lazy to burn, curled slowly into the air.

Around this campfire was a picturesque group of persons, all of whom, with a single exception, vanished like a covey of quail at the approach of the stranger. The man who stood his ground was a truly sinister being. He was tall, thin and angular; his clothing was scant and ragged, his face bronzed with exposure to the sun. A thin moustache of straggling hairs served rather to exaggerate than to conceal the vicious expression of a hare-lipped mouth. He stood with his elbow in the palm of one hand and his chin in the other, while around his legs a pack of wolf-like dogs crawled and growled as the traveler drew near. Throwing himself lightly to the ground the intruder kicked the curs who sprang at him, and as the terrified pack went howling into the door of the tent, said cheerily.

"Good-morning, Baltasar."

The gypsy acknowledged his salutation with a frown.

"I wish to sell this horse," the traveler added, without appearing to notice his cold reception.

The gypsy swept his eye over the animal and shook his head.

"If you will not buy, perhaps you will trade," the traveler said.

"Come," was the laconic response, and so saying, the gypsy turned towards the forest which lay just beyond the camp. The "doctor" obeyed, and the dogs sneaked after him, still growling, but keeping a respectful distance. A moment later he found himself in a sequestered spot where there was an improvised stable; and a dozen or more horses glancing up from their feed whinnied a welcome.

"Look zem over," said the gypsy, again putting his elbow in his left hand and his chin in his right—a posture into which he always fell when in repose.

The quack, moving among the animals with an easy, familiarity, glanced them over quickly but carefully, and shook his head.

"What!" exclaimed the gypsy with well feigned surprise; "ze señor doez not zee ze horse he wanz?"

"Horses!" exclaimed the quack; "these are not horses. These are boneyards. Every one of them is as much worse than mine as mine is than the black stallion you stole in Pittsburg on the twenty-first day of last October."

"Worze zan yourz! It eez impozzeeble!" answered the gypsy, as if he had not heard the accusation. "Ziz horze ov yourz eez what you call a crow-zcare! Zhe eez two hunner year ol'. Her teeth are fell oud. Zhe haz ze zpavins. Zhe haz ze ringa bonze. But, señor," growing suddenly respectful, and spreading out his hands in open and persuasive gestures, "ere eez a horze zat eez a horze. Ee knowz more zan a man! Ee gan work een ze arnez, ee gan work een ze zaddle; ee gan drot; ee can gallop; ee gan bead ze winz!"

The gypsy had played his part well and concealed with consummate art whatever surprise he might have felt at the charge of theft. His attitude was free, his look was bold and his manner full of confidence.

The demeanor of the quack suddenly altered. From that of an easy nonchalance, it turned to savage determination.

"Baltasar," he said, his face white and hard; "let us stop our acting. Where is that stallion?"

"Whad ztallion?" asked the imperturbable gypsy, with an expression of child-like innocence.

"I will not even take time to tell you, but if you do not take me to him this instant there will be a dead gypsy in these woods," said the quack fiercely.

"Ze zdranger jesz!" the gypsy answered blandly, showing his teeth and spreading out the palms of his hands.

The quack reached into his bosom, drew forth a pistol, pointed it at the right eye of the gypsy, and said: "Look into the mouth of that and tell me whether you see a bullet lying in its throat!"

"I zink zat ze señor an' heez piztol are boz lying in zeir zroats," he answered with easy irony.

"Good! But I am not here to match wits with you. I want that horse, and lie or no lie, I will have it. Take me to it, or I swear I will blow out your brains as sure as they are made of bacon and baby flesh!"

The gypsy vouchsafed no reply, but turned on his heel and led the way into the forest.

After a walk of a hundred yards or more they came to a booth of boughs, through the loose sides of which could be seen a black stallion.

"Lead him out," said the doctor imperatively; and the gypsy obeyed.

The magnificent animal came forth snorting, pawing the ground and tossing his head in the air.

The eye of the quack kindled, and after regarding the noble creature for a moment in silent admiration he turned to the gypsy and said, "Baltasar, do not misunderstand me, I am neither an officer of the law nor in any other way a minister of justice. I have as few scruples as you as to how I get a horse; but we differ from each other in this, that if you were in my place you would take the horse without giving an equivalent. Now I am a man of mercy, and if you will ask a fair price you shall have it. But mark me! Do not overreach yourself and kill the goose that is about to lay the golden egg."

"Wat muz be, muz be," the gypsy answered, shrugging his shoulders as if in the presence of an inexorable fate, and added: "Ze brice iz zwo hunner and viftee dollars, wiz ze mare drown een."

Putting his pistol back into his pocket with an air of triumph, the doctor said: "There seems to be persuasive power in cold lead. Stretch forth your palm and I will cross it for you."

The gypsy did so, and into that tiger-like paw he counted the golden coin; at the musical clink of each piece the eye of the gypsy brightened, and when he closed his hand upon them and thrust them into his pocket his hair-lip curled with a cynical smile.

The stranger took the bridle and saddle from his mare, placed them on the stallion and mounted.

As they moved forward through the silent forest the gypsy sang softly to himself:

"The Romany chal to his horse did cry
As he placed the bit in his jaw,
Kosko gry, Romany gry,
Muk, man, kuster, tute knaw."

He was still humming this weird tune when they emerged into the open fields, and there the traveler experienced a surprise.

A little rivulet lay across their path, and up from the margin of it where she had been gathering water cresses there sprang a young girl, who cast a startled glance at him, then bounded swiftly toward the tent and vanished through the opening.

Now it happened that this keen admirer of horses was equally susceptible to the charms of female beauty, and the loveliness of this young girl made his blood tingle. In her hand she carried a bunch of cresses still dripping with the water of the brook. A black bodice was drawn close to a figure which was just unfolding into womanhood. The color of this garment formed a striking contrast to a scarlet skirt which fell only a little below her knees. On her feet were low-cut shoes, fastened with rude silver buckles. A red kerchief had become untied and let loose a wave of black hair, which fell over her half bare shoulders. Her face was oval, her complexion olive, her eyes large, eager and lustrous.

All this the man who admired women even more than he admired horses, saw in the single instant before the girl dashed toward the tent and disappeared. So swift an apparition would have bewildered rather than illumined the mind of an ordinary man. But the quack was not an ordinary man. He was endowed with a certain rude power of divination which enabled him to see in a single instant, by swift intuition, more than the average man discovers by an hour of reasoning. By this natural clairvoyance he saw at a glance that this face of exquisite delicacy could no more have been coined in a gypsy camp than a fine cameo could be cut in an Indian wigwam. He knew that all gypsies were thieves, and that these were Spanish gypsies. What was more natural than that he should conclude with inevitable logic that this child had been stolen from people of good if not of noble blood!

He who had coveted the horse with desire, hungered for the maiden with passion; and with him, to feel an appetite, was to rush toward its gratification, as fire rushes upon tow.

"Baltasar!" he said.

The gypsy turned.

"You are a girl-thief as well as a horse-thief."

If the gypsy had felt astonished before, he was now terrified in the presence of a man who seemed to read his inmost thoughts; and for the first time in his life acknowledged to himself that he had met his master in cunning.

Bewildered as he was by this new charge, he still remembered that if speech was silver, silence was golden, and answered not a word.

"Baltasar," continued the strange man on horseback, rightly judging from the gypsy's confusion that he had hit the mark and determining to take another chance shot; "you stole this girl from the family of a Spanish nobleman. I am the representative of this family and have followed your trail for years. You thought I had come to get the horse. You were mistaken; it was the girl!"

"Perdita!" exclaimed the gypsy, taken completely off his guard.

"Lost indeed," responded the quack, scarcely able to conceal his pride in his own astuteness. And then he added slowly: "She must be a burden to you, Baltasar. You evidently never have been able or never have dared to take her back and claim the ransom which you expected. I will pay you for her and take her from your hands. It is the child I want and not vengeance."

"Ze Caballero muz be a Duquende (spirit)," gasped the gypsy.

"At any rate I want the child. You were reasonable about the horse. Be reasonable about her, and all will be well."

"Ze Caballero muz be made of gol'."

The horseman drew a silver coin from his pocket and flipped it into the waters of the brook.

The gypsy's face gleamed with avarice and springing into the water he began to scrape among the stones where it had fallen.

The stranger watched him for awhile with an expression of mingled amusement and contempt, and finally said: "Baltasar, I am in haste. You can search for that trifle after I am gone. Let us finish our business. What will you take for the girl?"

Still standing in the water, which he seemed reluctant to leave, he shrugged his shoulders and replied: "We muz azk Chicarona. Zhe eez my vife."

"And master?" asked the quack, smiling sardonically.

The gypsy did not answer, but, stepping from the brook and looking backward, reluctantly led the way to the tent.

"Chicarona! Chicarona!" he cried as they approached it.

The flap of the tent was thrown suddenly backward, and three figures emerged—a tall and stately woman, a little elfish child; and an old hag, wrinkled, toothless and bent with the weight of unrecorded years. The woman was the mother of the little child and the daughter of the old hag.

"Chicarona," said the gypsy, "ze Gacho az byed ze ztallion for zwo hunner an' viftee dollars, an' now he wanz to buy Pepeeta."

"Wad vor?" she asked.

"Berhabs he zinkz zhe eez a prinzez, I dunno," he answered, digging the toe of his bare foot nervously into the sand.

"Zen dell 'im zat he zhold not look vor ztrawberries in ze zea, nor red herring in ze wood," she said with a look of scorn.

The eyes of the stranger and the gypsy met. They confronted each other like two savage beasts who have met on a narrow path and are about to fight for its possession. It was not an unequal match. The man's eyes regarded the woman with a proud and masterful determination. The woman's seemed to burn their way into the inmost secrets of the man's soul.

Chicarona was a remarkable character. In her majestic personality, the virtues and the vices of the Spanish Gypsy fortune-teller were incarnate. The vices were legion; the virtues were two—the love of kindred, and physical chastity—the chastity of the soul itself being unknown.

"We are wasting time gazing at each other like two sheep in a pasture. Will you sell the girl?" the horseman asked, impatiently.

"I will nod!" she answered, with proud defiance.

"Then I will take her by force!"

"Ah! What could nod ze monkey do, if he were alzo ze lion!"

"I am the lion, and therefore I must have this lamb!"

"Muz? Say muz to ze clouds; to ze winz; to ze lightningz; but not to Chicarona!"

"If you do not agree to accept a fair offer for this girl, you will be in jail for kidnapping her in less than one hour!"

At this threat, the brilliant black eyes emitted a shower of angry sparks, and she exclaimed in derision, "Ze Buzno will dake us do brizon, ha! ha! ha!"

"Ze Buzno will dake us do brizon, hee! hee! hee!" giggled the little impish child who tugged at her skirts.

The old woman pressed forward and mumbled, "'Ol' oud your 'an', my pretty fellow. Crozz ze ol' gypsy's palm, and zhe will dell your fortune."

With every new refusal, the resolute stranger became still more determined. "Pearls are not to be had without a plunge," he murmured to himself, and dismounted.

Throwing the bridle of his horse over the limb of a tree, he approached the woman with a threatening gesture.

As he did so, the three female figures began to revolve around him in a circle, pointing their fingers at him and hissing like vipers. As the old woman passed before his face she threw a handful of snuff in his eyes—an act which has been, from time immemorial, the female gypsy's last resort.

Had he been less agile than he was, it would have proved a finishing stroke, but there are some animals that can never be caught asleep, or even napping, and he was one. He winked and dodged, and, quicker than a flash, brought the old crone a sharp cut across her knuckles with his riding whip.

As he did so, Baltasar sprang at his throat, but he once more drew his pistol and leveled it at the gypsy's head. His patience had been exhausted.

"Fool!" he cried, "Bring this woman to reason. This is a wild country, and a family of gypsies would be missed as little as a litter of blind puppies! Bring her to reason, I say, or I will murder every one of you!"

Once more shrugging those expressive shoulders which seemed to have a language of their own, the gypsy said "Chicarona, you do not luf ze leedle pindarri. Zell 'er to ze Buzno. Ee eez made of gol'."

As Baltasar uttered these words, he approached his wife and whispered something in her ear at which she started. Turning with a sudden motion to the stranger, she fixed her piercing eyes upon him and exclaimed, "You zay you know ze parenz of zis chil'?"

"I do."

"You lie!"

"How, then, did I know that you had stolen her?"

"You guezz zat! Any vool gan guezz zat! I zdole 'er, but who I zdole 'er vrom, you do not know any more zan you know why ze frogs zdop zinging when ze light zhines."

"Ah! You did steal her, did you? Why do gypsies steal children when they have so many of their own, and it is so easy to raise more, Chicarona?"

"Azk ze tiger why it zpringz, or ze lightning why it zdrikes! I will alzo azk ze Caballero a queztion. What doez he wan' wiz zis leedle gurrl?"

"To be a father to her!" he answered, with a sly wink at Baltasar.

"Alzo' I am dressed in wool, I am no sheep! Tell me," she cried, stamping her foot.

"Why should I tell secrets to one who can read the future?" he asked banteringly.

Chicarona's mood was changing. It was evident from her looks, either that she was defeated in the contest by this wily and resistless combatant or that she had succumbed to the temptation of his money.

"How much will you gif vor zis chil'?" she asked.

"One hundred dollars," he replied.

"One hunner dollars! You paid more zan twize as much vor ze horze! Eez nod a woman worth more zan a horze?"

"She will be, when she is a woman. She is a child now."

"Let me zee ze color of your money!"

He drew a leather wallet from his pocket and held it tantalizingly before her eyes.

Its influence was decisive upon her avaricious soul, and she clutched at it wildly.

"Put it into my han'!" she cried.

"Put Pepeeta into mine," he said.

"Pepeeta! Pepeeta!" she called.

"Pepeeta! Pepeeta!" shrilled the old crone.

Out of the door of the tent she came, her eyes fixed upon the ground, and her fingers picking nervously at the tinsel strings which fastened her bodice.

"Gif me ze money and take her," said Chicarona.

He counted out the gold, and then approached the child. For the first time in his life he experienced an emotion of reverence. There was something about her beauty, her helplessness and his responsibility that made a new appeal to his heart.

Yielding to the gentle pressure of his hand, she permitted herself to be led away. Not a goodbye was said. Chicarona's feeling toward her had been fast developing from jealousy into hatred as the child's beauty began to increase and attract attention. The others loved her, but dared not show it. Not a sign of regret was exhibited, except by the old crone, who approached her, gave her a stealthy caress, and secretly placed a crumpled parchment in her hand.

The Doctor lifted the child upon the horse's back and climbed into the saddle. As they turned into the highway, he heard Chicarona say, "Bring me my pajunda, Baltasar, and I will sing a grachalpa."

The beautiful child trembled, for the words were those of hatred and triumph. She trembled, but she also wept. She was parting from those whose lives were base and cruel; but they were the only human beings that she knew. She was leaving a wagon and a tent, but it was the only home that she could remember. In a vague and childish way, she felt herself to be the sport of mysterious powers, a little shuttlecock between the battledores of Fortune. Whatever her destiny was to be, there was no use in struggling, and so she sobbed softly and yielded to the inevitable. Her little hands were folded across her heart in an instinctive attitude of submission. Folded hands are not always resigned hands; but Pepeeta's were. She submitted thus quietly not because she was weak, but because she was strong, not because she was contemptible, but because she was noble. In proportion to the majesty of things, is the completeness of their obedience to the powers that are above them. Gravitation is obeyed less quietly by a grain of dust than by the rivers and planets. Those half-suppressed sobs and hardly restrained sighs would have softened a harder heart than that of this young man of thirty years. He was rude and unscrupulous, but he was not unkind. His breast was the abiding place of all other passions and it was not strange that the gentlest of all should reside within it, nor that it should have been so quickly aroused at the sight of such loveliness and such helplessness.

To have a fellow-being completely in our power makes us either utterly cruel or utterly kind, and all that was gentle in that great rough nature went out in a rush of tenderness toward the little creature who thus suddenly became absolutely dependent upon his compassion. After they had ridden a little way, he began in his rough fashion to try to comfort her.

"Don't cry, Pepeeta! You ought to be thankful that you have got out of the clutches of those villains. You could not have been worse off, and you may be a great deal better! They were not always kind to you, were they? I shouldn't wonder if they beat you sometimes! But you will never be beaten any more. You shall have a nice little pony, and a cart, and flowers, and pretty clothes, and everything that little girls like. I don't know what they are, but whatever they are you shall have them. So don't cry any more! What a pretty name Pepeeta is! It sounds like music when I say it. I have got the toughest name in the world myself. It's a regular jaw-breaker—Doctor Paracelsus Aesculapius! What do you think of that, Pepeeta! But then you need not call me by the whole of it! You can just call me Doctor, for short. Now, look at me just once, and give me a pretty smile. Let me see those big black eyes! No? You don't want to? Well, that's all right. I won't bother you. But I want you to know that I love you, and that you are never going to have any more trouble as long as you live."

These were the kindest words the child had ever had spoken to her, or at least the kindest she could remember. They fell on her ears like music and awakened gratitude and love in her heart. She ceased to sigh, and before the ride to town was ended had begun to feel a vague sense of happiness.

The next few years were full of strange adventures for these singular companions. The quack had discovered certain clues to the past history of the child whom he had thus adopted, and was firmly persuaded that she belonged to a noble family. He had made all his plans to take her to Spain and establish her identity in the hope of securing a great reward. But just as he was about to execute this scheme, he was seized by a disease which prostrated him for many months, and threw him into a nervous condition in which he contracted the habit of stammering. On his recovery from his long sickness he found himself stripped of everything he had accumulated; but his shrewdness and indomitable will remained, and he soon began to rebuild his shattered fortune.

During all these ups and downs, Pepeeta was his inseparable and devoted companion. The admiration which her childish beauty excited in his heart had deepened into affection and finally into love. When she reached the age of sixteen or seventeen years, he proposed to her the idea of marriage. She knew nothing of her own heart, and little about life, but had been accustomed to yield implicit obedience to his will. She consented and the ceremony was performed by a Justice of the Peace in the city of Cincinnati, a year or so before their appearance in the Quaker village. An experience so abnormal would have perverted, if not destroyed her nature, had it not contained the germs of beauty and virtue implanted at her birth. They were still dormant, but not dead; they only awaited the sun and rain of love to quicken them into life.

The quack had coarsened with the passing years, but Pepeeta, withdrawing into the sanctuary of her soul, living a life of vague dreams and half-conscious aspirations after something, she knew not what, had grown even more gentle and submissive. As she did not yet comprehend life, she did not protest against its injustice or its incongruity. The vulgar people among whom she lived, the vulgar scenes she saw, passed across the mirror of her soul without leaving permanent impressions. She performed the coarse duties of her life in a perfunctory manner. It was her body and not her soul, her will and not her heart which were concerned with them. What that soul and that heart really were, remained to be seen.

CHAPTER IV.

THE WOMAN

"One woman is fair, yet I am well; another is wise, yet I am well; but till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace."—Much Ado About Nothing.

True to his determination, the doctor devoted the night following his advent into the little frontier village to the investigation of the Quaker preacher's fitness for his use. He took Pepeeta with him, the older habitues of the tavern standing on the porch and smiling ironically as they started.

The meeting house was one of those conventional weather-boarded buildings with which all travelers in the western states are familiar. The rays of the tallow candles by which it was lighted were streaming feebly out into the night. The doors were open, and through them were passing meek-faced, soft-voiced and plain-robed worshipers.

The silhouettes of the men's broad hats and the women's poke bonnets, seen dimly against the pale light of the windows as they passed, plainly revealed their sect. The similarity of their garments almost obliterated the personal identity of the wearers.

The two strangers, so different in manners and dress, joined the straggling procession which crept slowly along the road and chatted to each other in undertones.

"What queer people," said Pepeeta.

"Beat the Dutch, and you know who the D-d-dutch beat!"

"What sort of a building is that they are going into?"

"That's a church."

"What is a church for?"

"Ask the marines! Never b-b-been in one more'n once or twice. G-g-g-guess they use 'em to p-p-pray in. Never pray, so never go."

"Why have you never taken me?"

"Why should I?"

"We go everywhere else, to theaters, to circuses, to races."

"Some sense in going there. Have f-f-fun!"

"Don't they have any fun in churches?"

"Fun! They think a man who laughs will go straight to the b-b-bow-wows!"

"What are they for, then, these churches?"

"For religion, I tell you."

"What is religion?"

"Don't you know?"

"No."

"Your education has been n-n-neglected."

"Tell me what it is!"

"D-d-d-don't ask so many questions! It is something for d-d-dead folks."

"How dark the building looks."

"Like a b-b-barn."

"How solemn the people seem."

"Like h-h-hoot owls."

