The horrible thing was well named; and life is just like it, —a whirl of happiness and misery, in which the music cannot play loud enough to drown the creak of the machinery, in which one soul cries out in pain, another in terror, and the rest laugh; but the prancing steeds gallop on, gallop on, and, once mounted, there is no getting off, unless . . .

There were some things it was not possible for a man to bear! The river! the river! He could hear it rippling over the sunny sands, swirling among the logs, dashing and roaring under the bridge, rushing to the sea's embrace. Could it tell whither it was hurrying? No; but it was escaping from its present bonds; it would never have to pass over these same jagged rocks again. “On,

on to the unknown!" called the river. "I come! I come!" he roused himself to respond, when a faint, faint, helpless voice broke in upon the mad clatter in his brain, cleaving his torn heart in twain; not a real voice, the half-forgotten memory of one; a tender wail that had added fresh misery to his night's vigil, the baby!

But the feeble pipe was borne down by the swirl of the water as it dashed between the rocky banks, still calling to him. If he could only close his ears to it! But it still called called still-the river! And still the child's voice pierced the rush of sound with its pitiful flute note, until the two resolved themselves into contesting strains, answering each other antiphonally. The river the baby the river the baby; and in and through, and betwixt and between, there spun the whirling merry-go-round, with its curveting wooden horses, its discordant organ, and its creaking machin

ery.

But gradually the child's voice gained in strength, and as he heard it more plainly the other sounds grew fainter, till at last, thank God! they were hushed. The din, the whirlwind, and the tempest in his brain were lulled into silence, as

under a "Peace, be still!" and, worn out with the contest, the man from Tennessee fell asleep under the grateful shade of the nooning tree. So deep was the slumber that settled over exhausted body and troubled spirit that the gathering clouds, the sudden darkness, the distant muttering of thunder, the frightened twitter of the birds, passed unnoticed. A heavy drop of rain pierced the thick foliage and fell on his face, but the storm within had been too fierce for him to heed the storm without. He slept on.

Almost every man, woman, and child in the vicinity of Pleasant River was on the way to the circus, Boomer's Grand Six-in-One Universal Consolidated Show; Brilliant Constellations of Fixed Stars shining in the same Vast Firmament; Glittering Galaxies of World-Famous Equestrian Artists; the biggest elephants, the funniest clowns, the pluckiest riders, the stubbornest mules, the most amazing acrobats, the tallest man and the shortest man, the thinnest woman and the thickest woman, "on the habitable globe;" and no connection with any other show on earth, especially Sypher's Two-in-One Show now devastating the same State.

If the advertisements setting forth these attractions were couched in language somewhat rosier than the facts would warrant, there were few persons calm enough to perceive it, when once the glamour of the village parade and the smell of the menagerie had intoxicated the senses.

The circus had been the sole topic of conversation for a fortnight. Jot Bascom could always be relied on for the latest and most authentic news of its triumphant progress from one town to another. Jot was a sort of town crier; and whenever the approach of a caravan was announced, he would go over on the Liberty Road to find out just where it was and what were its immediate plans, for the thrilling pleasure of

calling at every one of the neighbors' on his way home, and delivering his budget of news. He was an attendant at every funeral, and as far as possible at every wedding in the village, at every flag-raising and husking and town and county fair. When more pressing duties did not hinder, he endeavored to meet the two daily trains that passed through Milliken's Mills, a mile or two from Pleasant River. He accompanied the sheriff on all journeys entailing serving of papers and other embarrassing duties common to the law. On one occasion, when the two lawyers of the village held an investigation before Trial Justice Simeon Porter, they waited an hour because Jot Bascom did not come. They knew that something was amiss, but it was only on reflection they remembered that Jot was not indispensable. He went with all paupers to the Poor Farm, and never missed a town meeting. He knew all the conditions attending any swapping of horses that occurred within a radius of twenty miles, the terms of the trade and the amount paid to boot. He knew who owed the fish man and who owed the meat man, and who could not get trusted by either of them. In fact, so far as the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipresence could be vested in a faulty human creature, they were present in Jot Bascom. That he was quite unable to attend conscientiously to home duties, when overborne by press of public service, was true. When Diadema Bascom wanted kindling wood split, wood brought in, the cows milked, or the pigs fed, she commonly found her spouse serving humanity in bulk.

--

where the old one had been, — the old one, viewed with awe for five years by all the village small boys.

The forerunners, outriders, proprietors, whatever they might be, had arrived and gone to the tavern.

An elephant was quartered in the tavern shed!

The elephant had stepped through the floor!!

The advance guard of performers and part of the show itself had come! And the "Cheriot "!!

This far-famed vehicle had paused on top of Deacon Chute's hill, to prepare for the street parade. Little Jim Chute had been gloating over the fact that it must pass by his house, and when it stopped short under the elms in the dooryard his heart almost broke for joy. He pinched the twenty-five-cent piece in his pocket to assure himself that he was alive and in his right mind. The precious coin had been the result of careful saving, and his hot, excited hands had almost worn it thin. But alas for the vanity of human hopes! When the magnificent redand-gold "Cheriot" was uncovered, that its glories might shine upon the waiting world, the door opened, and a huddle of painted Indians tumbled out, ready to lead the procession, or, if so disposed, to scalp the neighborhood. Little Jim gave one panic-stricken look as they leaped over the chariot steps, and then fled to the barn chamber, whence he had to be dragged by his mother, and cuffed into willingness to attend the spectacle that had once so dazzled his imagination.

