"O no, if I get off I'll stand the expense myself. You've lost enough already, Jeff-Jack."

"No, sir; I'll stan' 'spence. I can be gen'rous you are. Or 'f you'll stay 'n' take care Mrs. Ravenel I'll—(h-h)-get off m'seff!"

John shook his head and with a sickened smile took up his bag and returned to the rear platform.

The train had stopped and was off again, when the porter came looking everywhere, the rear platform included. "Whah dat gemman what get on at Plaski City?"

Ravenel waved his cigar.

"He's out in back garden pickin' flowers! Porter-you-f-ond o' flowers? 'f you want to go an' pick some I'll (h-h)—take care car for you. Porter! here!-I-(h-h) don't want to be misleading. Mr. March's simply stepped out s-see 'f he can find a f-four-leaf clover."

LX

HOME-SICKNESS ALLEVIATED

On the second morning after the wedding and next trip of this train, the sleeping-car was nearly half filled with passengers by the time it was a night's run from Pulaski City. To let the porter put their two sections in order, a party of three, the last except one to come out of the berths, had to look around twice for a good place in which to sit together. They were regarded with interest.

"High-steppers," remarked a very large-eared commercial traveller to another.

"The girl's beautiful," replied the other, remembering that he was freshly shaved and was not bad-looking himself. "Yes," said the first, "but the other two are better than that; they're comfortable. They're done raising children and ain't had any bad luck with 'em, and they've got lots of tin. If that ain't earthly bliss I'll bet you!"

66

How d'you know she's not?" "I mustn't tell-breach o' confidence. Guess."

"OI guess you're guessing. George! she's what makes you think she's not their daughter?"

"O nothin', only I'm a man of discernment, and besides, I just now heard 'em call her Miss Garnet."

Their attention was diverted by the porter saying at the only section still curtained, "Breakfus' at next stop, seh. No, seh, it's yo' on'y chaynce till din neh, seh. Seh? No, seh, not till one o'clock dis afternoon, seh."

"Is that gentleman sick?" asked the younger commercial man, wishing Miss Garnet to know what a high-bred voice and tender heart he had.

Humph! he

"Who? numb' elevm? ain't too sick to be cross. Say he ain't sleep none fo' two nights. But he's gitt'n' up now."

The solicitous traveller secured a seat at table opposite Miss Garnet and put more majestic gentility into his breakfasting than he had ever done before. Once he pushed the sugar most courteously to the lady she was with, and once, with polished deference, he was asking the gentleman if he could reach. the butter when a tardy comer was shown in and given the chair next him. As this person, a young man as stalwart as he was handsome, was about to sit down, he started with surprise and exclaimed to Miss Garnet,

"Why! You've begunwe on the same train?"

Why, are

And without any definable alteration she grew visibly prettier as she replied smilingly,

"You must be Number Eleven, are you not?"

Coming out of the place the young lady's commercial admirer heard her introduce Number Eleven to "Mr. and Mrs. Fair," and Mr. Fair, looking highly pleased, say,

"I don't think I ever should have recognized you!"

Something kept the train, and as he was joined by his large-eared friend

who had breakfasted at the sandwich counter-he said,

"See that young fellow talking to Mr. Fair? That's the famous John Marsh, owner of the Widewood lands. He's one of the richest young men in Dixie. Whenever he wants cash all he's got to do is to go out and cut a few more telegraph-poles-O laugh if you feel like it, but I heard Miss Garnet tell her friends so just now without a smile, and I'd bet my head on anything that girl says." The firm believer relighted his cigar, adding digressively, "I've just discovered she's a sister-inlaw"-puff, puff-" of my old friend, General Halliday"-puff, puff-" president of Rosemont College. Well, away we go."

The train swept on, the smokingroom filled. The drummer with the large ears let his companion introduce "Mr. Marsh" to him, and was presently so pleased with the easy, open, and thoroughly informed way in which this wealthy young man discussed cigars and horses that he put aside his own reserve, told a risky story, and manfully complimented the cleanness of the one with which Mr. March followed suit.

A travelling man's life, he further said, was a rough one and got a fellow into bad ways. There wasn't a blank bit of real good excuse for it, but it was

80.

No, there wasn't! responded his fellow-craftsman. For his part he liked to go to church once in a while and wasn't ashamed to say so. His mother was a good Baptist. Some men objected to the renting of pews, but, in church or out of it, he didn't see why a rich man shouldn't have what he was willing to pay for, as well as a poor man. Where upon a smoker, hitherto silent, said, with an oratorical gesture,

"Lift up your heads, O ye gates, the rich and the poor meet together, yet the Lord is the maker of them all!"

March left them deep in theology. He found Mr. and Mrs. Fair half hid in newspapers, and Miss Garnet with a volume of poems.