"It scares me."

"Feel a little b-b-bit shaky myself; but it's too late to b-b-back out now. I'm going if they roast and eat me. If this f-f-feller can talk as they say he can, I am going to get hold of him, d-d-d-dead or alive. I'll have him if it takes a habeas c-c-corpus."

At this point of the conversation they arrived at the meeting-house. Keeping close together, Pepeeta light and graceful, the doctor heavy and awkward, both of them thoroughly embarrassed, they ascended the steps as a bear and gazelle might have walked the gang-plank into the ark. They entered unobserved save by a few of the younger people who were staring vacantly about the room, and took their seats on the last bench. The Quaker maidens who caught sight of Pepeeta were visibly excited and began to preen themselves as turtle doves might have done if a bird of paradise had suddenly flashed among them. One of them happened to be seated next her. She was dressed in quiet drabs and grays. Her face and person were pervaded and adorned by simplicity, meekness, devotion; and the contrast between the two was so striking as to render them both self-conscious and uneasy in each other's presence.

The visitors did not know at all what to expect in this unfamiliar place, but could not have been astonished or awed by anything else half so much as by the inexplicable silence which prevailed. If the whole assemblage had been dancing or turning somersaults, they would not have been surprised, but the few moments in which they thus sat looking stupidly at the people and then at each other seemed to them like a small eternity. Pepeeta's sensitive nature could ill endure such a strain, and she became nervous.

"Take me away," she imploringly whispered to the doctor, who sat by her side, ignorant of the custom which separated the sexes.

He tried to encourage her in a few half-suppressed words, took her trembling hand in his great paw, pressed it reassuringly, winked humorously, and then looked about him with a sardonic grin.

To Pepeeta's relief, the silence was at last broken by an old man who rose from his seat, reverently folded his hands, lifted his face to heaven, closed his eyes and began to speak. She had never until this moment listened to a prayer, and this address to an invisible Being wrought in her already agitated mind a confused and exciting effect; but the prayer was long, and gave her time to recover her self-control. The silence which followed its close was less painful because less strange than the other, and she permitted herself to glance about the room and to wonder what would happen next. Her curiosity was soon satisfied. David Corson, the young mystic, rose to his feet. He was dressed with exquisite neatness in that simple garb which lends to a noble person a peculiar and serious dignity. Standing for a moment before he began his address, he looked over the audience with the self-possession of an accomplished orator. The attention of every person in the room was at once arrested. They all recalled their wandering or preoccupied thoughts, lifted their bowed heads and fixed their eyes upon the commanding figure before them.

This general movement caused Pepeeta to turn, and she observed a sudden transformation on the countenance of the dove-like Quaker maiden. A flush mantled her pale cheek and a radiance beamed in her mild blue eyes. It was a tell-tale look, and Pepeeta, who divined its meaning, smiled sympathetically.

But the first word which fell from the lips of the speaker withdrew her attention from every other object, for his voice possessed a quality with which she was entirely unfamiliar. It would have charmed and fascinated the hearer, even if it had uttered incoherent words. For Pepeeta, it had another and a more mysterious value. It was the voice of her destiny, and rang in her soul like a bell. The speech of the young Quaker was a simple and unadorned message of the love of God to men, and of their power to respond to the Divine call. The thoughts to which he gave expression were not original, but simply distillations from the words of Madam Guyon, Fenelon, Thomas à Kempis and St. John; and yet they were not mere repetitions, for they were permeated by the freshness and the beauty of his own pure feelings.

"We are all," said he, "the children of a loving Father whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain, who yet dwells in every contrite human heart as the light of the great sun reproduces itself in every drop of dew. To have God dwell thus in the soul is to enjoy perfect peace. This life is a life of bitterness to those who struggle against God, a world of sorrow to those who doubt Him, and of darkness to those who refuse His sweet illumination. But the sorrow and the struggle end, and the darkness becomes the dawn to every one who loves and trusts the heavenly Father, for He bestows upon all a Divine gift. This gift is the 'inner light,' the light which shines within the soul itself and sheds its rays upon the dark pathway of existence. This God of love is not far from every one of us and we may all know Him. He is to be loved, not hated; trusted, not feared! Why should men tremble at the consciousness of His presence? Does the little sparrow in its nest feel any fear when it hears the flutter of its parent's wings? Does the child shudder at its mother's approaching footsteps?" As he uttered these words, he paused and awaited an answer.

Each sentence had fallen into the sensitive soul of the Fortune Teller like a pebble into a deep well. She was gazing at him in astonishment. Her lips were parted, her eyes were suffused and she was leaning forward breathlessly.

"If we would live bravely, hopefully, tranquilly," he continued, "we must be conscious of the presence of God. If we believe with all our hearts that He knows our inmost thoughts, we shall experience comfort beyond words. This life of peace, of aspiration, of communion, is possible to all. The evil in us may be overthrown. We may reproduce the life of Christ on earth. We may become as He was—one with God. As the little water drop poured into a large measure of wine seems to lose its own nature entirely and take on the nature and the color of both the water and the wine; or as air filled with sunlight is transformed into the same brightness so that it does not appear to be illuminated by another light so much as to be luminous of itself; so must all feeling toward the Holy One be self-dissolved and wholly transformed into the will of God. For how shall God be all in all, if anything of man remains in man?"

In words and images like these the young mystic poured forth his soul. There were no flights of oratory, and only occasional bursts of anything that could be called eloquence. But in an inexplicable manner it moved the heart to tenderness and thrilled the deepest feelings of the soul. Much of the effect on those who understood him was due to the truths he uttered; but even those who, like the two strangers, were unfamiliar with the ideas advanced, or indifferent to them, could not escape that nameless influence with which all true orators are endowed, and were thrilled by what he said. In our ignorance we have called this influence by the name of "magnetism." Whatever it may be, this young man possessed it in a very high degree, and when to it was added his personal beauty, his sincerity, and his earnestness, it became almost omnipotent over the emotions, if not over the reason. It enslaved Pepeeta completely.

It was impossible that in so small a room a speaker should be unconscious of the presence of strangers. David had noticed them at once, and his glance, after roaming about the room, invariably returned and fixed itself upon the face of the Fortune Teller. Their fascination was mutual. They were so drawn to each other by some inscrutable power, that it would not have been hard to believe that they had existed as companions in some previous state of being, and had now met and vaguely remembered each other.

When at length David stopped speaking, it seemed to Pepeeta as if a sudden end had come to everything; as if rivers had ceased to run and stars to rise and set. She drew a long, deep breath, sighed and sank back in her seat, exhausted by the nervous tension to which she had been subjected.

The effect upon the quack was hardly less remarkable. He, too, had listened with breathless attention. He tried to analyze and then to resist this mesmeric power, but gradually succumbed. He felt as if chained to his seat, and it was only by a great effort that he pulled himself together, took Pepeeta by the arm and drew her out into the open air.

For a few moments they walked in silence, and then the doctor exclaimed: "P-p-peeta, I have found him at last!"

"Found whom?" she asked sharply, irritated by the voice which offered such a rasping contrast to the one still echoing in her ears.

"Found whom? As if you didn't know! I mean the man of d-d-destiny! He is a snake charmer, Pepeeta! He just fairly b-b-bamboozled you! I was laughing in my sleeve and saying to myself, 'He's bamboozled Pepeeta; but he can't b-b-bamboozle me!' When he up and did it! Tee-totally did it! And if he can bamboozle me, he can bamboozle anybody."

"Did you understand what he said?" Pepeeta asked.

"Understand? Well, I should say not! The d-d-devil himself couldn't make head nor tail out of it. But between you and me and the town p-p-pump it's all the better, for if he can fool the people with that kind of g-g-gibberish, he can certainly f-f-fool them with the Balm of the B-B-Blessed Islands! First time I was ever b-b-bamboozled in my life. Feels queer. Our fortune's made, P-p-pepeeta!"

His triumph and excitement were so great that he did not notice the silence and abstraction of his wife. His ardent mind invariably excavated a channel into which it poured its thoughts, digging its bed so deep as to flow on unconscious of everything else. Exulting in the prospect of attaching to himself a companion so gifted, never doubting for a moment that he could do so, reveling in the dreams of wealth to be gathered from the increased sales of his patent medicine, he entered the hotel and made straight for the bar-room, where he told his story with the most unbounded delight.

Pepeeta retired at once to her room, but her mind was too much excited and her heart too much agitated for slumber. She moved restlessly about for a long time and then sat down at the open window and looked into the night. For the first time in her life, the mystery of existence really dawned upon her. She gazed with a new awe at the starry sky. She thought of that Being of whom David had spoken. Questions which had never before occurred to her knocked at the door of her mind and imperatively demanded an answer. "Who am I? Whence did I come? For what was I created? Whither am I going?" she asked herself again and again with profound astonishment at the newness of these questions and her inability to answer them.

For a long time she sat in the light of the moon, and reflected on these mysteries with all the power of her untutored mind. But that power was soon exhausted, and vague, chaotic, abstract conceptions gave place to a definite image which had been eternally impressed upon her inward eyes. It was the figure of the young Quaker, idealized by the imagination of an ardent and emotional woman whose heart had been thrilled for the first time.

She began timidly to ask herself what was the meaning of those feelings which this stranger had awakened in her bosom. She knew that they were different from those which her husband inspired; but how different, she did not know. They filled her with a sort of ecstasy, and she gave herself up to them. Exhausted at last by these vivid thoughts and emotions, she rested her head upon her arms across the window sill and fell asleep. It must have been that the young Quaker followed her into the land of dreams, for when her husband aroused her at midnight a faint flush could be seen by the light of the moon on those rounded cheeks.

There are all the elements of a tragedy in the heart of a woman who has never felt the emotions of religion or of love until she is married!

CHAPTER V.

THE LIGHT THAT LIES

"Oh! why did God create at last
This novelty on earth, this fair defect
Of nature, and not till the world at once
With men as angels, without feminine?"
—Paradise Lost.

On the following morning the preacher-plowman was afield at break of day. The horses, refreshed and rested by food and sleep, dragged the gleaming plowshare through the heavy sod as if it were light snow, and the farmer exulted behind them.

That universal life which coursed through all the various forms of being around him, bounded in tides through his own veins. The fresh morning air, the tender light of dawning day, the odors of plants and songs of birds, filled his sensitive soul with unutterable delight.

In the midst of all these beauties and wonders, he existed without self-consciousness and labored without effort. His heart was pure and his oneness with the natural world was complete. Whatever was beautiful and gentle in the manifold operations of the Divine Spirit in the world around him, he saw and felt. To all that was horrible and ferocious, he was blind as a child in Paradise. He did not notice the hawk sweeping upon the dove, the swallow darting upon the moth, nor the lizard lying in wait for the fly; or, if he did, he saw them only as he saw the shadows flitting across the sunny landscape. His soul was like a garden full of light, life, perfume, color and the music of singing birds and whispering leaves. Before his inward eye the familiar figures of his daily life passed and repassed, but among them was also a new one. It was the figure that had arrested his attention and inspired him the night before.

For hours he followed the plow without the consciousness of fatigue, but at length he paused to rest the horses, who were beginning to pant with their hard labor. He threw back his head, drew in deep inspirations of pure air, glanced about and felt the full tide of the simple joy of existence roll over him. Life had never seemed sweeter than in those few moments in which he quaffed the brimming cup of youth and health which nature held to his lips. Not a fear, not an apprehension of any danger crossed his soul. His glances roved here and there, pausing a moment in their flight like hummingbirds, to sip the sweetness from some unusually beautiful cloud or tree or flower, when he suddenly caught sight of a curious equipage flying swiftly down the road at the other side of the field. The spirited horses stopped. A man rose from the seat, put his hands to his mouth like a trumpet, uttered a loud "hallo," and beckoned.

David tied the reins to the plow handles and strode across the fresh furrows. Vaulting the fence and leaping the brook which formed the boundary line of the farm, he ascended the bank and approached the carriage. As he did so the occupants got out and came to meet him. To his astonishment he saw the strangers whom he had noticed the night before. The man advanced with a bold, free demeanor, the woman timidly and with downcast eyes.

"Good morning," said the doctor.

David returned his greeting with the customary dignity of the Quakers.

"My name is Dr. Aesculapius."

"Thee is welcome."

"I was over to the m-m-meeting house last night, and heard your s-s-speech. Didn't understand a w-w-word, but saw that you c-c-can talk like a United States Senator."

David bowed and blushed.

"I came over to make you a p-p-proposition. Want you to yoke up with me, and help me sell the 'B-B-Balm of the Blessed Islands.' You can do the t-t-talking and I'll run the b-b-business; see?"

He put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, spread his feet apart, squared himself and smiled like a king who had offered his throne to a beggar.

David regarded him with a look of astonishment.

"What do you s-s-say?"

Gravely, placidly, the young Quaker answered: "I thank thee, friend, for what thee evidently means as a kindness, but I must decline thy offer."

"Decline my offer? Are you c-c-crazy? Why do you d-d-decline my offer?"

"Because I have no wish to leave my home and work."

Although his answer was addressed to the man, his eyes were directed to the woman. His reply, simple and natural enough, astounded the quack.

"What!" he exclaimed. "Do you mean that you p-p-prefer to stay in this p-p-pigstye of a town to becoming a citizen of the g-g-great world?"

"I do."

"But listen; I will pay you more money in a single month than you can earn by d-d-driving your plow through that b-b-black mud for a whole year."

"I have no need and no desire for more money than I can earn by daily toil."

"No need and no desire for money! B-b-bah! You are not talking to sniveling old women and crack-b-b-brained old men; but to a f-f-feller who can see through a two-inch plank, and you can't p-p-pass off any of your religious d-d-drivel on him, either."

This coarse insult went straight to the soul of the youth. His blood tingled in his veins. There was a tightening around his heart of something which was out of place in the bosom of a Quaker. A hot reply sprang to his lips, but died away as he glanced at the woman, and saw her face mantled with an angry flush.

Calmed by her silent sympathy, he quietly replied: "Friend, I have no desire to annoy thee, but I have been taught that 'the love of money is the root of all evil,' and believing as I do I could not answer thee otherwise than I did."

It was evident from the look upon the countenance of the quack that he had met with a new and incomprehensible type of manhood. He gazed at the Quaker a moment in silence and then exclaimed, "Young man, you may mean what you say, b-b-but you have been most infernally abused by the p-p-people who have put such notions in your head, for there is only one substantial and abiding g-g-good on earth, and that is money. Money is power, money is happiness, money is God; get money! get it anywhere! get it anyhow, but g-g-get it."

Instead of mere resentment for a personal insult, David now felt a tide of righteous indignation rising in his soul at this scorn and denial of those eternal principles of truth and duty which he felt to be the very foundations of the moral universe.

"Sir," said he, with the voice and mien of an apostle, "I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness and the bonds of iniquity. Thy money perish with thee. The God of this world hath blinded thine eyes."

The quack, who now began to take a humorous view of the innocence of the youth, burst into a boisterous guffaw.

"Well, well," he said in mingled scorn and pity, "reckon you are more to be pitied than b-b-blamed. Fault of early education! Talk like a p-p-parrot! What can a young fellow like you know about life, shut up here in this seven-by-nine valley, like a man in a b-b-barrel looking out of the b-b-bung-hole?"

Offended and disgusted, the Quaker was about to turn upon his heel; but he saw in the face of the man's beautiful companion a look which said plainly as spoken words, "I, too, desire that you should go with us."

This look changed his purpose, and he paused.

"Listen to me now," continued the doctor, observing his irresolution. "You think you know what life is; but you d-d-don't! Do you know what g-g-great cities are? Do you know what it is to m-m-mix with crowds of men, to feel and perhaps to sway their p-p-passions? Do you know what it is to p-p-possess and to spend that money which you d-d-despise? Do you know what it is to wear fine clothes, to d-d-drink rare wines, to see great sights, to go where you want to and to do what you p-p-please?"

"I do not, nor do I wish to. And thee must abandon these follies and sins, if thee would enter the Kingdom of God," David replied, fixing his eyes sternly upon the face of the blasphemer.

"God! Ha, ha, ha! Who is He, anyhow? Same old story! Fools that can't enjoy life, d-d-don't want any one else to! Ever hear 'bout the fox that got his tail b-b-bit off? Wanted all the rest to have theirs! What the d-d-deuce are we here in this world for? T-t-tell me that, p-p-parson!"

"To do the will of our Father which is in heaven."

"To do the will of our Father in heaven! I know but one will, and it is the w-w-will of Doctor P-p-paracelsus Aesculapius. I'm my own lord and law, I am."

"Know thou that for all thy idle words, God will bring thee to judgment?" David answered solemnly.

"Rot!" muttered the doctor, disgusted beyond endurance, and concluding the interview with the cynical farewell,

"Good-bye, d-d-dead man! I have always hated c-c-corpses! I am going where men have red b-b-blood in their veins."

With these words he turned on his heel and started toward the carriage, leaving David and Pepeeta alone. Neither of them moved. The gypsy nervously plucked the petals from a daisy and the Quaker gazed at her face. During these few moments nature had not been idle. In air and earth and tree top, following blind instincts, her myriad children were seeking their mates. And here, in the odorous sunshine of the May morning, these two young, impressionable and ardent beings, yielding themselves unconsciously to the same mysterious attraction which was uniting other happy couples, were drawn together in a union which time could not dissolve and eternity, perhaps, cannot annul.

Having stalked indignantly onward for a few paces, the doctor discovered that his wife had not followed him, and turning he called savagely: "Pepeeta, come! It is folly to try and p-p-persuade him. Let us leave the saint to his prayers! But let him remember the old p-p-proverb, 'young saint, old sinner!' Come!"

He proceeded towards the carriage; but Pepeeta seemed rooted to the ground, and David was equally incapable of motion. While they stood thus, gazing into each other's eyes, they saw nothing and they saw all. That brief glance was freighted with destiny. A subtle communication had taken place between them, although they had not spoken; for the eye has a language of its own.

What was the meaning of that glance? What was the emotion that gave it birth in the soul? He knew! It told its own story. To their dying day, the actors in that silent drama remembered that glance with rapture and with pain.

Pepeeta spoke first, hurriedly and anxiously: "What did you say last night about the 'light of life?' Tell me! I must know."

"I said there is a light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world."

"And what did you mean? Be quick. There is only a moment."

"I meant that there is a light that shines from the soul itself and that in this light we may walk, and he who walks in it, walks safely. He need never fall!"

"Never? I do not understand; it is beautiful; but I do not understand!"

"Pepeeta!" called her husband, angrily.

She turned away, and David watched her gliding out of his sight, with an irrepressible pain and longing. "I suppose she is his daughter," he said to himself, and upon that natural but mistaken inference his whole destiny turned. Something seemed to draw him after her. He took a step or two, halted, sighed and returned to his labor.

But it was to a strangely altered world that he went. Its glory had vanished; it was desolate and empty, or so at least it seemed to him, for he confounded the outer and the inner worlds, as it was his nature and habit to do. It was in his soul that the change had taken place. The face of a bad man and of an incomprehensible woman followed him through the long furrows until the sun went down. He was vaguely conscious that he had for the first time actually encountered those strenuous elements which draw manhood from its moorings. He felt humiliated by the recognition that he was living a dream life there in his happy valley; and that there was a life outside which he could not master so easily. That confidence in his strength and incorruptibility which he had always felt began to waver a little. His innocence appeared to him like that of the great first father in the garden of Eden, before his temptation, and now that he too had listened to the voice of the serpent and had for the first time been stirred at the description of the sweetness of the great tree's fruit, there came to him a feeling of foreboding as to the future. He was astonished that such characters as those he had just seen did not excite in him loathing and repulsion. Why could he not put them instantly and forever out of his mind? How could they possess any attractiveness for him at all—such a blatant, vulgar man or such an ignorant, ah! but beautiful, woman; for she was beautiful! Yes—beautiful but bad! But no—such a beautiful woman could not be bad. See how interested she was about the "inner light." She must be very ignorant; but she was very attractive. What eyes! What lips!

Thoughts which he had always been able to expel from his mind before, like evil birds fluttered again and again into the windows of his soul. For this he upbraided himself; but only to discover that at the very moment when he regretted that he had been tempted at all, he also regretted that he had not been tempted further.

All day long his agitated spirit alternated between remorse that he had enjoyed so much, and regret that he had enjoyed so little. Never had he experienced such a tumult in his soul. He struggled hard, but he could not tell whether he had conquered or been defeated.

It was not until he had retired to his room at night and thrown himself upon his knees, that he began to regain peace. There, in the stillness of his chamber, he strove for the control of his thoughts and emotions, and fell asleep after long and prayerful struggles, with the sweet consciousness of a spiritual triumph!

CHAPTER VI.

THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT

"Every man living shall assuredly meet with an hour of temptation, a critical hour which shall more especially try what metal his heart is made of"—South.

It was long after he had awakened in the morning before the memory of the adventure of yesterday recurred to David's mind. His sleep had been as deep as that of an infant, and his rest in the great ocean of oblivion had purified him, so that when he did at last recall the experience which had affected him so deeply, it was with indifference. The charm had vanished. Even the gypsy's beauty paled in the light of the Holy Sabbath morning. He could think of her with entire calmness, and so thoroughly had the evil vanished that he hoped it had disappeared forever. But he had yet to learn that before evil can be successfully forgotten it must be heroically overcome.

He did not yet realize this, however, and his bath, his morning prayer, a passage from the gospel, the hearty breakfast, the kind and trustful faces of his family, dispelled the last cloud from the sky of his soul. Having finished the round of morning duties, he made himself ready to visit the lumber camp, there to discharge the sacred duty revealed to him in the vision.

The confidence reposed by the genuine Quaker in such intimations of the Spirit is absolute. They are to him as imperative as the audible voice of God to Moses by the burning bush.

"Farewell, mother, I am off," he said, kissing her upon the white forehead.

"Thee is going to the lumber camp, my son?" she asked, regarding him with ill-concealed pride.

"I am, and hope to press the truth home to the hearts of those who shall hear me," replied the young devotee, his face lighting up with the blended rapture of religious enthusiasm, youth and health.

"The Lord be with thee and make thy ministrations fruitful," his mother said, and with this blessing he set off.

As the young mystic had yesterday thought the world dark and stormy because of the tempest in his soul, so now he thought it still and peaceful, because of his inward calm. The very intensity of his recent struggles had rendered his soul acutely sensitive, like a delicate musical instrument which responded freely to the innumerable fingers wherewith Nature struck its keys. Her manifold forms, her gorgeous colors, her gigantic forces thrilled and intoxicated him.

That sense of fellowship with all the forms of life about him, which is characteristic of all our moments of deepest rapture in the embrace of Nature, filled his soul with joy. He accosted the trees as one greets a friend; he chatted with the brooks; he held conversation with the little lambs skipping in the pastures, and with the horses that whinnied as he passed.

Such opulent moments come to all in youth; moments when the soul, unconscious of its chains because they have not been stretched to their limits, roams the universe with God-like liberty and joy.

Had he been asked to analyze these exquisite emotions, the young Quaker would have said that they were the joys of the indwelling of the Divine Spirit. He did not realize how much of his exhilaration came from the feelings awakened by the experiences of the day before. One might almost say that a spiritual fragrance from the woman who had crossed his path was diffusing itself through the chambers of his soul. It was like the odor of violets which lingers after the flowers themselves are gone.

Up to this time, he had never felt the mighty and mysterious emotion of love. More than once, when he had seen the calm face of Dorothy Fraser, soft and tender feelings had arisen in his heart; but they were only the first faint gleams of that conflagration which sooner or later breaks forth in the souls of men like him.

It was this confusion of the sources of his happiness which made him oblivious to the struggle that was still going on within his mind. The question had been raised there as to whether he had chosen wisely in turning his back upon the joys of an earthly life for the joys of heaven. It had not been settled, and was waiting an opportunity to thrust itself again before his consciousness. In the meantime he was happy. Never had he seemed to himself more perfectly possessed by the Divine Spirit than at the moment when he reached the summit of the last hill, and looked down into the valley where lay the lumber-camp. He paused to gaze upon a scene of surpassing loveliness, and was for a moment absorbed by its beauty; but a sudden discovery startled and disturbed him. There was no smoke curling from the chimneys. There were no forms of men moving about in their brilliant woolen shirts; he listened in vain for voices; he could not even hear the yelp of the ever-watchful dogs.

"Can it be possible that I have been deceived by my vision?" he asked himself.

It was the first real skepticism of his life, and crowding it back into his heart as best he could, he pressed on, excited and curious. As he approached the rude structure, the signs of its desertion became indubitable. He called, but heard only the echo of his own voice. He tried the door, and it opened. Through it he entered the low-ceiled room. On every hand were evidences of recent departure; living coals still glowed in the ashes and crumbs were scattered on the tables. There could be no longer any doubt that the lumbermen had vanished. The last and most incontrovertible proof was tacked upon the wall in the shape of a flat piece of board on which were written in a rude scrawl these words: "We have gone to the Big Miami."

The face so bright and clear a moment ago was clouded now. He read the sentence over and over again. He sat down upon a bench and meditated, then rose and went out, walking around the cabin and returning to read the message once more. If he had spoken the real sentiment of his heart he would have said: "I have been deceived." He did not speak, however, but struggled bravely to throw off the feelings of surprise and doubt; and so, reassuring his faith again and again by really noble efforts, took from his pocket the lunch his mother had prepared, and ate it hungrily although abstractedly. As he did so, he felt the animal joy in food and rest, and his courage and confidence revived.

"It is plain," he said to himself, "that God has sent me here to try my faith. All he requires is obedience! It is not necessary that I should understand; but it is necessary that I should obey!"

The idea of a probation so unique was not distasteful to his romantic nature, and he therefore at once addressed himself to the business upon which he had come. He had been sent to preach, and preach he would. Drawing from the inner pocket of his coat a well-worn Bible, he turned to the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of Saint John, rose to his feet and began to read. It was strange to be reading to this emptiness and silence, but after a moment he adjusted himself to the situation. The earnest effort he was making to control his mind achieved at least a partial success. His face brightened, he conjured up before his imagination the forms and faces of the absent men. He saw them with the eye of his mind. His voice grew firm and clear, and its tones reassured him.

Having finished the lesson, he closed the volume and began to pray. Now that his eyes were shut, the strangeness of the situation vanished entirely. He was no longer alone, for God was with him. The petition was full of devotion, tenderness and faith, and as he poured it forth his countenance beamed like that of an angel. When it was finished he began the sermon. The first few words were scarcely audible. The thoughts were disconnected and fragmentary. He suffered an unfamiliar and painful embarrassment, but struggled on, and his thoughts cleared themselves like a brook by flowing. Each effort resulted in a greater facility of utterance, and soon the joy of triumph began to inspire him. The old confidence returned at last and his soul, filled with faith and hope and fervor, poured itself forth in a full torrent. He began to be awed by the conjecture that his errand had some extraordinary although hidden import. Who could tell what mission these words were to accomplish in the plans of God? He remembered that the waves made by the smallest pebble flung into the ocean widen and widen until they touch the farthest shore, and he flung the pebbles of his speech into the great ocean of thought, transported by the hope of sometime learning that their waves had beat upon the shores of a distant universe.

Suddenly, in the midst of this tumultuous rush of speech, he heard, or thought he heard, a sound. It seemed to him like a sob and there followed stumbling footsteps as of some one in hurried flight, but he was too absorbed to be more than dimly conscious of anything save his own emotions.

And yet, slight as was this interruption, it served to agitate his mind and bring him down from the realms of imagination to the world of reality. His thoughts began to flow less easily and his tongue occasionally to stammer; the strangeness of his experience came back upon him with redoubled force; the chill influence of vacancy and emptiness oppressed him; his enthusiasm waned; what he was doing began to seem foolish and even silly.

Just at that critical moment there occurred one of those trifling incidents which so often produce results ridiculously disproportionate to their apparent importance. Through the open door to which his back was turned, a little snake had made its way into the room, and having writhed silently across the floor, coiled itself upon the hearth-stone, faced the speaker, looked solemnly at him with its beady eyes, and occasionally thrust out its forked tongue as if in relish of his words.

That fixed and inscrutable gaze completed the confusion of the orator. He suddenly ceased to speak, and stood staring at the serpent. His face became impassive and expressionless; the pupils of his eyes dilated; his lips remained apart; the last word seemed frozen on his tongue. Not a shade of thought could be traced on his countenance and yet he must have been thinking, for he suddenly collapsed, sank down on a rude bench and rested his head on his hands as if he had come to some disagreeable, and perhaps terrible conclusion. And so indeed he had. The uneasy suspicions which had been floating in his mind in a state of solution were suddenly crystallized by this untoward event. The absurdity of a man's having tramped twenty miles through an almost unbroken wilderness to preach the gospel to a garter snake, burst upon him with a crushing force. This grotesque denouement of an undertaking planned and executed in the loftiest frame of religious enthusiasm, shook the very foundation of his faith.

"It is absurd, it is impossible, that an infinite Spirit of love and wisdom could have planned this repulsive adventure! I have been misled! I am the victim of a delusion!" he said to himself, in shame and bitterness.

To him, Christianity had been not so much a system of doctrines based upon historical proofs, as emotions springing from his own heart. He believed in another world not because its existence had been testified to by others, but because he daily and hourly entered its sacred precincts. He had faith in God, not because He had spoken to apostles and prophets, but because He had spoken to David Corson. Having received direct communication from the Divine Spirit, how could he doubt? What other proof could he need?

Suddenly, without warning and without preparation, the foundation upon which he had erected the superstructure of his faith crumbled and fell. He had been deceived! The communications were false! They had originated in his own soul, and were not really the voice of God.

Through this suspicion, as through a suddenly-opened door, the powers of hell rushed into his soul and it became the theater of a desperate battle between the good and evil elements of life. Doubt grappled with faith; self-gratification with self-restraint; despair with hope; lust with purity; body with soul.

He heard again the mocking laughter of the quack, and the stinging words of his cynical philosophy once more rang in his ears. What this coarse wretch had said was true, then! Religion was a delusion, and he had been spending the best portion of his life in hugging it to his bosom. Much of his youth had already passed and he had not as yet tasted the only substantial joys of existence,—money, pleasure, ambition, love! He felt that he had been deceived and defrauded.

A contempt for his old life and its surroundings crept upon him. He began to despise the simple country people among whom he had grown up, and those provincial ideas which they cherished in the little, unknown nook of the world where they stagnated.

During a long time he permitted himself to be borne upon the current of these thoughts without trying to stem it, till it seemed as if he would be swept completely from his moorings. But his trust had been firmly anchored, and did not easily let go its hold. The convictions of a lifetime began to reassert themselves. They rose and struggled heroically for the possession of his spirit.

Had the battle been with the simple abstraction of philosophic doubt, the good might have prevailed, but there obtruded itself into the field the concrete form of the gypsy. The glance of her lustrous eye, the gleam of her milk-white teeth, the heaving of her agitated bosom, the inscrutable but suggestive expression of her flushed and eager face, these were foes against which he struggled in vain. A feverish desire, whose true significance he did not altogether understand, tugged at his heart, and he felt himself drawn by unseen hands toward this mysterious and beautiful being. She seemed to him at that awful moment, when his whole world of thought and feeling was slipping from under his feet, the one only abiding reality. She at least was not an impalpable vision, but solid, substantial, palpitating flesh and blood. Like continuously advancing waves which sooner or later must undermine a dyke, the passions and suspicions of his newly awakened nature were sapping the foundations of his belief.

At intervals he gained a little courage to withstand them, and at such moments tried to pray; but the effort was futile, for neither would the accustomed syllables of petition spring to his lips, nor the feelings of faith and devotion arise within his heart. He strove to convince himself that this experience was a trial of his faith, and that if he stood out a little longer, his doubt would pass away. He lifted his head and glanced at the serpent still coiled upon the hearth. Its eyes were fixed upon him in a gorgon-like stare, and his doubts became positive certainties, as disgust became loathing. The battle had ended. The mystic had been defeated. This sudden collapse had come because the foundations of his faith had been honeycombed. The innocent serpent had been, not the cause, but the occasion.

Influences had been at work, of which the Quaker had remained unconscious. He had been observing, without reflecting upon, many facts in the lives of other men, experiences in his own heart, and apparent inconsistencies in the Bible. There was also a virus whose existence he did not suspect running in his very blood! And now on top of the rest came the bold skepticism of the quack, and the bewildering beauty of the gypsy.

Yes, the preliminary work had been done! We never know how rotten the tree is until it falls, nor how unstable the wall until it crumbles. And so in the moral natures of men, subtle forces eat their way silently and imperceptibly to the very center.

A summer breeze overthrows the tree, the foot of a child sets the wall tottering; a whisper, a smile, even the sight of a serpent, is the jar that upsets the equilibrium of a soul.

The Quaker rose from his seat in a fever of excitement. He seized the Bible lying open on the table, hurled it frantically at the snake and flung himself out of the open door into the sunshine. A wild consciousness of liberty surged over him.

"I am free," he exclaimed aloud. "I have emancipated myself from superstition. I am going forth into the world to assert myself, to gratify my natural appetites, to satisfy my normal desires. It was for this that life was given. I have too long believed that duty consisted in conquering nature. I now see that it lies in asserting it. I have too long denied myself. I will hereafter be myself. That man was right—there is no law above the human will."

CHAPTER VII.

THE CHANCE WORD

"A man reforms his habits altogether or not at all."
—Bacon.

David was not mistaken in his vague impression that he had heard a sob and footsteps outside the cabin door.

The little band of lumbermen abandoning their camp in the early light of the morning for another clearing still farther in the wilderness, had already covered several miles of their journey when their leader suddenly discovered that he had forgotten his axe, and with a wild volley of oaths turned back to get it.

Even in that region, where new types of men sprang up like new varieties of plants after a fire has swept over a clearing, there was not to be found a more unique and striking personality than Andy McFarlane. In physique he was of gigantic proportions, his hair and beard as red as fire, his voice loud and deep, his eyes blue and piercing. Clad in the gay-colored woolen shirt, the rough fur cap, and the high-topped boots of a lumberman, his appearance was bold and picturesque to the last degree.

Nor were his mental powers inferior to his physical. Although unable to read or write, he could both reason and command. His keen perceptions, his ready wit, his forcible logic and his invincible will had made him a leader among men and the idol of the rude people among whom he passed his days.

Repelled and disgusted with those manifestations of the religious life with which alone he was familiar, he was still an unconscious worshiper. The woods, the hills, the rivers and the stars awoke within him a response to the beautiful, the sublime and awe-inspiring in the natural universe.

But because of ignorance, the mysteries of existence which ought to have made him devout had only rendered him superstitious, though, all unknown to himself, his bosom was full of inflammable materials of a deeply religious life. A spark fell upon them that Sunday morning and kindled them into a conflagration. Nothing else can so enrage a nature like his as having to retrace its steps. He could have walked a hundred miles straight forward without a feeling of fatigue or a sense of hardship; but every backward step of his journey had put him more out of temper. He reached the clearing in a towering passion and was bewildered at hearing in what he supposed to be a deserted room, the sound of a human voice in whose tones there was a peculiar quality which aroused his interest and perhaps excited his superstition. He crept toward the rude cabin on his tiptoes, paused and listened. What he heard was the voice of the young mystic, pouring out his heart in prayer.

For the first time in his life McFarlane gave serious attention to a petition addressed to the Supreme Being. Other prayers had disgusted him because of their vulgar familiarity with the Deity, or repelled him by their hypocrisy; but there was something so sincere and simple in the childlike words which issued from the cabin as to quicken his soul and turn his thoughts upon the mysteries of existence. He had received the gift of life as do the eagles and the lions—without surprise. Had any one asked him: "Andy McFarlane, what is life?" he would have answered: "Life? Why it is just life."

But suddenly a voice, heard in the quiet of a wilderness, a voice full of tenderness and pathos, issuing from unknown and invisible lips and ascending into the vast and illimitable spaces of air, threw wide open the gates of mystery. His heart was instantly emptied of its passions; his soul grew calm and his whole nature became as impressionable as wax.

When at length the prayer had ended and the sermon began, every power of his mind was strained to its utmost capacity, and he listened as if for life. The buried germs of desires and aspirations of which he had never dreamed were quickened into life with the rapidity of the outburst of vegetation in a polar summer. Words and phrases which had hitherto seemed to him the utterances of fools or madmen, became instinct with a marvelous beauty and a wondrous meaning. They flashed like balls of fire. They pierced like swords. They aroused like trumpets. Such was the susceptibility of this great soul, and such was the power of that simple eloquence.

Andy McFarlane, the child of poverty, the rude lumberman, the hardy frontiersman, was by nature a poet and a seer, and this was his new birth into his true inheritance. Those eyes which had never wept, swam in tears. Those knees which had never trembled before the visible, shook in the presence of the unseen.

The emotions have their limitations as well as the thoughts, and McFarlane had endured all that he was capable of sustaining. With a profound sob, in which he uttered the feelings he could not speak, he turned and fled. It was this sob and these footsteps which David heard.

Plunging into the depths of the forest as a wounded animal would have done, he cast himself upon the bosom of the earth at the foot of a great tree, to find solitude and consolation.

There are wounds in the soul too deep to be healed by the balm which exudes from the visible elements of Nature. There are longings and aspirations which the palpable and audible cannot satisfy. Not what he sees and touches, but what he hopes and trusts, can save man in these dark moments from the final despair and terror of existence.

Upon such an hour as this the lumberman had fallen. God had thrust Himself upon his attention. Instead of being compelled to seek a religious experience, he found it impossible to escape it.

The religious experiences of men in any such epoch possess a certain general similarity. Sometimes thought, sometimes action and sometimes emotion furnish the all-pervasive element. Whatever this peculiar characteristic may be, its manifestations are always most vivid and violent in ignorant periods, and along the uncultivated frontiers of advancing civilization. In those rude days and regions, the victims (if one might say so) of religion experienced nervous excitations and emotional transports which not infrequently terminated in convulsions. Days and nights, weeks and even months, were often spent by them in struggles which were always painful and often terrible.

Andy McFarlane had often enough witnessed and despised these experiences; but through those almost inexorable laws of association and imitation, they were more than likely to reproduce themselves in him. And so indeed they did. Under the influence of these new thoughts that had seized him with such power, he writhed in agony on the ground. A profound "conviction of sin" took possession of his soul and he felt himself to be hopelessly and forever lost. That hell at which he had so often scoffed suddenly opened its jaws beneath his feet, and although he shuddered at the thought of being engulfed in its horrors, he felt that such a doom would be the just desert of a life like his.

Hours passed in which his calmest thoughts were those of complete bewilderment and helplessness, and in which he seemed to himself to be floating upon a wide and shoreless sea, or wandering in a pathless wilderness or winging his way like a lost bird through the trackless heavens. However large an element of unreality and absurdity there may have been in such experiences, it is certain that changes of the most startling and permanent character were often wrought in the natures of those who passed through them, and when McFarlane at last emerged from this spiritual excitement he was a strangely altered man. He seemed to find himself in another and more beautiful world. Looking around him with a childlike wonder, he rose and made his way back to the cabin. He listened at the door, but heard no sound. He entered, found the room empty, and gave himself up to rude and unscientific speculation as to the nature of this mysterious adventure. Nothing helped to solve the problem, until at last he discovered the Bible, which the Quaker had hurled at the snake, lying upon the hearthstone. It did not explain everything, but it served to connect the inexplicable with the real and human, and he carried the book with him when he returned to his companions with his recovered axe.

That Bible became a "lamp to his feet and a light to his path." By patient labor he learned to read it, and soon grew to be so familiar with its contents, that he was able not only to communicate its matter to others, in the new and beautiful life which he began to live, but to give it new power for those men in the plain and homely language of which he had always been a master.

The lion had become a lamb, the eagle a dove. He moved among his men, the incarnation of gentleness and truth. Under his powerful influence the camp passed through a marvelous transformation. From this limited sphere of influence, his fame began to extend into a larger region. He was sent for from far and near to tell the story of his strange conversion, and in time abandoned all other labor and gave himself entirely to the preaching of the Gospel.

It was as if the spirit of love and faith which had departed from the Quaker had entered into the lumberman.

CHAPTER VIII.

A BROKEN REED

"Superstition is a senseless fear of God."
—Cicero.

The address of the young Quaker in the meeting house and the interview with him by the roadside had opened a new epoch in the life of the Fortune Teller.

Her idea of the world was a chaos of crude and irrational conceptions. The superstitions of the gypsies by whom she had been reared were confusedly blended with those practical but vicious maxims which governed the conduct of her husband.

For her, the world of law, of order, of truth, of justice had no existence. The quack cared little what she thought, and had neither the ability nor the interest to penetrate to the secrets of her soul.

She had lived the dream life of an ignorant child up to the moment when David had awakened her soul, and now that she really began to grapple with the problems of existence, she had neither companion nor teacher to help her.

The two objects about which her thoughts had begun to hover helplessly were the God of whom David had spoken and the Quaker himself. Both of them had profoundly agitated her mind and heart, and still haunted her thoughts.

During all of Saturday after the interview, through the evening which she had passed in her booth, and far into the night, she had revolved in her mind the words she had heard, and attempted to weave these two mysterious beings into her confused scheme of thought.

