The servant - maid at the Den was Bruce's sweetheart. I knew Lagarre's groom had been paying her too much attention, little to the stout plowman's mind.

He seemed deafer, too. He did not hear me till I quite overtook him. He changed his staff to his left hand and shook hands eagerly with me, while his deep gray eyes, scanning my face, seemed to ask

brows fell a little. He pointed to the

He turned like a recoil.

"An' dinna you dislike onybody?" "Perhaps," I answered, unable to speak frankly, too cowardly to lay my heart open even to the faithful creature who would have served me so silently and bravely. No man, the meanest of us, need want friends; no man, the greatest, need hope for them if he keep hard locked up his own heart. But as some are born tongue-tied, so are some born dumb at the heart, or can at best only stammer.

Gawn Bruce spoke again:

"Ye ken yer ain affairs best, nae doot. Whaur are ye gaun tae sleep the nicht?"

"Here," I said, walking up to the long settle that lay in the corner, and stretching myself upon it.

“There are only two or three hours to sleep, at any rate. What time will you be up to-morrow?"

"Aboot five," he answered. The cooboy 'ill wauken me. The Lagarres and Miss Mary's gaein' off airly tae some picnic. I hae been ordered tae get the licht jauntin'-ker ready."

He watched me anxiously while he spoke the last sentence. I only replied: "Very well, Gawn; waken me the first thing you do. Good-night."

CHAPTER VIII.

But a few minutes after five, as it was next morning when I opened the orchard gate and came to walk on my and the old man's favorite path, Mr. Knox was there before me. His back was to the gate as I entered, and he seemed to lean more heavily on his stick than usual.

morning costume, came out with her flower-basket in her hand. She too, was a little early this morning, in looking after her father's library bouquet. Paul Lagarre was by her side. There was no denying that he was a fine man. Tall, deep-chested, with crisp raven hair, and a full neck, chin, and jaws massive and white as marble under the heavy mustache, no wonder Mary blushed as he touched her hand in the eagerness of his morning compliments.

"I don't much like this work, Dan," said the old man, hastily. "I once thought, indeed, that you

His eyes were searching my face again. O, if we had been but alone! A minute might have saved me. My back was to the advancing pair; the steps came nearer. I turned and took a step forward. Mary, too, made a quick movement of advance. The Frenchman said something in his own language about me. She looked at my muddy clothes, crumpled linen, and tangled hair, and her lips took the faintest humorous curve. Lagarre's great mustache broadened out and he lifted his brows, while he bowed low, making a burlesque of the salute.

Mary was holding out her hand to me in an instant with a strange look in her face, as if asking pardon for her thoughtless smile. As I touched her hand the Frenchman scowled on me with such pronounced insolence that I pushed her aside as if I had been stung and leaped toward him. But he caught at Mary, who had reeled against the box-edging of the path with a low hurt cry.

It was all in an instant; and Mr. Knox,

who had also started forward, took his daughter in his arms. Then Lagarre turned on me with a growl like a wild beast: "Dog of a peasant's son, you have struck a lady. Now"

In an instant he was down. I felt my knuckles cutting open that marble jaw of his to the very ear. Then I leaped on him, feeling with one rapid sweep all over his breast for any weapon hid. There was none. Indeed, he did not need one. The instant we grappled on the ground his immense strength made him my master. He had me by the throat; he wrenched me undermost; his blows were raining on my face. I could not free my throat; I was choking to death.

Well-and let me draw a long long breath here, and pause before I write further that was the last of it, the last I remember, the last I even now know anything about. It was in my own room in my father's house that I finally woke up. Ma was sitting beside the bed. I turned my head and looked at her in a helpless fashion out of my bruised eyes.

“Daniel Hoat, I thank God you are recovered," she said. "Three weeks to-morrow you have raved on that bed like him whose name was Legion. It has pleased God to restore you to reason and partial health; if it should also please Him to grant you in some small measure His divine grace and wisdom, we might hope to be spared a repetition of the folly and wickedness which have made you, and, in some measure, your family, a subject for scoffing and laughter to the whole neighborhood."

Poor woman! she had, indeed, tended me carefully all through the fever that followed my beating, but she was exasperated at the clatter of the gossips of the parish, and perhaps she had cause. She rattled on; it was a characteristic of her tongue that what it gained in ve

locity it did not lose in force. Once begun to scold, there was no hope for her victim but in flight, bodily or mental. To cross swords with her was but to sharpen her own weapon. Fortunately my nerves of suffering were numb, and the indignation that shot out over her gold spectacles, when she jerked her head forward as if about to gore me with the two corkscrew curls on her forehead, lost its heat ere it passed through the damp cloth I had pulled from my shaven head down nearly over my eyes.