"How beautiful the country is," she said as she made room for him at her side. "I can neither write my diary nor read my book." VOL. XVL-41

"Do you notice," replied he, "that the spring here is away behind ours?" "Yes, sir. By night, I suppose, we'll be where it's hardly spring at all yet."

"We'll be out of Dixie," said John, looking very far away.

"Now, Mr. March," responded Barbara, with a smile of sweetest resentment, "you're ag-grav-a-ting my nostal-gia!"

To the younger commercial traveller her accents sounded like the wavelets on a beach.

"Why, I declare, Miss Garnet, I don't want to do that. If you'll help me cure mine I'll do all you'll let me do to cure yours."

Barbara's reply was meditative. "I think mine must be worse than yours, for I don't-wa-an't it-cu-ured."

"Right? If it isn't then I'm wrong from centre to circumference!"

"Why, I'm glad it's so com-pre-hensive-ly correct." The commercial traveller hid his smile. "It's about all I learned at Montrose," she continued. "But, Mr. March, what is it in the South we Southerners love so? Mr. Fair asked me this morning and when I couldn't explain he laughed. Of course I didn't con-fess my hu-mil-i-a-tion; I in-ti-ma-ted that it was simply something a Northern-er can't un-der-stand. Wasn't that right?"

"Certainly! They can't understand it! They seem to think the South we love is a certain region and everything and everybody within its borders."

"I have a mighty dim idea where its Northern border is sit-u-a-ted."

"Why, so we all have! Our South isn't a matter of boundaries, or skies, or landscapes. Don't you and I find it all here, now, simply because we've both

"Yes, romantic! Something that makes

"No land like Dixie in all the wide world over!"

"Good!" cried John. "Good! O, my mother's expressed that beautifully in a lyric of hers where she says that though every endearing charm should fade away like a fairy gift, our love would still entwine itself around the dear ruin-verdantly- But I oughtn't to try to quote it without knowing it better. Doesn't her style remind you of some of the British poets? Aha! I knew you'd say so! Your father's noticed it. He says she ought to study Moore !"

Barbara looked startled, colored, and then was impassive again, all in an instant and so prettily, that John gave her his heartiest admiration even while chafed with new doubts of Garnet's genuineness. The commercial man went back to the smoking-room to mention casually that Mrs. March was a poetess.

"There's mighty little," John began, but the din of a passing freight train compelled him to repeat much louder "There's mighty little poetry that can beat Tom Moore's!"

Barbara showed herself so mystified and embarrassed that March was sure she had not heard him correctly. He reiterated his words, and she understood and smiled broadly, but would not express her opinion. She merely explained, apologetically, that she had thought he had said there was mighty little pastry could beat his mother's.

John laughed so heartily that Mrs. Fair looked back at Barbara with gay

approval, and life seemed to him for the moment to have less battle-smoke and more sunshine; but by and by when he thought Barbara's attention was entirely on the landscape, she saw him unconsciously shake his head and heave a sigh.

LXI

CONCERNING FIRST LOVE

WHEN the train stopped at a station they talked of the book in her hand, and by the time it started on they were reading poems from the volume to each other. The roar of the wheels did not drown her low, searching tones; by bending close John could hear quite comfortably. Between readings they discussed those truths of the heart on which the poems touched. Later, though they still read aloud, they often looked on the page together.

In the middle of one poem they turned the book face downward to consider a question. Did Miss Garnet believe— Mr. March offered to admit that among the small elect who are really capable of a divine passion there may be some with whom a second love is a genuine and beautiful possibility-yet it passed his comprehension-he had never seen two dawns in one day-but! did Miss Garnet believe such a second love could ever have the depth and fervor of the first?

Yes, she replied with slow care, she did-in a man's case at least. To every deep soul she did believe it was appointed to love once yes-with a greater joy and pain than ever before or after, but she hardly thought this was first love. It was almost sure to be first love in a woman, for a woman, she said, can't afford to let herself love until she knows she is loved, and, so, her first love-when it really is love, and not a mere consent to be loved

"Which is frequently all it is," said John.

"Then you believe there are such?" "Yes, there must be, or God wouldn't create some of the women he makes." "True!" said John, very gallantly. "But don't you think, Mr. March, a man of that sort is apt to love prematurely and very faultily? His best fruit doesn't fall first. Haven't you observed that a man's first love is just what a woman finds hardest to take in earnest?"

"Yes, I have observed that. And still are you too cynical to believe that there are men to whom first love is everything and second love impossible?"

"No," said Barbara, with true resentment. "I'm not too cynical. But she looked her prettiest-" still I don't believe it."

John turned on her a hard glance which instantly softened. It is a singular fact that the length and droop of a girl's eyelashes have a great weight in an argument.

"And yet," she resumed, but waited for John to wave away the train-boy with his books.