Her disappointment at David's refusal to accompany them in their wandering life had been bitter. She did not comprehend the nature of her feeling for him; but his presence gave her so exquisite a happiness that the thought of never seeing him again had become intolerable.

For the first time she, who had been for years, as she thought, disclosing the future to other people, was seized with a burning curiosity as to her own. Up to this crisis of her experience she had lived in the present moment; but now she must look into to-morrow and see if the Quaker was ever to cross her path again. For so important, so delicate and so difficult a discovery it seemed to her that the ordinary instruments of her art were pitifully inadequate. The playing cards, the lines upon her hands, the leaves in her tea cup would not do. She would resort to that charm which the old gypsy had given her at parting, and which she had reserved for some great and critical moment of life. That moment had arrived.

As she enjoyed the most perfect freedom in all her movements, she snatched an early and hurried breakfast Sunday morning, told her husband that she was going to the woods for wild flowers, and set forth upon an errand pregnant with destiny.

With an instinct like that of a wild creature she made her way swiftly towards the great forest which lay at a little distance from the outskirts of the village.

Her ignorance, her inexperience, her sadness and her beauty would have stirred the hardest heart to compassion. Arrived at the point where she was to confront the great spiritual problems of existence, she might almost as well have been the first woman who had ever done so, for she knew nothing of the experiences of others who had encountered them, and she had scarcely heard an echo of the great life-truths which seers have been ages in discovering. She had to sound her way across the perilous sea of thought without any other chart than the faded parchment of the gypsy, and those few incomprehensible words which she had heard from the lips of the young Quaker.

It is good for us that upon this vast and unknown sea of life, God's winds and waves are wiser and stronger than the pilots, and often bring our frail crafts into havens which we never sought! Perhaps the act which Pepeeta was about to perform had more ethical and spiritual value than the casual observer would suppose, because of the perfect sincerity with which she undertook its performance. No priestess ever entered an oracle, no vestal virgin a temple, nor saint a shrine with more reverence than she felt, as she passed into the silence of this primeval forest.

Neither David nor Pepeeta knew anything of each other's movements, but they started upon their different errands at almost the same moment and were pursuing parallel courses with only a low ridge of hills between them. Each was following the brightest light that had shone upon the pathway of life. Both were absorbed with the highest thoughts of which they were capable. As invisible planets deflect the stars from their orbits, these two were imperceptibly diverting each other from the way of duty. The experiences of this beautiful morning were to color the lives of both forever.

As soon as Pepeeta had escaped from the immediate environments of the village, she gave herself wholly to the task of gathering those ingredients which were to constitute the mixture she planned to offer to her god. She first secured a cricket, a lizard and a frog, and then the herbs and flowers which were to be mingled with them. Thrusting them all into a little kettle which swung on her arm, she surrendered herself to the silent and mysterious influences of the forest. At the edge of the primeval wilderness a solemn hush stole over her. She entered its precincts as if it were a temple and she a worshiper with a votive offering. Threading her way through the winding aisles of the great cathedral, she was exalted and transported. The fitful fever cooled in her veins. She absorbed and drew into her own spirit the calm and silence of the place, and she was in turn absorbed and drawn into the majestic life around her. The distinctively human seemed to slip from her like a garment, and she was transformed into a creature of these solitudes. Her movements resembled those of a fawn. Her great, gazelle-like eyes peered hither and thither, as if ever upon the watch for some hidden foe. It was as if her life in the habitations of men had been an enforced exile, and she had now returned to her native haunts.

As she penetrated more and more deeply into the wood, her confidence increased; she stepped more firmly, removed her hat, shook out her long black tresses, listened to the songs of birds piping in the tops of trees, and exulted in the consciousness of freedom and of kinship with these natural objects. With a sudden and impulsive movement, she drew near to the smooth trunk of a great beech, put her arms around it, laid her cheek against it and kissed the bark. She was prompted by the same instinct which made St. Francis de Assisi call the flowers "our little sisters,—" an inexplicable sense of companionship and fraternity with living things of every kind.

Her swift footsteps brought her at last to the summit of a low line of hills, and she glided down into an unpeopled and shadow-haunted valley through which ran a crystal stream. Perceiving the fitness of the place for her purpose, she hastened forward smiling, and, heated with her journey, threw herself down by the side of the brook and plunged her face into its cool and sparkling waters. Then she lifted her head and carried the water to her lips in the palm of her dainty hand, and as she drank beheld the image of her face on the surface of a quiet little pool. Small wonder that she stooped to kiss the red lips which were mirrored there! So did the fair Greek maidens discover and pay tribute to their own loveliness, in the pure springs of Hellas.

Refreshed by the cooling draught, the priestess now addressed herself to her task. Gazing for an instant around the majestic temple in which her act of worship was to be performed, she began like some child of a long gone age to rear an altar. Selecting a few from the many boulders that were strewn along the edge of the stream, she arranged them so as to make an elevated platform upon which she heaped dry leaves, brushwood and dead branches. Over it she suspended a tripod of sticks, and from this hung her iron kettle. Drawing from her pocket flint and steel, she struck them together, dropped a spark upon a piece of rotten wood, purred out her pretty cheeks and blew it into a flame. As the fire caught in the dry brushwood and began to leap heavenward, she followed it with her great brown eyes until it vanished into space. Her spirit thrilled with that same sense of awe and reverence which filled the souls of primitive men when they traced the course of the darting flames toward the sky. In the presence of fire, some form of worship is inevitable. Before conflagrations our reveries are transformed into prayers. The silently ascending tongues of flame carry us involuntarily into the presence of the Infinite.

Filling her kettle with water from the running brook, she stirred into it the herbs, the berries, the lizard, the frog and the cricket. This part of her work completed, she sat down upon a bed of moss, drew forth the sacred parchment and read its contents again and again.

"When the cauldron steams, dance about the fire and sing this song. As the last words die away Matizan will leap from the flames and reveal to thee the future."

Credulous child that she was, not the faintest shadow of a doubt floated across her mind. She thrust the parchment back into her bosom, and as the water began to bubble, leaped to her feet, threw her arms above her head, sprang into the air, and went whirling away in graceful curves and bacchantean dances.

There were in these movements, as in every dance, mysterious and perhaps incomprehensible elements.

Who can tell whether they have their origin in the will of the dancer alone, or in some outside force? The daisies in the meadow and the waves of the sea dance because they are agitated by the wind. The little cork automaton upon the sounding board of a piano dances because it is agitated by the vibrations of the strings. The little children in the alleys of a great city seem to be agitated in the same way by the hurdy-gurdy!

Perhaps the rhythmic beating of the feet upon the ground surcharges the body with electrical force, as by the touch of a magnet. There is a mystery in the simplest phenomena of life.

Pepeeta, dancing upon the green moss beneath the great beech trees, seemed to be in the hands of some external power, and could scarcely have been distinguished from an automaton! She had brought her tambourine, and holding it on high with her left hand or extending it far forward, she tapped it with her fingers or her knuckles, until all its brazen disks tingled and its little bells gave out a sweet and silvery tintinnabulation.

The dancer's movements were alternately sinuous, undulatory and gliding. At one moment her supple form, bending humbly toward the earth, resembled the stem of a lily over-weighted with its blossom; the next, a branch of a tree flung upward by a tempest; the next, a column of autumn leaves caught up by a miniature whirlwind and sent spinning along a winding path.

Her eyes glowed, her cheeks burned and her bosom heaved with excitement. She seemed either to have caught from nature her own mood, or else to have communicated hers to it, for while she danced all else danced with her, the water in the brook, the squirrels in the tree-tops, the shadows on the moss, and the leaves on the branches.

Following the directions of the parchment, she continued to spin and flutter around the fire until the water in the kettle began to boil. At the first ebullitions, she stood poised for an instant upon her toe, like the famous statue of Mercury, and so lightly that she seemed to be sustained by undiscoverable wings, or to float, like a bubble, of her own buoyancy.

Settling down at length as if she were a hummingbird lighting upon a flower, she began to circle slowly around the fire and sing. The melody was in a minor key and full of weird pathos. The words were these:

"God of the gypsy camp, Matizan, Matizan,
Open the future to me—
Me thy true worshiper, here in this solitude,
Offering this incense to thee.
"Matizan, Matizan, God of the future days,
Come in the smoke and the fire;
Kaffaran, Kaffaran, Muzsubar, Zanzarbee;
Bundemar, Omadar, Zire."

As the last syllable fell from her lips, the loathsome decoction boiled over, and the singer, pausing as if suddenly turned to marble, stood in statuesque beauty, her arms extended, her lips parted, her eyes fixed. Expectancy gave place to surprise, surprise to disappointment, disappointment to despair.

The lips began to quiver, the eyes to fill with tears; her girlish figure suddenly collapsed and sank upon the ground as the sail of a vessel falls to the deck when a sudden blast of wind has snapped its cordage.

While the broken-hearted and disillusioned priestess lay prostrate there, the fire spluttered, the birds sang cheerfully in the treetops, and the brook murmured to the grasses at its marge. No unearthly voice disturbed the tranquillity of the forest, and no unearthly presence appeared upon the scene. The great world spirit paid no more attention to the prone and weeping woman than to the motes, that were swimming gaily in the sunbeams.

As for her, poor child, her life faith had been dissipated in a single instant, and the whole fabric of her thought-world demolished in a single crash.

What had happened to the Quaker in the lumber camp, had befallen the gypsy in the forest. But while in his case the disappearance of faith had been followed by a sudden eruption of evil passions, in hers a vanished superstition had given place to a nascent spiritual life.

The seed of religious truth sown by his hand in the fertile soil of her heart already struck its roots deep down. She did not in any full degree comprehend his words; but that reiterated statement that "there is a light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world" had made an indelible impression upon her mind and was destined to accomplish great results.

As she lay crushed and desolate in her disillusionment, her mind began of its own accord suddenly to feed upon this new hope. She could not be said to have been reasoning, as David was doing in the cabin. Her nature was emotional rather than intellectual, or at least her powers of reason had never been developed. She could not therefore think her way through these pathless regions over which she was now compelled to pass; she could only feel her way. The thoughts which began to course through her mind did not originate in any efforts of the will, but issued spontaneously from the depths of her soul, and as they arose without volition, so did they flow on until they finally became as pure and clear as the waters of the brook by whose banks she lay.

When her emotions had expended their force and she arose, an experience befell her which revealed the immaturity of her mind.

The idea of that "inner light" had taken complete possession of her soul, and so when she suddenly perceived a long bright path of gold which a beam of the setting sun had thrown along the floor of the forest, like a shining track in the direction of the village, she thought it had emerged from the depths of her own spirit.

Without a moment's hesitation she entered this golden highway and sped along! Not for another instant did she regret the failure of the gypsy god to meet her. She knew well enough, now, the way to find her path amid the mysteries of life! She had but to follow this light!

The shining pathway led her to the summit of the hill; and as she began to descend the other slope, it vanished with the sun. But she was not troubled, for she saw at a glance that the brook to whose banks she was coming was the one flowing through the farm of the Quaker. "Perhaps I shall see him again," she said to herself, and the hope made her tumultuously happy.

She had lost all consciousness of the flight of time, and now noticed with surprise that it was evening. The crows were winging their way to their nesting ground; the rabbits were seeking their burrows; the whole animal world was faring homeward. Some universal impulse seemed to be driving them along their predestined paths, as it drove the brooks and the clouds, and Pepeeta appeared, as much as they, to be borne onward by a power above herself. She was but little more conscious of choosing her path than the doe who at a little distance was hurrying home to her mate; so completely were all her volitional powers in abeyance to the emotional elements of her soul.

CHAPTER IX.

WHERE PATHS CONVERGE

"If we do meet again, we'll smile indeed;
If not, 'tis true this parting was well made."
—Julius Caesar.

Violent emotions, like the lunar tides, must have their ebb because they have their flow. The feelings do not so much advance like a river, as oscillate like a pendulum.

Striding homeward after his downfall in the log cabin, David's determination to join his fortunes to those of the two adventurers began to wane. He trembled at an unknown future and hesitated before untried paths.

Already the strange experience through which he had just passed began to seem to him like a half-forgotten dream. The refluent thoughts and feelings of his religious life began to set back into every bay and estuary of his soul.

With a sense of shame, he regretted his hasty decision, and was saying to himself, "I will arise and go to my Father," for all the experiences of life clothed themselves at once in the familiar language of the Scriptures.

It is more than likely that he would have carried out this resolution, and that this whole experience would have become a mere incident in his life history, if his destiny had depended upon his personal volition. But how few of the great events of life are brought about by our choice alone!

Just at sunset, he crossed the bridge over the brook which formed the boundary line of the farm, and as he did so heard a light footstep. Lifting his eyes, he saw Pepeeta, who at that very instant stepped out of the low bushes which lined the trail she had been following.

Her appearance was as sudden as an apparition and her beauty dazzled him. Her face, flushed with exercise, gleamed against the background of her black hair with a sort of spiritual radiance. When she saw the Quaker, a smile of unmistakable delight flashed upon her features and added to her bewitching grace. She might have been an Oread or a Dryad wandering alone through the great forest. What bliss for youth and beauty to meet thus at the close of day amid the solitudes of Nature!

Had Nature forgotten herself, to permit these two young and impressionable beings to enjoy this pleasure on a lonely road just as the day was dying and the tense energies of the world were relaxed? There are times when her indifference to her own most inviolable laws seems anarchic. There are moments when she appears wantonly to lure her children to destruction.

They gazed into each other's eyes, they knew not how long, with an incomprehensible and delicious joy, and then looked down upon the ground. Having regained their composure by this act, they lifted their eyes and regarded each other with frank and friendly smiles.

"I thought thee had gone," said David.

"We stayed longer than we expected," Pepeeta replied.

"Has thee been hunting wild flowers?" he asked, observing the bouquet which she held in her hand.

"I picked them on the way."

"Has thee been walking far?"

"I have not thought."

"It is easy to walk in these spring days."

"I must have found it so, for I have been out since sunrise, and am not tired."

"Thee does love the woods?"

"Oh, so much! I am a sort of wild creature and should like to live in a cave."

"I am afraid thee would always turn thy face homeward at dusk, as thee is doing now," he said with a smile.

"Oh, no! I am not afraid! I go because I must."

"I will join thee, if I may. The same path will take us toward our different destinations."

"Oh, I shall be glad, for I want to ask you many questions. I can think of nothing else but what I heard you say in the meeting house."

"I fear I have said some things which I do not understand myself," he replied, with a flush, remembering the experience through which he had just passed.

The path was wide enough for two, and side by side they moved slowly forward.

The somber garb in which he was dressed, and the brilliant colors of her apparel, afforded a contrast like that between a pheasant and a scarlet tanager. Color, form, motion—all were perfect. They fitted into the scene without a jar or discord, and enhanced rather than disturbed the harmony of the drowsy landscape.

As they walked onward, they vaguely felt the influence of the repose that was stealing upon the tired world; the intellectual and volitional elements of their natures becoming gradually quiescent, the emotions were given full sway. They felt themselves drawn toward each other by some irresistible power, and, although they had never before been conscious of any incompleteness of their lives, they suddenly discovered affinities of whose existence they had never dreamed. Their two personalities seemed to be absorbed into one new mysterious and indivisible being, and this identity gave them an incomprehensible joy. Over them as they walked, Nature brooded, sphynx-like. Their young and healthy natures were tuned in unison with the harmonies of the world like perfect instruments from which the delicate fingers of the great Musician evoked a melody of which she never tired, reserving her discords for a future day. On this delicious evening she permitted them to be thrilled through and through with joy and hope and she accompanied the song their hearts were singing with her own multitudinous voices. "Be happy," chirped the birds; "be happy," whispered the evening breeze; "be happy," murmured the brook, running along by their side and looking up into their faces with laughter. The whole world seemed to resound with the refrain, "Be happy! Be happy! for you are young, are young, are young!"

Pepeeta first broke the silence.

"I had never heard of the things about which you talked," she said.

"Thee never had? How could that be? I thought that every one knew them!"

"I must have lived in a different world from yours."

"What sort of a world has thee lived in?"

"A world of fairs and circuses, of traveling everywhere and never stopping anywhere."

"Has thee never been in a church?"

"Never until that night."

"And thee knows nothing of God?"

"Nothing except the gypsy god, and he was not like yours."

"And thee was happy?"

"I thought so until I heard what you said. Since then I have been full of care and trouble. I wish I knew what you meant! But I have seen that wonderful light!"

"Thee has seen it?"

"Yes, to-day! And I followed it; I shall always follow it."

"When does thee leave the village?" David asked, fearing the conversation would lead where he did not want to go.

"To-morrow," she said.

"Does thee think that the doctor would renew his offer to take me with him?"

"Do I think so? Oh! I am sure."

"Then I will go."

"You will go? Oh! I am so happy! The doctor was very angry; he has not been himself since. You don't know how glad he will be."

"But will not thee be happy, too?" he asked.

"Happier than you could dream," she answered with all the frankness of a child. "But what made you change your mind?"

"I will tell thee sometime; it is too late now. There is my home and I have much work to do before dark."

"Home!" she echoed. "I never had a home, or at least I cannot remember it. We have always led a roving life, here to-day and gone to-morrow. It must be sweet to have a home!"

"Thee has always led a roving life and wishes to have a home? I have always had a home, and wish to lead a roving life," said David.

They looked at each other and smiled at this curious contradiction. They smiled because they were not yet old enough to weep over the restlessness of the human heart.

Having reached the edge of the woods, where their paths separated, they paused.

"We must part," said David.

"Yes; but we shall meet to-morrow."

"We shall meet to-morrow."

"You are sure?"

"I am sure."

"You will not change your mind?"

"I could not if I would."

"Good-bye."

"Good-bye."

At the touch of their hands their young hearts were swayed by tender and tumultuous feelings. A too strong pressure startled them, and they loosened their grasp. The sun sank behind the hill. The shadows that fell upon their faces awakened them from their dreams. Again they said goodbye and reluctantly parted. Once they stopped and, turning, waved their hands; and the next moment Pepeeta entered the road which led her out of sight.

In this interview, the entire past of these two lives seemed to count for nothing.

If Pepeeta had never seen anything of the world; if she had issued from a nunnery at that very moment, she could not have acted with a more utter disregard of every principle of safety.

It was the same with David. The fact that he had been reared a Quaker; that he had been dedicated to God from his youth; that he had struggled all his days to be prepared for such a moment as this, did not affect him to the least degree.

The seasoning of the bow does not invariably prevent it from snapping. The drill on the parade ground does not always insure, courage for the battle. Nothing is more terrible than this futility of the past.

Such scenes as this discredit the value of experience, and attach a terrible reality to the conclusion of Coleridge, that "it is like the stern-light of a vessel—illuminating only the path over which we have traveled."

Nor did the future possess any more power over their destinies than the past. Not a conscious foreboding disturbed their enjoyment of that brief instant which alone can be called the present.

And yet, no moment in their after lives came up more frequently for review than this one, and in the light of subsequent events they were forced to recognize that during every instant of this scene there was an uneasy but unacknowledged sense of danger and wrong thrilling through all those emotions of bliss.

It is seldom that any man or woman enters into the region of danger without premonitions. The delicate instincts of the soul hoist the warning signals, but the wild passions disregard them.

It was to this moment that their consciences traced their sorrows; it was to that act of their souls which permitted them to enjoy that momentary rapture that they attached their guilt; it was at that moment and in that silent place that they planted the seeds of the trees upon which they were subsequently crucified.

CHAPTER X.

A POISONED SPRING

"It was the saying of a great man, that if we could trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes and all princes from slaves!"—Seneca.

Early the next morning the two adventurers took their departure.

The jovial quack lavished his good-byes upon the landlord and the "riff-raff" who gathered to welcome the coming or speed the parting guest at the door of the country tavern. He drove a pair of beautiful, spirited horses, and had the satisfaction of knowing that he excited the envy of every beholder, as he took the ribbons in his hand, swung out his long whip and started.

If her husband's heart was swelling with pride, Pepeeta's was bursting with anxiety. An instinct which she did not understand had prevented her from telling the doctor of her interview with the Quaker. Long before the farmhouse came in sight she began to scan the landscape for the figure which had been so vividly impressed upon her mind.

The swift horses, well fed and well groomed, whirled the light wagon along the road at a rapid pace and as they passed the humble home of the Quaker, Pepeeta saw a little child driving the cows down the long lane, and a woman moving quietly among the flowers in the garden; but David himself was not to be seen.

"He has gone," she said to herself joyously.

On through the beech grove, around the turn of the road, into full view of the bridge, they sped.

It was empty! And yet it was there that he had agreed to meet them!