I took a lazy incurious interest in hearing the details of my own guilt as published by rumor. I had lurked around the Den all night to shoot Mr. Lagarre; Etienne had seen me. Foiled by daylight in my murderous designs, I had grown desperate, abused old Mr. Knox in his own garden, thinking to find him at that early hour alone, and when Miss Knox and her new lover came out, I had knocked the poor girl down. She had only been saved from my further brutality by the prowess of Lagarre, who had beaten me to a jelly, and would have killed me had not Gawn Bruce and Bounce arrived on the scene, attracted by Miss Knox's and her father's cries. Harry Knox had promised publicly to horsewhip me whenever I should be sufficiently recovered to undergo the operation; and Ady, who, it seems, was making a fool of himself over Lagarre's sister, had taken no notice of the threat on my behalf, thereby incurring the displeasure of my father. Here ma stopped. My poor father-giving way more and more to Scotch whisky, and fast approaching that chronically sodden condition which may be described as an evolution from ordinary drunkenness into a higher form of imbecility - here opened the door to tell ma some one wanted her below-stairs.

He walked heavily into the room as she left it, and looked at me sleepily: "Ye hae bin haen' a bit o' a spree. Ma's

doon on ye a bit"-and he looked again, to be sure she had left the room. "Nae metther, we hae a' wer fauts-I always liked ye betther than Ady, wi' his womanish ways. Bit, Dan, ye got yersel' badly han'led. No Hoat could stan' it, Dan"—and the dull glimmer left my father's eyes for a moment and a sinful fire shone in them. We were nearer, we, father and son, in that hour than we had ever been.

"Have they ever sent to inquire after me, father?" I questioned, evasively.

"They say auld Knox is doon wi' some kind o' a paralaysis," said my father, listlessly, as he applied himself to his great pocket-flask; "ablins Harry sends you word that his fether wants tae dispense wi' yer company henceforth. Wull ye trie the brie?" and he handed me the flask.

I drank long and deep, and felt a sudden strength thrilling through me:

"Any other news?"

“Ay, lad”—and his face, that must once have been splendid in its rugged strength, became transformed again with fierce anger. "Mary Knox came roon' tae see ye, twa days after ye wur braught

hame". -I sat up and my heart beat violently-"came tae see ye--in company wi' the Frenchman!"

I leaped from my bed at mention of the insult, and caught my father's arm. "And you -?"

"Get into bed, my bairn; gin Mary Knox nurses my spade-cut out of hir black Frenchman's hud, she'll no hae time tae goe jauntin' mair jist the noo." "You struck him before her, father?" "Ay, bairn, peeled his scalp tae the bone wi' the auld peat-spade, an' tauld the hizzie that sae wad I serve ony Knox I suld see on my grun'."

"The flask, father," I said. He reached it to me, and I drank again. “Father, when I get better I must have money enough to go abroad for a year or two and forget the Knoxes and all these things."

"There's three thousan' in the bank, Dan; yer likely tae make a better use o' it than me. Mitherless bairn, ye hae na had so much pleesure in yer life. It were muckle better for us baith ye were na mitherless-muckle better, Dan." And he walked steadily out of the room. I turned my face to the wall and slept.

California and Mexico. While Mexican raids into Texas are fomenting discord and apprehension in the East, in the West the steady advance of our Southern Pacific Railroad toward its declared objective point, the great plateau of Anahuac, stirs up feelings and dreams of the most pleasant kind. The Hon. Leland Stanford is reported as saying: "We are quietly but resolutely expending our every exertion to build the Southern Pacific Railroad. We are toiling for the greatest prize that this continent affords. The people of California and the people of San Francisco have no appreciation of the splendid trade we are opening up for them, nor for the magnificent destiny that awaits this city when we shall have brought to its doors the vast trade of Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, Chihuahua, and the valley of Mexico." It will very well suit those who sneered at our great transcontinental railway at its inception to say that these are mere empty words; but those best acquainted with the enterprise of the great company which Mr. Stanford represents know how fit they are to join together the North and the South, as well as the East and the

West. They believe in the work, believe in its feasibility, and in the future of our State and of its metropolis. Mr. Stanford closed the interview with an eloquent and hopeful picture of what he believed would be the future: "I hope to live and look down upon a city embracing in itself and its suburbs a million of people. I shall see trains of cars laden with merchandise and passengers coming from the East across the present transcontinental railroad. I shall see long trains from the line of the thirty-second parallel. I shall see cars from the city of Mexico, and trains laden with the gold and silver bullion and grain that comes from Sonora and Chihuahua on the south, and from Washington Territory and Oregon on the north. I shall see railroads bearing to and fro the produce and merchandise of each extreme. I shall look out through the Golden Gate, and I shall there see fleets of ocean steamers bearing the trade of India, the commerce of Asia, the traffic of the islands of the ocean— steamers from Australia and the Southern Pacific. I shall see our thronged and busy streets, our wharves laden with the commerce of the Orient, and I shall say to myself, 'I