"And yet what?" asked March, ever so kindly.

"And yet, that first love is everything, is what every woman would like every man to believe, until he learns better." Her steadfast gaze and slow smile made John laugh. He was about to give a railing answer when the brakeman announced twenty minutes for dinner at the next stop. "What! It can't- "he looked at his watch. "Why, would you have imagined?"

O yes; her only surprise-a mild one -was that he didn't know it.

At table she sat three seats away, with her Northern friends between; and when they were again roaring over streams, and through hills and valleys, and the commercial travellers were discussing aërial navigation, and March cut short his after-dinner smoke and

came back to resume his conversation, he found Miss Garnet talking to the Fairs, and not to be moved by the fact

which he felt it the merest courtesy to state-that the best views were on the other side of the car.

Thereupon he went to the car's far end and wrote a short letter to his mother, who had exacted the pledge of one a day, which she did not promise to

answer.

In this he had some delay. A woman with a disabled mouth, cautiously wiping crumbs off it with a paper napkin, asked him the time of day. She explained that she had loaned her watch

gold-patent lever--to her husband, who was a printer. She said the chain of the watch was made of her mother's hair. She also stated that her husband was an atheist, and had a mole on his back shaped exactly like the sole of a shoe, and that she had been called by telegraph to the care of an aunt taken down with measles and whose husband was a steamboat pilot, and an excellent self-taught banjoist; that she, herself, had in childhood been subject to membranous croup which had been cured with pulsatilla, which the doctor had been told to prescribe, by his grandmother, in a dream; also that her father, deceased, was a man of the highest refinement, who had invented a stumpextractor; that her sisters were passionately fond of her; that she never spoke to strangers when travelling, but, somehow, he, March, did not seem like a stranger at all; and that she had brought her dinner with her in a pasteboard shirt-box rather than trust railroad cooking, being a dyspeptic. She submitted the empty box in evidence, got him to step to the platform, and throw it away, and on his return informed him that it was dyspepsia had disabled her mouth, and not overwork, as she and her sisters had once supposed.

Still March did finish his letter. Then he went and smoked another cigar. And then he came again and found the travelling men playing whist, Mr. and Mrs. Fair dozing, and Miss Garnet looking out of a window on the other side in a section at the far end of the car, the only one not otherwise occupied.

"I'm in your seat," she said.

to lie five hours at a junction the night

She gradually remarked that she was not the sort of person to wilfully damage the value of a seat in a railroad car, and they shared it.

For a time they talked at random. He got out a map and time-table and while he held one side and she the other he showed where and why they had had

N the eastern portion of the south coast of Long Island there resided, some years since, an old sailor-man, "Bill" Waters by name, who for more than fifty years had followed the sea, now in ships of war and then in whalers or merchantvessels, his last cruise being on the Kearsarge when that ship fought the Alabama. He was one of the crew of the after pivot-gun, which wrought such havoc to the last-named vessel.

Uncle Bill lived in a little cabin on the beach, where, in summer, through the sale of cakes, fruits, and nuts, he added measurably to his annual revenue. He was one of those quaint, old sailor-men of former days, the total disappearance of whom, now near at hand, will sever the last link which contributed so potently to the interest and humor of the seas.

Uncle Bill was a firm and consistent believer in signs and tokens. An ingrained pessimist, any manifestation in nature above or below the normal drew from him predictions which, if taken seriously, would have undermined and saturated with gloom the most hopeful spirit. To the moon he owed an unquestioning, abject, and loyal allegiance. If one in a hundred of the prognostications which he made, founded upon the movements and phases of our satellite, had been verified, it would have

stamped it as the most malignant and terrifying of phenomena.

This blind adulation of Uncle Bill was a source of considerable amusement to summer visitors. Now and again some one of the clergy would take the thing seriously, and would reason with Uncle Bill upon his "heathenish worship of an innocent sphere of inert matter." Uncle Bill never vouchsafed but the one reply:

"I ne'er know'd no good a-comin' from a cussin' and a mockin' o' the moon."

The writer, who has had some experience with old-fashioned sailor- men, and who was cognizant of their innocent credulity, particularly in connection with the presumed potency of the moon, was a frequent visitor at Uncle Bill's cabin, who, when the day's work was done, being a widower and living alone, was disposed to talk freely concerning the incidents of his seafaring life. On one occasion, the conversation turning upon the fight between the Kearsarge and Alabama, Uncle Bill remarked:

"I nev'r know'd no good a-comin' from a-cussin' and a-mockin' o' the moon. Most fo'ks, princ'p'ly landlubb'rs and sich, thinks as how the guns of the Kearsarge dun the biz'ness for the Alabamy. So it wor, particTr Bill Smith, the Capt'in of the aft'r pivot-gun, me and Joe bein' in the