A tear fell from her eye, and her chin quivered. With the utmost effort of her will she could not repress these evidences of her disappointment, and with a spasmodic motion she clutched the arm of the driver as if it were that of Destiny and she could hold it back.

So sudden and so powerful was the grasp of her young hand, that it turned the horses out of the road and all but upset the carriage.

With a violent jerk of the reins, the astonished driver pulled them back, and exclaimed with an oath:

"You little wild cat, if you ever d-d-do that again, I will throw you into the d-d-ditch!"

"Excuse me!" she answered humbly, cowering under his angry glances.

"What in the d-d-deuce is the matter?" he asked more kindly, seeing the tears in her eyes.

"I do not know. I am nervous, I guess," she answered sadly.

"Nervous? P-p-pepeeta Aesculapius nervous? I thought her nerves were m-m-made of steel? What is the m-m-matter?" he asked, looking at her anxiously.

His gentleness calmed her, and she answered: "I am sorry to leave a place where I have been so happy. Oh! why cannot we settle down somewhere and stay? I get so tired of being always on the wing. Even the birds have nests to rest in for a little while. Are we never going to have a home?"

"Nonsense, child! What do we want with a h-h-home? It is better to be always on the go. I want my liberty. It suits me best to fly through the heavens like a hawk or swim the deep sea like a shark. A home would be a p-p-prison. I should tramp back and forth in it like a polar bear in a c-c-cage."

Pepeeta answered with a sigh.

"Cheer up, child," he cried in his hearty fashion. "Your voice sounds like the squeak of a mouse! B-b-be gay! Be happy! How can you be sad on a morning like this? Look at the play of the muscles under the smooth skins of the horses! Remember the b-b-bright shining dollars that we coaxed out of the tightly b-b-buttoned breeches pockets of the gray-backed Q-Q-Quakers. What more do you ask of life? What else can it g-g-give?"

"It does not make me happy! I shall never be happy until I have a home," she said, still sobbing, and trying to conceal the cause of her grief from herself as well as from her husband.

Nothing could have astonished the great, well-fed animal by her side more than this confession. In all his life he had never heaved a sigh. His contentment was like that of a lion in a forest full of antelopes. But if he was fierce and cruel to others, he was at least kind to his mate, and he now put his great paw around her little shoulders and gave her one of his leonine kisses.

"You are as melancholy as an unstrung d-d-drum," he said. "I must cheer you up. How would you like a s-s-song? What shall it be? 'Love's Young D-D-Dream'? All right. Here g-g-goes."

And at the word, he opened his great mouth and stuttered it forth in stentorian tones that went bellowing among the hills like the echoes of thunder.

Pepeeta smiled at his kindness and was grateful for his clumsy efforts at consolation; but they did not dispel her sadness. Her spirits sank lower and lower. The light seemed to have faded out of the world, and the streams of joy to have run dry. She sighed again in spite of herself, and in that sigh exhaled the hope which had sprung from her heart at the prospects of a new and sweet companionship.

She had divined the cause of her disappointment with an unerring instinct. It was exactly as she thought. At the last instant, David's heart had failed him.

On the preceding evening, he had hurried through his "chores," excused himself from giving an account of the adventures of the day on the ground of fatigue, and retired to his room to cherish in his heart the memories of that beautiful face and the prospects of the future. He could not sleep. For hours he tossed on his bed or sat in the window looking out into the night, and when at last he fell into an uneasy slumber his dreams were haunted by two faces which struggled ceaselessly to crowd each other from his mind. One was the young and passionate countenance of the gypsy, and the other was that of his beautiful mother with her pale, carven features, her snow-white hair, her pensive and unearthly expression. They both looked at him, and then gazed at each other. Now one set below the horizon like a wan, white moon, and the other rose above it like the glowing star of love. Now the moon passed over the glowing star in a long eclipse and then disappearing behind a cloud left the brilliant star to shine alone.

When he awoke the gray dawn revealed in vague outline the realities of the world, and warned him that he had but a few moments to execute his plans. He sprang from his couch strong in his purpose to depart, for the fever of adventure was still burning in his veins, and the rapturous looks with which Pepeeta had received his promise to be her companion still made his pulses bound. He hurriedly put a few things into a bundle and stole out of the house.

As he moved quietly but swiftly away from the familiar scenes, his heart which had been beating so high from hope and excitement began to sink in his bosom. He had never dreamed of the force of his attachment to this dear place, and he turned his face toward the old gray house again and again. Every step away from it seemed more difficult than the last, and his feet became heavy as lead. But he pressed on, ashamed to acknowledge his inability to execute his purpose. He came to the last fence which lay between him and the bridge where he had agreed to await the adventurers, and then paused.

He was early. There was still time to reflect. Had the carriage arrived at that moment he would have gone; but it tarried, and the tide of love and regret bore him back to the old familiar life. "I cannot go. I cannot give it up," he murmured to himself.

Torn by conflicting emotions, inclining to first one course and then another, he finally turned his face away from the bridge and fled, impelled by weakness rather than desire. He did not once look back, but ran at the top of his speed straight to the old barn and hid himself from sight. There, breathless and miserable, he watched. He had not long to wait. The dazzling "turn-out" dashed into view. On the high seat he beheld Pepeeta, saw the eager glance she cast at the farm house, followed her until they arrived at the bridge, beheld her disappointment, raved at his own weakness, rushed to the door, halted, returned, rushed back again, returned, threw himself upon the sweet smelling hay, cursed his weakness and indecision and finally surrendered himself to misery.

From the utter wretchedness of that bitter hour, he was roused by the ringing of the breakfast bell. Springing to his feet, he hastened to the spring, bathed his face, assumed a cheerful look and entered the house.

For the first time in his life he attempted the practice of deception, and experienced the bitterness of carrying a guilty secret in his bosom. How he worried through the morning meal and the prayer at the family altar, he never knew, and he escaped with inexpressible relief to the stable and the field to take up the duties of his daily life. He found it plodding work, for the old inspirations to endeavor had utterly vanished. He who had hitherto found toil a beatitude now moved behind the plow like a common drudge.

Tired of the pain which he endured, he tried again and again to forget the whole experience and to persuade himself that he was glad the adventure had ended; but he knew in his heart of hearts that he had failed to follow the gypsy, not because he did not really wish to, but because he did not wholly dare. The consciousness that he was not only a bad man but a coward, added a new element to the bitterness of the cup he was drinking.

Each succeeding day was a repetition of the first, and became a painful increment to his load of misery and unrest. The very world in which he lived seemed to have undergone a transformation. The sunlight had lost its glory, the flowers had become pale and odorless, the songs of the birds dull and dispiriting.

What had really changed was the soul of the young recluse and mystic. The consciousness of God had vanished from it; the visions of the spiritual world no longer visited it; he ceased to pray in secret, and the petitions which he offered at the family altar were so dull and spiritless as even to excite the observation and comment of his little nephew.

"Uncle Dave," remarked that fearless critic, "you pray as if you were talking down a deep well."

No wonder that the child observed the fact upon which he alone had courage to comment, for there is as great a difference between a prayer issuing from the heart and one merely falling from the lips as between water gushing from a fountain and rain dripping from a roof.

Some men pass their lives in the midst of environments where insincerity would not have been so painful; but in a home and a community where sham and hypocrisy were almost unknown these perpetual deceptions became more and more intolerable with every passing hour. Nothing could be more certain than that in a short time, like some foreign substance in a healthy body, his nature would force him out of this uncongenial environment. With some natures the experience would have been a slow and protracted one, but with him the termination could not be long delayed.

It came in a tragedy at the close of the next Sabbath. The day had been dreary, painful and exasperating beyond all endurance, and he felt that he could never stand the strain of another. And so, having detained his mother in the sitting room after the rest of the family had retired, he paced the floor for a few moments, and after several unsuccessful attempts to introduce the subject gently, said bluntly:

"Mother, I am chafing myself to death against the limitations of this narrow life."

"My son," she said calmly, "this has not come to me as a surprise."

He moved uneasily and looked as if he would ask her "Why?"

"Because," she said, as if he had really spoken, "a mother possesses the power of divination, and can discern the sorrows of her children, by a suffering in her own bosom."

The consciousness that he had caused her pain rendered him incapable of speech, and for a moment they sat in silence.

"What is thy wish and purpose, my son?" she asked at last, with an effort which seemed to exhaust her strength.

"I wish to see the world," he answered, his eye kindling as he spoke.

This reply, foreseen and expected as it was, sent a shiver through her. She turned paler, if possible, than before; but summoning all the powers of self-control resident in that disciplined spirit, she replied with an enforced tranquillity:

"My son, does thee know what this world is which thee fain would see?"

"I have seen it in my dreams. I have heard its distant voices calling to me. My spirit chafes to answer their summons. I strain at my anchor like a great ship caught by the tide."

"Shall I tell thee what this world of which thee has dreamed such dreams is really like, my son?" she asked, struggling to maintain her calm.

"How should thee know?"

"I have seen it."

"Thee has seen it? I thought that thee had passed thy entire life among the Quakers," he answered with surprise.

"I say that I have seen it. Shall I tell thee what it is?" she resumed, as if she had not heard him.

"If thee will," he answered, awed by a strange solemnity in her manner.

Her quick respirations had become audible. Small but intensely red spots were burning on either cheek. Her white hands trembled as they clutched the arms of the old rocking chair in which she sat.

"I will!" she said, regarding him with a look which seemed to devour him with yearning love. "This world whose voices thee hears calling is a fiction of thine own brain. That which thee thinks thee beholds of glory and beauty thee hast conjured up from the depths of a youthful and disordered fancy, and projected into an unreal realm. That world which thee has thus beheld in thy dreams will burst like a pin-pricked bubble when thee tries to enter it. It is not the real world, my son. How shall I tell thee what that real world is? It is a snare, a pit-fall. It is a flame into which young moths are ever plunging. It promises, only to deceive; it beckons, only to betray; its smiles are ambushes; it is sunlight on the surface, but ice at the heart; it offers life, but it confers death. I bid thee fear it, shun it, hate it!"

She leaned far forward in her chair, and her face upon which the youth had never seen any other look but that of an almost unearthly calm, was glowing with excitement and passion.

"Mother," he exclaimed, "what does thee know of this world, thee who has passed thy life in lonely places and amongst a quiet people?"

She rose and paced the floor as if to permit some of her excitement to escape in physical activity, and pausing before him, said: "My only and well-beloved son, thee does not know thy mother. A veil has been drawn over that portion of her life which preceded thy birth, and its secrets are hidden in her own heart. She has prayed God that she might never have to bring them forth into the light; but he has imposed upon her the necessity of opening the grave in which they are buried, in order that, seeing them, thee may abandon thy desires to taste those pleasures which once lured thy mother along the flower-strewn pathway to her sin and sorrow."

Her solemnity and her suffering produced in the bosom of her son a nameless fear. He could not speak. He could only look and listen.

"Thee sees before thee," she continued, "the faded form and features of a woman once young and beautiful. Can thee believe it?"

He did not answer, for she had seemed to him as mothers always do to children, to have been always what he had found her upon awakening to consciousness. He could not remember when her hair was not gray.

Something in her manner revealed to the startled soul of the young Quaker that he was about to come upon a discovery that would shake the very foundation of his life; for a moment he could not speak.

The silence in which she awaited the answer to her question became profound and in it the ticking of the old clock sounded like the blows of a blacksmith's hammer, the purring of the cat like the roar of machinery, and the beating of his heart like the dull thud of a battering ram.

As if reading his inmost thoughts, the white-faced woman said: "And so thee thought that I was always old and gray?"

As she uttered these words in a tone of indescribable sadness, a faint smile played around the corners of her mouth—such a marble smile as might have appeared upon the face of Niobe. In an instant more it had composed itself into its former sadness, as a sheet of pure water resumes its calmness, after having been lightly stirred by a summer wind.

So long did she stand regarding him with looks of unutterable love that he could not endure the strain of the withheld secret, but exclaimed hoarsely: "Go on! Mother, for God's sake, go on! If thee has something to disclose, reveal it at once!"

It seemed impossible for her to speak. The opening of the secrets of her heart to God before the bar of judgment could have cost her no greater effort than this confession to her son.

"David," she said, in a voice that sounded like an echo of a long-dead past, "the fear that the sins of thy parents should be visited upon thee has tormented every hour of my life. I have watched thee and prayed for thee as no one but a mother who has drunk the bitter cup to its dregs could ever do. I have trembled at every childish sin. In every little fault I have beheld a miniature of the vices of thy mother and thy father—thy father! Oh! David, my son—my son!"

The white lips parted, but no sound issued from them. She raised her white hand and clutched at her throat as if choking. Then she trembled, gasped, reeled, and fell forward into his arms.

In a moment more, the agitated heart had ceased to beat, and the secret of her life was hidden in its mysterious silence. The sudden, inexplicable and calamitous nature of this event came near unsettling the mental balance of the sensitive and highly organized youth. Coming as it did upon the very heels of the experiences which had so thoroughly shaken his faith in the old life, he felt himself to be the target for every arrow in the quiver of misfortune.

He seemed to himself not so much like a boat that had sprung a single leak, as like one out of which every nail had been pulled and the joints left open to the inrushing waters.

Into the unfilled gap in his mother's narrative, ten thousand suspicions crept, each displacing the other and leaving him more and more in darkness and in dread with regard to the origin of his own life. Wherever he went and whatever he did these confused suspicions resounded in his ears like the murmur in a seashell.

He did not dare communicate this story even to his sister; for if she knew nothing he feared to poison her existence by telling her, and if she knew all he had not the courage to listen to the sequel. Perhaps no other experience in life produces a more profound shock than a discovery like that upon which David had so suddenly stumbled. It leads to despair or to melancholy, and many a life of highest promise has been suddenly wrecked by it. While he brooded over this mystery the days slipped past the young mystic almost unnoted; he wandered about the farm, passing from one fit of abstraction into another, doing nothing, saying nothing, thinking everything.

The world was shrouded in a gloom through whose shifting mists a single star shone now and then, emitting a brilliant and dazzling ray. It was the figure of a gypsy.

In his heavy, aching heart thoughts of her alone aroused an emotion of joy. As other objects lost their power to attract or charm, she more and more filled all his horizon.

Her name was whispered by each passing breeze. It was syllabled by every singing bird. The old clock ticked it on the stairway. The hoofs of his horse which he rode recklessly over the country uttered it to the hard roads on which they fell—"Pepeeta, Pepeeta, Pepeeta."

Whenever he really tried to banish the temptations which haunted his soul, they always returned to the swept and garnished chamber bringing with them seven spirits worse than themselves.

He tried to look forward to the future with hope. But how can a man hope for harvests, when all his seed corn has been destroyed? If his father was bad, what hope was there that he could be better?

He made innumerable resolves to take up the duties of life where he had laid them down, but they were all like birds which die in the nest where they are born.

Pepeeta was drawing him irresistibly to herself; he was like a man in the outer circle of a vortex, of which she was the center. The touch of her soft hand which he could still feel, the farewell glance of eyes which still glowed before his imagination, attracted him like a powerful magnet. It was true that he did not know where she was; but he felt that he could find her in the uttermost parts of the earth by yielding himself to the impulse which she had awakened in his heart.

"A dark veil of mystery hangs over my past. My present is full of misery and unrest. I will see if the future has any joys in store for me," he said to himself at the close of one of his restless days.

Without so much as a word of farewell, he crept out of the house in the gathering dusk, and started in pursuit of the bright object that floated like a will-o'-the-wisp before his inner eye.

A feeling of exultation and relief seized him as he left the place made dark and dreadful by the memory of that tragic scene through which he had so recently passed; the quiet of the evening soothed his perturbed spirits, and the tranquil stars looked down upon him with eyes that twinkled as if in sympathy.

It is an old tradition of the monks, that when the sap begins to run in the vines on sunny slopes, a revolt and discontent thrills in the bottles imprisoned in the darkness of the wine vaults. Such a discontent and fever had been thrilling in David's veins during these warm spring days, when the whole world had been in a ferment of life, and he had been bottled up in the gloom and narrowness of the little country village; and yielding himself to the emotions that seethed in his breast, he broke all the tender ties of the past and went blindly into the future.

He had been suddenly fascinated by a beautiful woman and bewildered by an unscrupulous man; he had felt the foundations of his religious faith shaken, and discovered that his own life had sprung from an illicit passion. These are violent blows, and many a man has gone down before a single one of them. If the blows had been delivered singly at long intervals he might have survived the shock; but following each other in swift succession like great tidal waves they had literally swept him from his moorings.

Such collapses fill us with horror and questioning. How do they come about? Can they be prevented? These are the deepest problems of life, and our psychology is still impotent to solve them. We can detect and measure the dross in metals or the poison in drugs; but we have no solvent that will reduce a complex nature like David's into its original elements and enable us to differentiate a son's responsibility from that of his father.

We make bold guesses and confident affirmations as to the comparative influence of heredity and environment. We enter into learned disputations as to the blessing or the bane of an education such as his. But every such case is still a profound and insoluble mystery. The most comprehensive laws and the most careful generalizations meet with too many exceptions to enable us to form a science. The children of the good are too often bad and the children of the bad too often good to permit us to dogmatize about heredity. We learn as our experience deepens and our horizon widens to regard such collapses with a compassionate sympathy and a humbled consciousness of our own unfitness to judge and condemn. Whether we create our individuality or only bring it to light—is the question that makes us stumble! But while we move in the midst of uncertainties in this realm, there is another in which we walk in the glare of noonday. We know beyond the peradventure of a doubt that whatever may be the origin of such weakness as that of the young mystic, the results are always inevitable! Nature never asks any questions nor makes any allowances. To her mind, sin is sin! Whatsoever a man sows—that shall he also reap. Whether he yield to evil voluntarily or be driven into it by resistless force; whether he sin because of a self-originating propensity or because his father sinned before him, is all one to those resistless executors of Nature's law, sickness, sorrow, disaster, death!

No man ever defeated Nature! No man ever will! From the instant when he turned his back upon his home, David's fate was sealed. He was playing against a certainty and he knew it. But he ought to have remembered it! It was of this that he ought to have been thinking, and not of the gypsy's eyes!

Sometimes such men escape from the final catastrophe of the long series; but not from the intermediate lashings!

This brutal, idiotic step of Corson's looks like a final plunge; a fatal fall; a hopeless retrogression. But we must not judge prematurely. "Man advances; but in spiral lines," said Goethe. The river goes forward, in spite of its eddies. You can complete a geometric circle from a minute portion of its curve; but not a human cycle. We can not predict the final issue of a human life until the last sigh is drawn.

CHAPTER XI.

THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL

"To tell men they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair."—Froude.

Although David did not know the exact route the quack had laid out for his journey, he was certain that it would be easy enough to trace him in that sparsely-settled region, and so he turned his face in the direction in which the equipage vanished when he watched it from the barn. His movements did not seem to come from his own volition but to originate in something external. He had a sense of yielding to necessity. There are heroic moments in our lives, when that subtle force we call our "will" demonstrates, or at all events persuades us, that we are "free." There are others, like those through which the young adventurer was now passing, when we experience a feeling of utter helplessness amidst cosmic forces and believe ourselves to be straws in a mighty wind or ill-fated stars borne along a predestined orbit.

Surrendering himself to the current of events, the recalcitrant Quaker escaped for a time the painful consciousness of personal responsibility.

The tranquil stars above him seemed to look down upon the wanderer in silent approval. The night birds chanted their congratulations from the tree tops, and reading his own thoughts into their songs he imagined he heard them saying, "Let each one find his mate; let each one find his mate."

The cool night breeze caressed and kissed him as it hurried by on silent wings, and for an hour or two he tramped along with a peace in his heart which seemed to be a reflection from the outside world.

But gradually a change came over the face of nature, and this, too, reflected itself in the mirror of his soul.

In the heavens above him the clouds commenced to gather like hostile armies. They skirmished, sent out their flying battalions and then fell upon each other in irresistible fury. Great, jagged flashes of lightning, like sword thrusts from gigantic and hidden hands rent the sky; wild crashes of thunder pealed through the reverberating dome of heaven; the rain fell in torrents; the elements of nature seemed to have evaded their master, vaulted their barriers and precipitated themselves in a furious struggle.

The lonely pilgrim perceived the resemblance which his conflicting emotions bore to this wild scene, and smiled grimly. He found in all this tumult a justification for the tempest in his soul.

It was not until the light of morning struggled through this universal gloom, that the weary and bedraggled traveler entered the outskirts of the then straggling but growing and busy village of Hamilton. Tired in body and benumbed in mind, he made his way to the hotel, conscious only of his desire and determination to look once more upon the face of the woman whose image was so indelibly impressed upon his mind.

Approaching the desk he nervously asked if the doctor was among the guests, flushed at the answer, demanded a room, ascended the steep staircase, and was soon in bed and asleep. Fatigued by his long tramp, he did not awaken until after noon, and then, having bathed, dressed and broken his long fast, he knocked at the door of the room occupied by the doctor and his wife.

There was a quick but gentle step in answer to his summons, and at the music of that footfall his heart beat tumultuously. The door opened, and before him stood the woman who had brought about this mysterious train of events in his life.

She started back as she saw him, with an involuntary and timid motion, but so great was her surprise and joy that she could not control her speech or action sufficiently to greet him.

"Who is there?" cried the doctor, in his loud, imperative voice.

"Mr. Corson," she answered in tones that were scarcely audible.

"Corson? Who the d-d-deuce is Corson, and what the deuce does he want?" he asked, rising and approaching the door.

The instant his eyes fell on the countenance of the Quaker, he threw up both hands and uttered a prolonged whistle of astonishment.

"The preacher!" he exclaimed. "The lost is found. The p-p-prodigal has returned. Come in, and let us k-k-kill the fatted calf!"

Coarse as the welcome was, it was full of sincerity, and its heartiness was like balm to the wounded spirit of the youth. He grasped the extended hand and permitted himself to be drawn into the room.

Pepeeta, who had recovered from the first shock of surprise and delight, came forward and greeted him with a shy reserve. She gave him her hand, and its gentle touch reanimated his soul. She smiled at him,—a gracious smile, and its light illumined the darkness of his heart. His sadness vanished. He once more felt an emotion of joy.

The excitement of their meeting having subsided they seated themselves, David in an easy chair, the doctor on the broad couch, and Pepeeta on a little ottoman at his feet. Vivid green curtains partially obscured the bright sunshine which beat upon the windows. The wall-paper was cheap, vulgar, faded. On the floor was an old ingrain carpet full of patches and spattered with ink stains. A blue-bottle fly buzzed and butted his head against the walls, and through the open casement hummed the traffic of the busy little town.

Nothing could have been more expressive of triumph and delight than the face of the quack. Whenever his feelings were particularly bland and expansive, he had a way of taking the ends of his enormous moustache and twirling them between his spatulate thumbs and fingers. He did this now, and twisted them until the coarse hairs could be heard grating against each other.

"Well, well!" he said, "so you could not resist the temptation? Ha! ha! ha! No wonder! It's not every young fellow behind the p-p-plow-tail that has a fortune thrust under his nose. Shows your g-g-good sense. I was right. I always am. I knew you were too bright a man to hide your light under a half b-b-bushel of a village like that. In those seven-by-nine towns, all the sap dries out of men, and before they are forty they begin to rattle around like peas in a p-p-pod. In such places young men are never anything but milk sops, and old men anything but b-b-bald-headed infants! You needed to see the world, young man. You required a teacher. You have put yourself into good hands, and if you stay with me you shall wear d-d-diamonds."

"Whatever the results may be, I have determined to make the experiment," said David, shrugging his shoulders.

"Right you are. But what b-b-brought you round? You were as stiff as a ramrod when I left you."

"Circumstances over which I had no control, and which I want to forget as soon as possible. My old life has ended and I have come to seek a new one."

"A new life? That's good. Well—we will show it to you, P-P-Pepeeta and I! We will show you."

"The sooner the better. What am I to do?"

"Not too fast! There are times when it is better to g-g-go slow, as the snail said to the lightning. We must make a b-b-bargain."

"Make it to suit yourself."

"You d-d-don't expect me to stick to my old offer, I reckon. When I made it, Mahomet went to the m-m-mountain, and now the mountain comes to Mahomet; see?"

"Do as you please, I am in no mood to split hairs, nor pennies. All I ask is a chance to put my foot upon the first round of the ladder and if I do not get to the top, I shall not hold you responsible," David replied, dropping the "thees" of his Quaker life, in his determination to divest himself of all its customs as rapidly as he could.

"Hi! hi! There's fire in the flint! Good thing! you don't want to split pennies! Well, if you d-d-don't, I don't. You take me on the right side, D-D-Davy. I'll do the square thing by you—see if I d-d-don't. Let's have a drink. Bring the bottle, Pepeeta!"

She went to the mantel and returned with a flask and two glasses. The quack filled them both and passed one to David. It was the first time in his life that he had ever even smelt an intoxicant. He recoiled a little; but having committed himself to his new life, he determined to accept all that it involved. He lifted the fiery potion to his lips, and drank.

"Hot, is it, my son?" cried the doctor, laughing uproariously at his wry face. "You Quakers drink too much water! Freezes inside of you and t-t-turns you into what you might call two-p-p-pronged icicles. Give me men with red blood in their veins! And there's nothing makes b-b-blood red like strong liquors!"

The whisky revived the courage and loosened the tongue of the youth. The repugnance which he had instinctively felt for the vulgar quack began to mellow into admiration. He asked and answered many questions.

"What part am I to take in this business?" he asked.

"What part are you to take in the business? That's good, 'Never put off till to-morrow what you can d-d-do to-day.' 'Business first and then pleasure.' 'The soul of business is dispatch.' These are good mottoes, my lad. I learned them from the wise men; but if I had not learned them, I should have invented them. What's your p-p-part of the business, says you; listen! You are to be its m-m-mouth-piece. That tongue of yours must wag like the tail of a d-d-dog; turn like a weather-vane; hiss like a serpent, drip with honey and poison, be tipped with p-p-persuasion; tell ten thousand t-t-tales, and every tale must sell a bottle of p-p-panacea!"

He paused, and looked rapturously upon the face of his pupil.

"This panacea—has it merits? Will it really cure?" asked David.

The doctor laughed long and loud.

"Has it merits? Will it really cure? Ho! ho! 'Is thy bite good for the b-b-backache?' said the sick mouse to the cat. What difference does it make whether it will cure or not? Success in b-b-business is not based upon the quality of the m-m-merchandise, my son."

"Upon what, then?" said David.

"Upon the follies, the weaknesses and the p-p-passions of mankind! Since time began, a universal panacea' has been a sure source of wealth. It makes no difference what the panacea is, if you only have the b-b-brains to fool the people. There are only two kinds of people in the world, my son—the fools and f-f-foolers!"

Even whisky could not make David listen to this cold-blooded avowal without a shudder.

The keen eye of the quack detected it; but instead of adulterating his philosophy, he doubled his dose.

"Shocks you, does it? You will g-g-get over that. We are not angels! we are only men. Remember what old Jack Falstaff said? 'If Adam fell in a state, of innocency, what shall I d-d-do in a state of villainy?'"

The boldness of the man and the radicalness of his philosophy dazzled and fascinated the inexperienced youth.

This was what the astute and unscrupulous instructor expected, and he determined to pursue his advantage and effect, if possible, the complete corruption of his pupil in a single lesson; and so he continued:

"Got to live, my son! Self-p-p-preservation is the first law, and so we must imitate the rest of the b-b-brute creation, and live off of each other! The big ones must feed upon the little and the strong upon the weak. 'Every man for himself and the d-d-devil take the hindmost!' That's my religion."

"You may be right," said David, "but I cannot say that I take to it kindly. I do not see how a man can practice this cruelty and injustice without suffering."

"Suffering! Idea of suffering is greatly exaggerated. Ever watch a t-t-toad that was being swallowed by a snake? Looks as if he positively enjoyed it. It's his mission. Born to be eaten! If there was as much pain in the world as p-p-people say, do you think anybody could endure it! Isn't the d-d-door always open? Can't a man quit when he wants to? Suffering! Pshaw! Do I look as if I suffered? Does Pepeeta look as if she suffered? And yet she b-b-bamboozles them worse than I do."

The head of the gypsy bent lower and lower over her crocheting.

"She plays upon them like a fife! They d-d-dance when she whistles! Next to wanting a universal panacea for pain, the idiots want a knowledge of the future! Everybody but me wants to know what kind of a to-morrow God Almighty has made for him. I make my own to-morrows! I don't ask to have my destiny made up for me like a t-t-tailor coat. I make my own destiny. If things d-d-don't come my way, I just pull them! People talk about 'following Providence!' I follow Providence as an Irishman follows his wheel-barrow. I shove it! See? But that is not the way of the rest of them, thank Fortune! And so Pepeeta gathers them in! Strange fish g-g-get into her net, Davy. Back there in your own little t-t-town she caught some of your long-faced old Quakers, b-b-big fellows with broad-brimmed hats, drab coats and ox eyes, regular meetin'-goers! And there was that little d-d-dove-eyed girl. What was it she wanted to know, P-P-Pepeeta? Tell him. Ha! ha! Tell him and we will see him b-b-blush."

"She asked me if her father was going to send her to Philadelphia this winter," she answered, without lifting her eyes.

"I don't mean that!"

"She asked me whether I could tell them where to find the spotted heifer."

"The d-d-deuce, child! Why don't you tell me what she asked you 'bout D-D-Davy?"

"It is time for us to go to supper or we shall be late," she replied, laying aside her work and rising.

"Sure enough!" cried the doctor, springing to his feet. "The Q-Q-Quaker has knocked everything out of my head. Come on!"

He rose and began bustling about the room.

When Pepeeta glanced up from her work she saw in David's eye a grateful appreciation of her courtesy and tact, and his look filled her with a new happiness.

The disgust awakened in the Quaker's mind by the coarseness of the quack was more than offset by the beauty and grace of the gypsy. When he looked at her, when he was even conscious of her presence, he felt a happiness which compensated for all that he had suffered or lost. He did not stop to ask what its nature was. He had cast discretion to the winds. He had in these few hours since his departure broken so utterly with the past that he was like a man who had been suddenly awakened from a long lapse of memory. His old life was as if it had never been. He felt himself to be in a vacuum, where all his ideas must be newly created. This epoch of his experience was superimposed upon the other like a different geological formation. Like the old monks in their cells, he was deliberately trying to erase from the parchment of his soul all that had been previously written, in order that he might begin a new life history.

CHAPTER XII.

THE MOTH AND THE FLAME

"Misled by Fancy's meteor-ray
By passion driven:
But yet the light that led astray
Was light from heaven."
—Burns.

A little before dusk the three companions started upon their evening's business. The horses and carriage were waiting at the door and they mounted to their seats. David was embarrassed by the novelty of the situation, and Pepeeta by his presence; but the quack was in his highest spirits. He saluted the bystanders with easy familiarity, ostentatiously flung the hostler a coin, flourished his whip and excited universal admiration for his driving.

During the turn which they took around the city for an advertisement, he indoctrinated his pupil with the principles of his art.

"People to-day are just what they were centuries ago. G-g-gull 'em just as easy. Make 'em think the moon is made of g-g-green cheese—way to catch larks is to p-p-pull the heavens down—extract sunbeams from c-c-cucumbers and all the rest! There's one master-weakness, Davy. They all think they are sick, or if they d-d-don't, you can make 'em!"

"What! Make a well man think he is sick?" the Quaker asked in astonishment.

"Sure! That's the secret of success. I can pick out the strongest man in the c-c-crowd and in five minutes have pains shooting through him like g-g-greased lightning. They are all like jumping-jacks to the man that knows them. You watch me pull the string and you-you'll see them wig-wig-wiggle."

"It seems a pity to take advantage of such weakness in our fellow men," said David, whose heart began to suffer qualms as he contemplated this rascality and his own connection with it.

"Fellow men! They are no fellows of mine. They are nuts for me to c-c-crack. They are oysters for me to open!" responded the quack, as he drove gaily into the public square and checked the horses, who stood with their proud necks arched, champing their bits and looking around at the crowd as if they shared their master's contempt.

Pepeeta descended from the carriage and made her way hastily into the tent which had already been pitched for her. The doctor lighted his torch and set his stock of goods in order while David, obeying his directions, began to move among the people to study their habits. Elbowing his way here and there, he contemplated the crowd in the light of the quack's philosophy, and as he did so received a series of painful mental shocks.

"The first principle in the art of painting a picture is to know where to sit down;" in other words, everything depends upon the point of view. Now that David began to look for evidences of the weaknesses and follies of his fellow men, he saw them everywhere. For the first time in his life he observed that startling prevalence of animal types which always communicates such a shock to the mind of him who has never discovered it before. Every countenance suddenly seemed to be the face of a beast, but thinly and imperfectly veiled. There were foxes and tigers and wolves, there were bulldogs and monkeys and swine. He had always seen, or thought he saw, upon the foreheads of his fellow men some evidence of that divinity which had been communicated to them when God breathed into the great first father the breath of life; but now he shuddered at the sight of those thick lips and drooping jaws, those dull or crafty eyes, those sullen, sodden, gargoyle features, as men do at beholding monstrosities.

A few weeks ago he would have felt a profound pity at this discovery, but so rapid and radical had been the alteration in his feelings that he was now seized by a sudden revulsion and contempt. "Are these creatures really men?" he asked himself. He stood there among them taller, straighter, keener, handsomer than them all, and the old feelings that have made men aristocrats and tyrants in every age of the world, surged in his heart and hardened it against them.

By this time the quack had finished his few simple preparations, and, standing erect before his audience, began the business of the evening.

Having observed the habits of the game, David now chose a favorable position to study those of the hunter. He watched with an almost breathless interest every expression upon that sinister face and listened with a boundless interest to every word that fell from those treacherous lips.

He was not long in justifying the quack's honest criticism of his own oratory. His voice lacked the vibrant tones of a musical instrument and his rhetoric that fluency, without which the highest effects of eloquence can never be attained. By speaking very slowly and deliberately he avoided stammering, but this always acted like a dragging anchor upon the movement of his thought. These were radical defects, but in every other respect he was a consummate artist. He arrested the attention of his hearers with an inimitable skill and held it with an irresistible power.

His piercing eye noted every expression on the faces of his hearers, and seemed to read the inmost secrets of their hearts. He perceived the slightest inclination to purchase, and was as keen to see a hand steal towards a pocket-book as a cat to see a mouse steal out of its hole.

He coaxed, he wheedled, he bantered, he abused,—he even threatened. He fulfilled his promise to the letter, "to make the well men think that they were sick," and many a stalwart frontiersman whose body was as sound as an ox, began to be conscious of racking pains.

Nor were those legitimate arts of oratory the only ones which this arch-knave practiced.

"I gave you two dollars, and you only gave me change for one," cried a thin-faced, stoop-shouldered, helpless-looking fellow, who had just purchased a bottle of the "Balm of the Blessed Islands."

With lightning-like legerdemain the quack had shuffled this bill to the bottom of his pile, and lifting up the one that lay on top, exposed it to the view of his audience.

"That's a lie!" he said, in his slow, impressive manner. "There is always such a man as this in every crowd. Some one is always trying to take advantage of those who, like myself, are living for the public good. Gentlemen, you saw me lay the b-b-bill he gave me down upon the top! Here it is; judge for yourselves. That is a bad man! Beware of him!"

The bold effrontery of the quack silenced the timid customer, who could only blush and look confused. His blushes and confusion condemned him and the crowd hustled him away from the wagon. They believed him guilty and he half believed it of himself.

David, who had seen the bill and knew the victim's innocence but not the doctor's fraud, pressed forward to defend him. The quack stopped and silenced him with an inimitable wink, and then instantly and with consummate art diverted his auditors with a series of droll stories which he always reserved for emergencies like this. They were old and thread-bare, but this was the reason he chose them. He had one for every circumstance and occasion.

There was a man standing in an outer circle of the crowd around whose forehead was a bandage. "Come here, my friend," said the quack. "How did you get this wound? Don't want to tell? Oh! well, that is natural. A horse kicked him, no doubt; never got it in a row! No! No! Couldn't any one hit him! Reminds me of the man who saw a big black-and-blue spot on his boy's forehead. 'My son,' said he, 'I thought I told you not to fight? How did you get this wound?' 'I bit it, father,' replied the boy.

"'Bit it!' exclaimed the old man in astonishment, 'how could you bite yourself upon the forehead?'

"'I climbed onto a chair,' says he.

"And have you been climbing on a chair to bite your forehead, too, my friend?" he asked with humorous gravity, while a loud guffaw went up from the crowd.

"Well," he continued soothingly, "whether you did it or not, just let me rub a little of this b-b-balm upon it, and by to-morrow morning it will be well. There! that's right. One dollar is all it costs. You don't want it? What the d-d-deuce did you let me open the b-b-bottle for? I'll leave it to the crowd if that is fair? There, that is right. Pay for it like a man. It's worth double its price. Thank you. By to-morrow noon you will b-b-be sending me a testimonial to its value. Do you want to hear some of my testimonials, gentlemen?"

The crowd shuffled and stood over on its other foot. The doctor, putting an enormous pair of spectacles upon his nose, took up a piece of paper and pretended to read slowly and carefully to avoid stammering:

"'Dr. Aesculapius.

"'Dear Sir: I was wounded in the Mexican war. I have been unable to walk without crutches for many years; but after using your liniment, I ran for office!' Think of it, gentlemen, the day of miracles has not passed. 'I lost my eyesight four years ago, but used a bottle of your "wash" and saw wood.' Saw wood, gentlemen, what do you think of that? He saw wood! 'Some time ago I lost the use of both arms; but a kind friend furnished me with a box of your pills, and the next day I struck a man for ten dollars.' There is a triumph of the medical art, my friends. And yet even this is surpassed by the following: 'I had been deaf for many years, stone deaf; but after using your ointment, I heard that my aunt had died and left me ten thousand dollars.' Think of it, gentlemen, ten thousand dollars! And a written guarantee goes with every bottle, that the first thing a stone-deaf man will hear after using this medicine will be that his aunt has died and left him ten thousand dollars."

During all these varied operations, David had never taken his eyes from the face of the quack. Even his quick wit had often been baffled by the almost superhuman adroitness of this past grandmaster of his art.

The novelty of the scene, the skill of the principal actor, the rapid growth of the piles of coin and bills, the frantic desire of the people to be gulled, all served to obscure those elements which were calculated to appeal to the Quaker's conscience. He felt like one awakened from a dream. While he was still in the half dazed condition of such an awakening, the quack gave him a sign that this part of his lesson was ended, and following the direction of the thumb which he threw over his shoulder towards Pepeeta's tent, he eagerly took his way thither.

Before the door stood several groups of young men and maidens, talking under their breath as if in the presence of some august deity. Now and then a couple disentangled itself from the crowd, and with visible trepidation entered. As they reappeared, their friends gathered about them and besought them to disclose the secrets they had discovered.

Some of them giggled and simpered, others laughed boisterously and skeptically, while others still, looked scared and anxious. It was evident that even those who tried to make light of what they had seen and heard were moved by something awe-inspiring.

David listened to their silly talk, observed their bold demeanor and their vulgar manners, while the impression of weakness, of stupidity, of the lowness and beastiality of humanity made upon his mind by the aged and the mature, was intensified by his observation of the young and callow.

He did not anywhere see a spark of true nobility. He did not hear a word of wisdom. Everything was moving on a low, material and animal plane. He felt that manhood and womanhood was not what he had believed it to be.

From the outside of the gypsy's tent, he could make but few discoveries of her method; and he waited impatiently until the last curious couple had departed. When they had disappeared, he entered.

At the opposite side of the tent and reclining upon a low divan was the gypsy. Above her head a tallow candle was burning dimly. Before her was a rough table covered with a shawl, upon which were scattered cups of tea with floating grounds, ivory dice, cards, coins and other implements of the "Black Art."

Pepeeta sprang to her feet when she saw who her visitor was, and exhibited the clearest signs of agitation. David's own emotions were not less violent, for although the gypsy's surroundings were poor and mean, they served rather to enhance than to diminish her exquisite beauty. Her shoulders and arms were bare, and on her wrists were gold bracelets of writhing serpents in whose eyes gleamed diamonds. On her fingers and in her ears were other costly stones. Her dress was silk, and rustled when she moved, with soft and sibilant sounds.

"The doctor has sent me here to study the methods by which you do your work," said David approaching the table and gazing at her with undisguised admiration.

"You should have come before. How can you study my methods when I am not practicing them? And any way, you have no faith in them. Have you? I always had until I heard your sermon in the little meeting house."

"And have you lost it now?"

"It has been sadly shaken."

"You can at least show me how you practice the art, even if you have lost your faith in it. I too have lost a faith; but we must live. What are these cards for?"

"If you wish me to show you, you may shuffle and cut them, but I would rather tell your fortune by your hand, for I have more faith in palmistry than in cards."

He extended his hand; she took it, and with her right forefinger began to trace the lines. Her gaze had that intensity with which a little child peers into the mechanism of a watch or an astronomer into the depths of space.

A thrill of emotion shot through the frame of the Quaker at the touch of those delicate and beautiful fingers.

The contrast between his own hands and hers was marked enough to be almost ridiculous. Hers were tiny, soft and white. His were large, brown and calloused. He thought to himself, "It is as if two little white mice were playing about an enormous trap which in a moment may seize them."

Neither of them, spoke. The delicate finger of the gypsy moved over the lines of the palm like that of a little school-girl over the pages of a primer. They did not realize how dangerous was that proximity, nor how fatal that touch. Through those two poles of Nature's most powerful battery, the magnetic and mysterious current of love was passing.

"What do you see?" said David, at last.

"Shall I tell you?" she asked, lifting her eyes to his.

"If you please," he said.

"I will do so if you wish; but if the story of your life is really written in the palm of your hands, it is sad indeed, and you would be happier if you knew it not."

"But it is not written there. I do not believe it, nor do you."

"Let us hope that it is not," she answered, and began the following monologue in a low musical monotone:

"Marked as it is with the signs of toil, this hand has still retained all those characteristics that an artist would choose as a model. It is perfect in its form. The palm is of medium size, the fingers without knots, the third phalanges are all long and pointed, and the thumb is beautifully shaped. Whoever possesses a hand like this must be guided by ideals. He is a worshiper of the sublime and beautiful. He disdains small achievements, embarks enthusiastically upon forlorn hopes, and is spurred to victory by the fervor of his desires.

"See this thumb! How finely it is pointed. The first phalanx is short, and indicates that above all other things he is a man of heart and will be dominated by his affections. He will yield to temptations, perhaps; but the second phalanx is long and reveals a power of reason and logic which will probably triumph at last."

Not a single word of all this had David heard. Her voice sounded to him like the low droning of bees in a meadow, and he had been watching the movements of her fingers, as he used to watch the dartings of the minnows in the pools of the brook which ran through his farm.

"How smooth the fingers are! And how they taper to the cone," continued Pepeeta. "Here is this one of Jupiter, for example. How plainly it tells of religiousness and perhaps of fanaticism! The Sun finger is not long. Nay, it is not long enough. There is too little love of glory here. And the Saturnian finger is too long. The life is too much under the dominion of Fate or Destiny. The Mercurial finger is short. He will be firm in his friendships. The moons all correspond. They, also, are too large. The Mount of Venus, here at the base of the thumb, is excessively developed, and indicates capacity for gentleness, for chivalry, for tenderness and love. The Mount of the Moon is small. That is good. There will be no disturbance of the brain, no propensity towards lunacy. Mars is not excessive, but it is strong, and he will be bold and courageous, but not quarrelsome."

The pleasant murmur of the voice, the gentle pressure of her hand, her nearness and her beauty, had rendered the Quaker absolutely oblivious to her words.

"Let me now examine the lines," she continued. "Here is the line of the heart. It passes clear across the palm. It is well marked at every point and is most pronounced upon the upper side. The love will not be a sensual passion, but look! it is joined to the head below the finger of Saturn. It is the sign of a violent death! Heavens!"

As she uttered this exclamation, she pressed the hand convulsively between her own, and looked up into his face.

The involuntary and sudden action recalled him to his consciousness. "What did you say?" he asked.

"Have you not been listening?" she replied, repressing both her anxiety and her annoyance.

"No; was it a good story or a bad one which you were reading?"

"It was both."

"Well—it is no matter, those accidental marks can have no significance."

"Do you think so?"

"I am sure."

"You do not believe in any signs?"

"None."

"You know that the traveler on the desert told the Bedouin that he did not, and yet from the foot prints of the camels the Bedouin deciphered the whole history of a caravan."

Astonished at her reply, David did not answer.

"And then, you know," she continued, "there are the weather signs."

"Yes—that is so."

"And what are the letters of a book but signs?"

"You are right again."

"And is not hardness a sign of something in a stone, and heat of something in fire? And are not deeds the sign of some quality in a man's soul, and the expressions of his face signs of emotions of his heart?"

"They are."

"So that by his gait and gestures each man says: 'I am a farmer—a quack—a Quaker—a soldier—a priest'?"

"This, too, is true."

"Why, then, should not the character and destiny of the man disclose itself in signs and marks upon his hands?"

David was too much astonished by these words to answer. They revealed a mental power which he had not even suspected her of possessing. He discovered that while she was as ignorant as a child in the realms of thought to which she had been unaccustomed, in her sphere of experience and reflection she was both shrewd and deep.

"You have thought much about this matter," he said.

"Too much, perhaps."

"It is deeper than I knew."

"And so is everything deeper than we know. Tell me, if you can, why it is that having met you I have lost faith in my art, and having met me you have lost faith in your religion."

"It is strange."

"Something must be true. Do you not think so?"

"I have begun to doubt it."

"I believe that what you said is true."

As they stood thus confronting each other, they would have presented a study of equal interest to the artist or to the philosopher. There was both a poem and a picture in their attitude. Grace and beauty revealed themselves on every feature and in every movement. They had arrived at one of those dramatic points in their life-journey, where all the tragic elements of existence seem to converge. Agitated by incomprehensible and delicious emotions, confronting insoluble problems, longing, hoping, fearing, they hovered over the ocean of life like two tiny sparrows swept out to sea by a tempest.

The familiar objects and landmarks had all vanished. As children rise in the morning to find the chalk lines, inside of which they had played their game of "hop-scotch," washed out by the rain, they had awakened to find that the well known pathways and barriers over which and within which they had been accustomed to move had all been obliterated. They had nothing to guide them and nothing to restrain them except what was written in their hearts, and this mysterious hieroglyph they had not yet learned to decipher.

They were awakened from their reveries by the footsteps of the quack, and by his raucous voice summoning them back into the world of realities from which they had withdrawn so completely.

"Well, little wife," he said, "how is b-b-business?"

"Fair," she said, gathering up a double hand-full of change and passing it over to him indifferently.

The question fell upon the ears of the Quaker like a thunder bolt. It was to him the first intimation that Pepeeta was not the daughter of the quack. "His wife!" The heart of the youth sank in his bosom. Here was a new and unexpected complication. What should he do? It was too late to turn back now. The die had been cast, and he must go forward.

The doctor rattled on with an unceasing flow of talk, while the mind of the Quaker plunged into a series of violent efforts to adjust itself to this new situation. He tried to force himself to be glad that he had been mistaken. He for the first time fully admitted the significance of the qualms which he felt at permitting himself to regard this strolling gypsy with such feelings as had been in his heart.

"But now," he said to himself, "I can go forward with less compunction. I can gratify my desire for excitement and adventure with perfect safety. I will stay with them for a while, and when I am tired can leave them without any entanglements." When the situation had been regarded for a little while from this point of view, he felt happier and more care-free than for weeks. He solaced his disappointment with the reflection that he should still be near Pepeeta, but no longer in any danger.

At this profound reflection of the young moth hovering about the flame, let the satirist dip his pen in acid, and the pessimist in gall! There is enough folly and stupidity in the operations of the human mind to provoke the one to contempt and the other to despair.

The cuttle-fish throws out an inky substance to conceal itself from its enemies; but the soul ejects an opaque vapor in which to hide from itself! In this mist of hallucination which rises and envelopes us, the whole appearance of life alters. Passion and desire repress the judgment and pervert the conscience. Conclusions that are illogical, expectations that are irrational and confidences that are groundless to the most final and fatal absurdity seem as natural and reasonable as intuitions.

It is not in human nature to escape this perversion of thought and feeling under the stress of temptation. One may as well try to prevent the rise of temperature in the blood in the rage of fever. There are times when even the upright in heart must withdraw to the safe covert of the inner sanctuary and there fervently put up the master prayer of the soul, "Lord, lead me not into temptation!" But if necessity or duty calls them out into the midst of life's dangers, let them remember that what they feel in the calm retreat, is not what will surge through their disordered intellects and their bounding pulses when they come within the reach of those fearful fascinations!

It was such a prayer that David had need of when he gave his hand to the gypsy.

CHAPTER XIII.

FOUND WANTING

"How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!"—King John.

The spring and summer had passed, autumn had attained the fullness of its golden beauty, and the inevitable had happened. David and Pepeeta had passed swiftly though not unresistingly through all the intervening stages between a chance acquaintance and an impassioned love.

Any other husband than the quack would have foreseen this catastrophe; but there is one thing blinder than love, and that is egotism such as his. His colossal vanity had not even suspected that a woman who possessed him for her husband could for a single instant bestow a thought of interest on any other man.

Astute student of men, penetrating judge of motive and conduct that he was, he daily beheld the evolution of a tragedy in which he was the victim, with all the indifference of a lamb observing the preparations for its slaughter. Because of this ignorance and indifference, the fellowship of these two young people had been as intimate as that of brother and sister in a home, and this new life had wrought an extraordinary transformation in the habits and character of both.

David had abandoned the Quaker idiom for the speech of ordinary men, and discarded his former habiliments for the most conventional and stylish clothes. Contact with the world had sharpened his native wit, and given him a freedom among men and women, that was fast descending into abandon. Success had stimulated his self-confidence and made him prize those gifts by which he had once aroused the devotion of adoring worshipers in the Quaker meeting house; he soon found that they could be used to victimize the crowds which gathered around the flare of the torch in the public square.

That which his friends had once dignified by the name of spiritual power had deteriorated into something but little above animal magnetism. He had learned to cherish a profound contempt for men and morals, and the shrewd maxims which the quack had instilled into his mind became the governing principles of his conduct. Those qualities which he had inherited from his dissolute father, and which had been so long submerged, were upheaved, while all that he had received from his mother by birth and education sank out of sight and memory. Three elemental passions assumed complete possession of his soul—the love of admiration, of gambling and of the gypsy.

A transformation of an exactly opposite character had been taking place in Pepeeta. Under the sunshine of David's love, and the dew of those spiritual conceptions which had fallen upon her thirsty spirit, the seeds of a beautiful nature, implanted at her birth, germinated and developed with astonishing rapidity. Walking steadily in such light as fell upon her pathway and ever looking for more, her spiritual vision became clearer and clearer every day; and while this affection for God purified her soul, her love for David expanded and transformed her heart. Her unbounded admiration for him blinded her to that process of deterioration in his character which even the quack perceived. To her partial eye a halo still surrounded the head of the young apostate. But while these two new affections wrought this sudden transformation in the gypsy and filled her with a new and exquisite happiness, the circumstances of her life were such that this illumination could not but be attended with pain, for it brought ever new revelations of those ethical inconsistencies in which she discovered herself to be deeply if not hopelessly involved.

There was, in the first place, the inevitable conflict between her new sense of duty, and the life of deception which she was leading. The practice of her art of fortune-telling was daily becoming a source of unendurable pain as she saw more and more clearly the duty of leaving the future to God and living her daily life in humble, child-like faith. And in the second place, she was slowly awaking to the terrifying consciousness that her affection for David was producing a violent and ungovernable disgust for her husband.

By the flood of sorrows which poured from these two discoveries, she seemed to be completely overwhelmed and if, like a diver, she rose to the sunlight now and then, it was only to seize a few breaths of air by which she might be able to endure her existence in the depths to which she was compelled to return.

No wonder that life became a mystery to this poor child. It seemed as if its difficulties increased in a direct ratio with her wish to discharge its duties; as if the darkness gained upon the light, and the burden grew heavy, faster than her shoulders grew strong.

The discovery of the nature of that affection which she felt for David had been slow and unwelcome, coming to her even before David's protestations of his love; yet one day the passionate feelings of their hearts found expression in wild and startling confessions. They were terrified at what they told each other; but it became necessary therefore to seek the comfort of still other confessions and confidences.

Their interviews had steadily become more ardent and more dangerous; and the doctor's negligence giving them the utmost freedom, they often spent hours together in wandering about the cities they visited, or the fields and woods lying near.

On one of these tramps, their relationship reached a critical stage. It was the early morning of a beautiful autumn day that they strolled up Broadway in the city of Cincinnati, turned into the Reading road, and sauntered slowly out into the country.

"In which direction shall we go?" asked David.

"Let us wander without thought or purpose, like those beautiful clouds," Pepeeta answered, pointing upward.

David watched them silently for a moment and then said, "Pepeeta, men and women are like those clouds. They either drift apart forever, or meet and mingle into one. It must be so with us."

She walked silently by his side, sobered by the seriousness of his voice and words.

"Perhaps," he continued, "it makes but little difference what becomes of us, for our lives are like the clouds, a morning mist, a momentary exhalation. And yet, how filled with joy or woe is this moment of parting or commingling! Pepeeta, I have decided that this day must terminate my suspense. I cannot endure it any longer. I must know before night whether our lives are to be united or divided. You have told me that you love me, and yet you will not give yourself to me. What am I to think of this?"

"My friend," she cried with an infinite pain in her voice, "how can you force me to such a decision when you know all the difficulties of my life? How can you thus forget that I have a husband?"

"I do not forget it," he answered bitterly, "I cannot forget it. It is an eternal demonstration of the madness of faith in any kind of Providence. It makes me hate an order which unites a lion to a lamb, and marries a dove to a hawk! You say that you loathe this man! Then leave him and come with me! The world lies before us. We are as free as those clouds!"

"We are not free, and neither are they," she answered. "Something binds them to their pathway, as it binds me to mine. I cannot leave it. I must tread it even though I have to tread it alone."

"You can leave it if you will; but if you will not, I must know the reason why."

"Oh! why will you not see? I have tried so hard to show you! I have told you that there is a voice which speaks within my soul, that to it I must listen and that the inward light of which you told me shines upon the path and I must follow it."

"I could curse that inward light! Must I be always confronted by the ravings of my youth? All my life long must the words of my credulous childhood hang about my neck like a millstone? There is no inward light. You are living a delusion. You are restrained by the conventionalities of life and are the slave of the customs of society. Because the miserable herd of mankind is willing to submit to that galling yoke of marriage, does it follow that you must? By what right can society demand that men and women who abhor each other should be doomed to pass their lives in hopeless agony? Against such laws I protest! I defy those customs. The path of life is short. We go this way but once! Who is to refuse us all the joy that we can find? There will be sorrow enough, any way!"

"Oh! my friend, do not talk so! Do not break my heart! Have pity on me. I know that it is hard for you; but it is I who have to suffer most. It is I who must continually exert this terrible resistance which alone keeps us from being swept away. Have mercy, David! Spare me a little longer. Spare me this one day at least. If any troubled heart had ever need of the rest and peace of such a day as this, it is mine! Let us give ourselves up to these soothing influences. Let us wander. Let us dream and let us love."

"Love! This accursed Platonic affection is not love," he answered savagely.

"David," she said with an enforced calmness, "you must not speak so. It will do no good. There is something in me stronger than this passion. From the bottom of my soul there has come a sense of duty to a power higher than myself and I will be true to it. I believe that it is God who speaks. You may appeal to my mind, and I cannot answer you, but my heart has reasons of its own higher than the reason itself. It was you who told me this! You told me when you were so beautiful, so good, so true that I know you were right, and I shall never doubt it. I am not what I was. I am, oh! so different. I cannot understand; but I am different."

There was in this delicate and ethereal girl who spoke so fearlessly something which held the man, strong in his physical might, in an inexplicable and irresistible awe. Before a mountain, beside the sea, beneath the stars and in the presence of a virtuous woman, emotions of wonder and reverence possess the souls of men.

Subdued by this influence, David said, with more gentleness: "But what are we to do? We cannot live in this way. We have been forced into a situation from which we must escape, even if we have to act against our consciences."

"I do not think that this is so! I do not believe that any one can be placed against his will in a situation that is opposed to his conscience! There must be some other way to do. A door will open. Let us wait and hope a little longer. Let us have another happy day at least," Pepeeta said.

Heaving a sigh and shrugging his shoulders as if to throw off a burden, David answered, "Well, let it be as you wish. I have had to suffer so much that perhaps I can endure it a little longer. I do not want to make you unhappy. I will try."

"Oh! thank you, thank you a thousand times; that is like yourself!" Pepeeta said, her face aglow with gratitude.

It was a light from the soul itself that shone through the thin transparency of that face, pale with thought and suffering, and gave it its new radiance.

The world around them was steeped in autumn beauty. A gigantic smile was on the face of Nature. Fleecy, fleeting clouds were chasing each other across the blue dome of the heavens. The hazy atmosphere of the Indian summer softened the landscape and lent it a mystical and unearthly charm. The forests were resplendent with those brilliant colors which appear like a last flush of life upon the dying face of summer, as she sinks into her wintry grave. The autumn birds were singing; the autumn flowers were blooming; yellow golden rod and scarlet sumach glowed in the corners of the fences; locusts chirped in treetops; grasshoppers stridulated in the meadows, one or two of them making more noise than a whole drove of cattle lying peacefully chewing their cud beneath an umbrageous elm and lifting up their great, tranquil, blinking eyes to the morning sun. Here and there boys and girls could be seen in the vineyards and orchards gathering grapes and apples. Farmers were cutting their grain and stacking it in great brown shocks, digging potatoes, or plowing the fertile soil. Now and then a traveler met or passed them, clucking to his horses and hurrying to the city with his produce. Amid these gracious influences, life gradually lost its stern reality and took on the characteristics of a pleasant dream. The fever and unrest abated, burdens weighed less heavily, sorrow became less poignant; the finer joys of both the waking and sleeping hours of existence were mysteriously blended.

Sharp and irritating as the encounter had been between the two lovers, the momentary antipathy passed away as they moved along. They drew nearer together; they lifted their eyes furtively; their glances met; they smiled; they spoke; their sympathies flowed back into the old channel; their hopes and affections mingled. They gave themselves up to joy with the abandon of youth, falling into that mood in which everything pleases and delights. Nature did not need to tell them her secrets aloud, for they comprehended her whispers and grasped her meaning from sly hints. They melted into her moods.

What joys were theirs! To be young; to be drawn together by an affinity which produced a mysterious and ineffable happiness; to wander aimlessly over the earth; to yield to every passing fancy; to dream; to hope; to love. It was the culminating hour of their lives.

Passing through the little village since called Avondale, they turned down what is now the Clinton Springs road, climbed a hill, descended its other slope, and came upon an old spring house where, as they paused to drink, David scratched their names with his penknife on one of the stones of the walls, where they may be read to-day.

Leaving the turnpike, they entered a grove through which flowed a noisy stream; cast themselves upon a bank, bathed their faces, ate their lunch and rested. There for a few moments, in the tranquil and uplifting influence of the silence and the solitude, all that was best in their natures came to the surface. Pepeeta nestled down among the roots of a great beech tree, her hat flung upon the ground by her side, her arms folded across her bosom, her face upturned like a flower drinking in the sunshine or the rain. At her feet her lover reclined, his head upon his arms and his gaze fixed upon the canopy of leaves which spread above them and through which as the branches swayed in the breeze he caught glimpses of the sky.

Pepeeta broke the silence. "I could stay here forever," she said. "I nestle here in the roots of this great tree like a little child in the arms of its mother. I feel that everything around me is my friend. I feel, not as if I were different from other things, but as if I were a part of them. Do you comprehend? Do you feel that way?"

"More than at any time since leaving home," he said. "That was the way I always felt in the old days—how far away they seem! I could then sit for hours beside a brook like this, and thoughts of God would flow over my soul like water over the stones; and now I do not think of Him at all! It was by a brook like this that we first met. Do you remember, Pepeeta?"

"I shall never forget."

"Are you sure?"

"As certain as that I live."

"Sure—certain! Of what are we sure but the present moment? Into it we ought to crowd all the joys of existence."

Her feminine instinct discovered the return of his thoughts into the old dangerous channel, and her quick wit diverted them.

"Tell me more about your home, and how you felt when you used to sit like this and think."

He determined to yield himself for a little while longer to her will, and said: "In those days Nature possessed for me an irresistible fascination; but the spell is broken now. I then thought that I was face to face with the eternal spirit of the universe. How far I have drifted away from the world in which I then existed! I could never return to it. I am like a bird which has broken its shell and which can never be put back again. I have found another face into which I now look with still deeper wonder than into that of Nature, and which exerts a still deeper fascination. It is the face of a woman, in whom all the beauties of nature seem to be mirrored. She is everything to me; she is the entire universe embodied in a gentle heart."

He gazed at her with a look that made her pulses beat; but she was determined not to permit him to drift back into that dangerous mood from which she had drawn him with such difficulty.

"One time you told me," she said, "that the birds and squirrels were such good friends to you, that if you called them they would come to you like your dog. I should love to see that. Look! There is a squirrel sitting on the limb of this very tree! How saucy he looks! How shy! Bring him to me! I command you! You have said that I am your mistress; go, slave!"

Rising to her feet she pointed to the squirrel. Her lithe form was outlined against the green background of the forest in a pose of exquisite grace and beauty, her eyes glowed with animation, and her lips smiled with the consciousness of power. It was impossible to resist her.

He rose, looked in the direction toward which she pointed, and saw the squirrel cheeping among the branches. Imitating its cries, he began to move slowly toward it. The little creature pricked up its ears, cocked its head on one side, flirted its bushy tail and watched the approaching figure suspiciously. As it drew nearer and nearer, he began to creep down the branches. Stopping now and then to reconnoiter, he started forward again; paused; retreated; returned, and still continued to advance, until he was within a foot or two of David's hand, which he examined first with one eye and then the other and made a motion as if to spring upon it. Suddenly the spell was broken. With a wild flirt of his tail and a loud outcry, he sprang up the tree and disappeared in the foliage.

David watched him until he had vanished, and then turned toward Pepeeta with a look of disappointment and chagrin.

"It is too bad," she cried, hastening toward him sympathetically, "but see, there is a redbird on the top of that old birch tree. Try again! You will have better success this time, I am sure you will."

He determined to make another experiment. The brilliant songster was pouring out his heart in that fine cry of strength and hope which he sends resounding over hill and vale. Suddenly hearing his own voice repeated to him in an echo sweet and pure as his own song, he fluttered his wings, peered this way and that, and sang again. Once more the answering call resounded, true as an image in a mirror.

David now began to move with greater caution than before toward the little creature, who looked at him with curious glances. Back and forth resounded the sweet antiphonal, and the bird hopped down a branch or two. Neither of the actors in this woodland drama removed his eyes from the other, and the spectator watched them both with breathless interest.

Presently David lifted his hands—the palms closed together in the form of a cup or nest. The songster bent farther forward on the twig, and suddenly with a downward plunge shot straight toward them; but just as his tiny feet touched the fingers, turned as the squirrel had done, and uttering a loud cry of terror flew away. David dropped his hands and his eyes.

"I have lost my power," he said sadly.

"You are out of practice, you must exercise it oftener. It will all come back," Pepeeta responded cheerfully.

They walked slowly and silently back to the place where they had been sitting, and David began tossing pebbles into the brook.

"Three times to-day," he said, pausing and turning toward Pepeeta, "I have opened my hands and my heart, and each time the object whose love I sought has fluttered away from me in terror or repugnance."

"Oh! no, not in terror and repugnance," she said eagerly.

"Am I then incapable of exciting love?" he asked.

"You will break my heart if you speak so. I love you more than I love my own life."

"I do not believe it. Can I believe that the squirrel and the redbird love me, when they flee from me? If they had loved me, they would have come to me and nestled to my heart. And so would you. I have come back to the old subject. I cannot refrain any longer. Will you go with me, or will you not?"

"Oh! David," she cried, wringing her hands, "why, why will you break my heart? Why can you not permit me to finish this day in peace? Wait until some other time. Why can you not enjoy this present moment? I could wish it to last forever, if you were only kind. If the flight of time could be stopped, if we could be forever what we are just now, I could not ask for any other thing. See how beautiful the world is. See how happy we are. See how everything hangs just like a balance! Do not speak, do not move; one unkind word would jar and spoil it all."

"It is impossible," he cried roughly, "you must leave your husband and come with me. You cannot put me off any longer. I am desperate."

He was looking at her with eyes no longer full of pleading, but of determination and command.

"What will you do?" he asked.

"Oh!" she answered, trembling, "why will you compel me to act? Let something happen! Wait! It is not necessary always to act! Sometimes it is better to sit still! We are in God's hands. Let us trust Him. Has He not awakened this love in our hearts? He has not made us love and long for each other only to thwart us!"

"Thwart us! Who coaxes the flowers from the ground, only that the frost may nip them? Who opens the bud only to permit it to be devoured by the worm? Who places the babe in its mother's arms only to let it be snatched away by the hand of death? You cannot appeal to me in that way," he retorted, bitterly.

"Do not speak so," she exclaimed with genuine terror. "It is wicked to say such things in this quiet and holy place. Oh! why have you lost that faith you once possessed? What has blinded your eyes to the light that you taught me to see? I see it now! All will be well! Something says to me in my heart, 'All will be well,' if we only follow the light!"

Nothing could have given stronger proof that inspiration and intuition are as natural and legitimate functions of the spiritual nature as sensation and sense perception are of the physical, than her words and looks. They would have convinced and mastered him, except for the self-denial which they demanded of his love! But he was now far past all reason.

"Pepeeta," he cried, approaching her, "you must be mine and mine alone! I can no longer endure the thought of your being the wife of another man. You must come with me. I will not take 'no' for an answer. I command you to leave this man and go with me. It is a worse crime for you to live with him when you hate him than to leave him! Come, let us go! I have money! There are horses to be had. He does not know where we are. Let us fly!"

It was evident that he had brooked her refusal as long as he could. The man was mad. He seized her by the arm.

In a single instant this gentle creature passed through an incredible transformation. She wrenched her arm from his hand and stood before him fearless, resolute, magnificent! Her gypsy training stood her in good stead now. Young as she was when a pupil in that hard school, she had learned from her wild teachers the cardinal principle of their code—loyalty to her marriage vows. They had taught her to believe that this breach was the one unpardonable sin.

She drew a little stiletto from the folds of her dress, placed its point upon her heart and said: "It is not necessary that a gypsy should live; but it is necessary that she should be virtuous!"

Her resplendent beauty, her fearless courage, her invincible determination quenched the wild impulses of the reckless youth in a single instant. All the manhood, all the chivalry of his better nature rose within him and did homage. He threw himself on his knees and frantically besought her pardon.

In an instant the fierce light died from her eyes. She stooped down, laid her hand on his arm, and with an all-forgiving charity lifted him to his feet. They stood regarding each other in silence. All that their souls could reveal had been manifested in actions. The brief scene was terminated by a common impulse. They turned their faces toward the city and walked quietly, each reflecting silently upon the struggle that had been enacted and the denouement which was yet to come.

In her ignorance and inexperience, Pepeeta hoped that a scene so dreadful would quench the madness in her lover's soul; but this revelation of the grandeur of her nature only inflamed his desires the more. The momentary feeling of shame and penitence passed away. His determination to possess her became more fixed than ever and during the homeward walk assumed a definite form.

For a long time a sinister purpose had been rolling about in his soul. That purpose now crystallized into resolution. He determined to commit a crime if need be in order to gain his end.

Nothing can be more astonishing than the rapidity and ease with which the mind becomes habituated to the presence of a criminal intention. The higher faculties are at first disturbed, but they soon become accustomed to the danger, and permit themselves to be destroyed one after another, with only feeble protestations.

CHAPTER XIV.

TURNED TEMPTER

"All men have their price."
—Walpole.

The plan which David had chosen to compel Pepeeta to abandon her husband was not a new one. For its execution he had already made a partial preparation in an engagement to meet the justice of the peace who had performed her marriage ceremony. The engagement was conditioned upon his failure to persuade the gypsy to accompany him of her own free will.

Immediately after supper he took his way to the place appointed for the meeting. This civil officer had been a companion of the quack's for many years. His natural capacity, which was of the highest order, had secured him one place of honor after another; but he had lost them through the practice of many vices, and had at last sunk to that depth of degradation in which he was willing to barter his honor for almost any price.

The place at which he had agreed to meet David was a low saloon in one of the most disreputable parts of the city, and to this spot the infatuated youth made his way. Now that he was alone with his thoughts, he could not contemplate his purpose without a feeling of dread, and yet he did not pause nor seriously consider its abandonment. His movements, as he elbowed his way among the outcasts who infested this degraded region, were those of a man totally oblivious to his surroundings.

"Curse him," he muttered in an undertone, and did not know that he had spoken.

To talk to one's self is so often a premonitory symptom of either insanity or crime, that a policeman standing on the corner eyed him closely and followed him down the street.

Having reached the door of the saloon, David cast a glance about him, as if ashamed of being observed, and entered. It was a fitting place to hatch an evil deed. The floor was covered with filthy sawdust; the air was rank with the fumes of sour beer and adulterated whisky; the lamps were not yet lighted, and his eyes blinked as he entered the dirty dusk of the interior. Against the wall were rude shelves strewn with bottles, decanters, jugs and glasses. The landlord was leaning against the inside of the bar glaring about him like an octopus. The habitues of the place, looking more like scarecrows than men, stood opposite him with their blear eyes uplifted in ecstasy, draining into their insatiable throats the last precious drops from their upturned glasses.

At a table four human shapes which seemed to be operated by some kind of clumsy mechanical motors rather than animated by sentient spirits were playing a game of chance and slapping the greasy cards down upon the table to the accompaniment of coarse laughter and hideous profanity.

The Quaker, who was not yet thoroughly enough corrupted to witness this spectacle without horror, hurried through the room like a man who has suddenly found himself in a pest-house. The door which he pushed open admitted him to a parlor scarcely less dirty and disgusting that the saloon itself, at the opposite end of which, wreathed in a cloud of tobacco smoke, he beheld the object of his search.

"Well, I see you are here," he said, drawing a chair to the table.

"And waiting," a deep and rich but melancholy voice replied.

"Can't we have a couple of candles? These shadows seem to crawl up my legs and take me by the throat. I feel as if some one were blindfolding and gagging me," said David, looking uneasily about.

The judge ordered the candles, and while they were waiting observed: "You had better accustom yourself to shadows, young man, for you will find plenty of them on the road you are traveling. They deepen with the passing years, along every pathway; but the one on which you are about to set your feet leads into the hopeless dark."

These unexpected words agitated the soul of the young plotter, but while he was still shuddering the barkeeper entered with the candles and set them down on the table between the two men, who found themselves vis-a-vis in the flickering gleams.

They leaned on their elbows and looked into each other's faces. The contrast was remarkable. The countenance of the judge had unquestionably once been noble, and perhaps also beautiful; but the massive features were now coarsened by dissipation. A permanent curl of scorn had wreathed itself around the mouth. A look of ennui brooded over his features. One would as soon expect to see a flower in the crater of a volcano as a smile on the lips of this extinct man.

David's face was young and beautiful. The features were still those of a saint, even if the aureole had for a time been eclipsed by a cloud. These two human beings gazed incredulously at each other for a moment.

"I was once like this youth," the judge was saying to himself with a sigh.

"I shall never be like this beast," thought David with a shudder of repulsion and disgust.

The "Justice" (grotesque parody) broke the silence.

"Did you succeed?" he asked.

"No," said David, sullenly.

"She would not yield, then?"

"No more than adamant or steel."

"You should have pressed her harder."

"I used my utmost skill."

"You are a novitiate, perhaps. An adept would have succeeded."

"Not with her."

"Ah! who ever caught a trout at the first cast? What you need is experience."

"What I want is help."

"And so you have appealed to me? You wish me to go to this woman and tell her that her marriage was a fraud?"

"I do."

"There have been pleasanter tasks."

"Will you do it, or will you not?"

"Suppose she will not believe me?"

"You must compel her."

"Young man, have you no compunctions about this business?" said the judge, leaning forward and looking earnestly into the blue eyes.

"Compunctions?" said David, in a dry echo of the question.

"Yes, compunctions," replied the judge, repeating the word again.

"Oh! some. But for every compunction I have a thousand desperate determinations. Were you ever in love, Judge?"

"Yes, I have been in love, such love as yours, and that is why I am what I am now."

As he uttered these words, he lifted the glass which his hand had been toying with, drained it to the dregs, fixed his eyes on David once more, and after regarding him a moment with a look of pity, said slowly and solemnly: "Young man, I am about to give you good advice. You smile? No wonder! But I beg you to listen to me. Sometimes a shipwrecked sailor makes the best captain, for he knows the force of the tempest. I have no conscience for myself, but some unaccountable emotion impels me to bid you abandon this project. Somehow, as I look at you, I cannot bear to have you become what I am. You seem so young and innocent that I would like to have you stay as you are. I wish to save you. How strange it is. When I look at you, I seem to behold myself as I was at your age."

As he spoke these words the whole expression of his countenance altered, and faint traces of an almost extinguished manhood appeared. It was as if beauty, sunk below the horizon, had been thrown up in a mirage.

So tender an appeal would have broken a heart like David's, except for the madness of illicit love.

"Judge!" he cried, striking the table with his fist, "I did not come here for advice, I came for help. I am determined to have this woman. She is mine by virtue of my desire and my capacity to acquire her! I must have her! I will have her, by fair means or foul. And, Judge, in this case, the foulest means are fair. What seems an act of injustice is in reality an act of mercy. You know her husband, and you know as well as I do that her life with him will be her ruin. You know that the complacency with which she once regarded him has already turned to disgust, and that it is only a single step from disgust to hate and another from hate to murder. She will kill him some day! She cannot help it. It is human nature and if she doesn't I will! Come now, Judge, you will help me, won't you?"

A cynical smile wreathed itself around the mouth of the old roué. In his debauched nature, the oil of sympathy had long ago been exhausted. This was a last despairing flicker. A wick cannot burn alone.

"Help you?" he said languidly. "Oh, yes, I will help you. There is no use trying to save you. You are only another moth! You want the fire, and you will have it! You will burn your wings off as millions have done before you and as millions will do after you. What then? Wings are made to be burned! I burned mine. Probably if I had another pair I would burn them also. It is as useless to moralize to a lover as to a tiger. I am a fool to waste my breath on you. Let us get down to business. You say that she loves you, and that she will be glad to learn that she is free?"

"I do! her heart is on our side. She will believe you, easily!"

"Yes, she will believe me easily! She will believe me too easily! For six thousand years desire has been a synonym for credulity. All men believe what they want to, except myself. I believe everything that I do not want to, and nothing that I do! But no matter. How much am I to get for this job?"

They haggled a while over the price, struck a bargain and shook hands—the same symbol being used among men to seal a compact of love or hate, virtue or vice.

"Be at the Spencer House at eleven o'clock," said David, rising. "You will find us on the balcony. The doctor is to spend the night in a revel with the captain of the Mary Ann, and we shall be uninterrupted. Be an actor. Be a great actor, Judge. You are to deal with a soul which possesses unusual powers of penetration."

"Do not fear! She will be no match for me, for she is innocent—and when was virtue ever a match for vice? She is predestined to her doom! Farewell! Fare-ill, I mean," he muttered under his breath, as David passed from the room.

He gazed after him with his basilisk eyes, drank another glass of whisky and relapsed into reveries.

The mind of the lover was full of tumultuous emotions. On the thin ice of his momentary joy, he hovered like an inexperienced skater over the great deeps of sin which were waiting to engulf him.

There was still an hour before the time when he would have to take his part in the business of the evening. He determined to walk off his excitement, and chose the way along the edge of the river.

It was now quite dark. The stars were shining in the sky and lamps were twinkling in the windows. The streets were almost deserted; the citizens, wearied with the toils of the day, were eating their evening meal, or resting on the balconies and porches. Here and there on the surface of the swift-flowing river a huge steamer swept past, or little ferry-boats shot back and forth like shuttles. His thoughts composed a strangely blended web of good and evil. At the same moment in which he reiterated his resolve to prosecute this deed he consecrated himself to a life of tenderness and devotion to the woman whom he loved with all the energy of his nature! Of such inconsistencies is the soul capable!

It seemed an easy matter to him to control the august forces which he was letting loose! He was like a little child who wanders through a laboratory uncorking bottles and mixing explosives.

Having regained his calmness by a long walk, he hurried back and reached the open space along the river front where peddlers, mountebanks and street venders plied their crafts, just in time to meet the doctor as he drove up with his horses.

CHAPTER XV.

THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER

"Thinks thou there are no serpents in the world
But those who slide along the grassy sod
And sting the luckless foot that presses them?
There are those who in the path of social life
Do bask their skins in Fortune's sun
And sting the soul." —Joanna Baillie.

That evening's business was one of unprecedented success. Never had the young orator been so brilliant. All the faculties of his mind seemed wrought up to their highest pitch and all its resources under perfect control. The boisterous crowd laughed itself hoarse at his humor, wept itself silly at his pathos, and laid its shekels at his feet.

It is no wonder that such scenes and others like them have generated both satirists and saviors, and that while men like Savonarola have been ready to die for the redemption of such creatures other men, like Juvenal, have sneered.

The three companions returned to the hotel and counted their ill-gotten gains. Pepeeta was sober, David exultant and the doctor hilarious. He pulled out the ends of his long black mustache to their utmost limit, twisted them into ropes, rubbed his hands together, slapped his great thigh and laughed long and loud.

"David, my son," he exclaimed, "you have the touch of Midas; g-g-give us a few years more and we will outrank the fabled Croesus. We shall yet be masters of the world. We shall ride upon its neck as if it w-w-were an ass! How about the old farm life now? Do you want to return to the p-p-plow-tail? Would you rather milk the b-b-brindle cow than the b-b-bedeviled people? This has been a g-g-great night, and I must go and finish it in the c-c-cabin of the Mary Ann with the captain, his mate and the judge. They will know how to appreciate it! Such a t-t-triumph must not be allowed to p-p-pass without a celebration."

He bustled about the room a few moments, kissed his wife, shook hands with David and hastened away.

After he had vanished, David and Pepeeta passed down the long corridor and out upon the balcony of the old Spencer House, to the place appointed for the interview of the judge. The night was bright; a refreshing breeze was blowing up from the river and the frequent intermissions in the gusts of wind that swept over the sleeping city gave the impression that Nature was holding her breath to listen to the tales of love that were being told on city balconies and in country lanes. Under the mysterious influence of the full moon, and of the silence, for the noises of the city had died away, their imaginations were aroused, their emotions quickened, their sensibilities stirred. It seemed impossible that life could be seriously real. Their conceptions of duty and responsibility were sublimated into vague and misty dreams, and the enjoyment of the moment's fleeting pleasures seemed the only reality and end of life.

The two lovers placed their chairs close to the railing and leaning over it looked down into the deserted street or off toward the distant hills swimming like islands on a sea of light, or up to the infinite sky in the immensity of which their individual being seemed to be swallowed up, or down into each other's eyes, in the depths of which they discovered realities which they had never before perceived, and lost sight of those in which they had always believed. For a long time they sat in silence. Afterwards, there came a few whispered interchanges of feeling, as the stillness of a grove is broken by gentle agitations among the leaves, and finally David said,

"Pepeeta, you have long promised to tell me all you knew of your early life; will you do it now?"

"Of what possible interest can it be to you?" she asked.

"It seems to me," he replied, "that I could linger forever over the slightest detail. It is not enough to know what you are. I wish to know how you came to be what you are."

"You must reconcile yourself to ignorance; the origin of my existence is lost in night."

"Did not the doctor discover anything at all from the people in whose possession he found you?"

"Nothing. They kept silence like the grave. He heard from a gypsy in another camp that my parents belonged to a noble family in Spain, and has often said that when he becomes very rich he will go with me to my native land and find them. But I believe, myself, that the veil will never be lifted from the past. I must be content!"

"But you can tell me something of that part of your childhood that you do remember?"

"It is too sad! I do not want to think of anything that happened before I met you. My life began from that moment. Before, I had only dreamed."

He was intoxicated with her beauty and her love; but he carried himself carefully, for he was playing a desperate game and must keep himself under control.

"And do you think," he said, "that having awakened from this dream you can ever fall asleep again?"

"Can the bird ever go back into the shell or the butterfly into the chrysalis? No, no, it is impossible."

"But would you, if you could?"

"Perhaps I ought to want to; but I cannot."

"And do you think that we can drift on forever as we are going?"

"I do not know. I do not dare to think. I only live from day to day."

"And you still refuse to take your future into your own hands?"

"It is not mine. I must accept what has been appointed."

"And you still believe that some door will be opened through which we may escape?"

"With all my heart."

"I wish I could share your faith."

They ceased to speak, and sat silently gazing into each other's faces, the heart of the woman rent with a conflict between desire and duty, that of the man by a tempest of evil passions. At that moment, a slow and heavy step was heard in the hallway. They looked toward the door, and in the shadows saw a man who contemplated them silently for a moment and then advanced.

David rose to meet him.

"I beg your pardon," he said, feigning embarrassment, "I had an errand with the lady, and hoped I should find her alone."

"You may speak, for the gentleman is the friend of my husband and myself," Pepeeta said.

"I will begin, then," he responded, "by asking if you recognize me?" And at that he stepped out into the moonlight.

Pepeeta gave him a searching glance and exclaimed in surprise, "You are the judge who married me."

He let his head fall upon his breast with well-assumed humility, remained a moment in silence, looked up mournfully and said, "I would to God that I had really married you, for then I should not have been bearing this accursed load of guilt that has been crushing me for months."

At these words, Pepeeta sprang from her seat and stood before him with her hands clasped upon her breast.

"Be quick! go on!" she cried, when she had waited in vain for him to proceed.