On the eventful afternoon of the performance the road was gay with teams. David and Samantha Milliken drove by in Miss Cummins' neat carryall, two chil dren on the back seat, a will-o'-the-wisp baby girl held down by a serious boy. Steve Webster was driving Doxy Morton in his mother's buggy. Jabe Slocum, Pitt Packard, Brad Gibson, Cyse Higgins, and scores of others were riding "shank's mare," as they would have said.

It had been a close, warm day, and as the afternoon wore away it grew hotter and closer. There was a dead calm in the air, a threatening blackness in the west that made the farmers think anxiously of their hay. Presently the Presently the "thunder heads " ran together into big black clouds, which melted in turn into molten masses of smoky orange, so that the heavens were like burnished brass. Drivers whipped up their horses, and pedestrians hastened their steps. Steve Webster decided not to run even the smallest risk of injuring so precious a commodity as Doxy Morton by a shower of rain, so he drove into a friend's yard, put up his horse, and waited till the storm should pass by. Brad Gibson stooped to drink at a wayside brook, and as he bent over the water he heard a low, murmuring, muttering sound that seemed to make the earth tremble.

Then from hill to hill "leapt the live thunder." Even the distant mountains appeared to have "found a tongue." A zigzag chain of lightning flashed in the lurid sky, and after an appreciable interval another peal, louder than the first, and nearer.

The rain began to fall, the forked flashes of flame darted hither and thither in the clouds, and the boom of heaven's artillery grew heavier and heavier. The blinding sheets of light and the tumultuous roar of sound now followed each other so quickly that they seemed almost simultaneous. Flash crash - flash crash flash crash; blinding and deafening eye and ear at once. Everybody who could find a shelter of any sort hastened to it. The women at home set their children in the midst of feather beds, and some of them even huddled there themselves, their babies clinging to them in sympathetic fear, as the livid shafts of light illuminated the dark rooms with more than noonday glare.

The air was full of gloom: a nameless terror lurked within it; the elements seemed at war with each other. Horses

whinnied in the stables, and colts dashed about the pastures. The cattle sought sheltered places; the cows ambling clumsily towards some refuge, their full bags dripping milk as they swung heavily to and fro. The birds flew towards the orchards and the deep woods; the swallows swooped restlessly round the barns, and hid themselves under the eaves or in the shadow of deserted nests.

The rain now fell in sheets.

66

Hurry up 'n' git under cover, Jabe," said Brad Gibson; "you 're jest the kind of a pole to draw lightnin'!"

"You hain't, then!" retorted Jabe. "There ain't enough o' you fer lightnin' to ketch holt of!"

Suddenly a ghastly streak of light leaped out of a cloud, and then another, till the sky seemed lit up by cataracts of flame. A breath of wind sprang into the still air. Then a deafening crash, clap, crack, roar, peal! and as Jabe Slocum looked out of a protecting shed door, he saw a fiery ball burst from the clouds, shooting brazen arrows as it fell. Within the instant the meeting-house steeple broke into a tongue of flame, and then, looking towards home, he fancied that the fireball dropped to earth in Squire Bean's meadow.

The wind blew more fiercely now. There was a sudden crackling of wood, falling of old timbers, and breaking of glass. The deadly fluid ran in a winding course down a great maple by the shed, leaving a narrow charred channel through the bark to tell how it passed to the earth. A sombre pine stood up, black and burned, its heart gaping through a ghastly wound in the split trunk.

The rain now subsided; there was only an occasional faint rumbling of thunder, as if it were murmuring over the distant sea; the clouds broke away in the west; the sun peeped out, as if to see what had been going on in the world since he hid himself an hour before. A delicate rainbow bridge stretched from the blackened church steeple to the glittering weather

cock on the squire's barn; and there, in the centre of the fair green meadows from which it had risen in glorious strength and beauty for a century or more, lay the nooning tree.

The fireball, if ball of fire indeed there were, had struck in the very centre of its splendid dome, and ploughed its way from feather tip to sturdy root, riving the tree in twain, cleaving its great boughs left and right, laying one majestic half level with the earth, and bending the other till the proud head almost touched the grass.

The rainbow was reflected in the million drops glittering upon the bowed branches, turning each into a tear of

liquid opal. The birds hopped on the prone magnificence, and eyed timorously a strange object underneath.

There had been one swift, pitiless, merciful stroke! The monarch of the meadow would never again feel the magic thrill of the sap in its veins, nor the bursting of brown bud into green leaf.

The birds would build their nests and sing their idyls in other boughs. The "time of pleasure and love" was over with the nooning tree; over, too, with him who slept beneath; for under its fallen branches, with the light of a great peace in his upturned face, lay the man from Tennessee.

Kate Douglas Wiggin.

UNDER the northern shadow of Cape Smoky there is a double bay, cut in two by a rocky peninsula called Middle Head. Into the half of the bay next to Smoky, and chafing restlessly against the foundations of its richly colored cliffs, runs the Ingonish River, which comes from the almost impenetrable forests and morasses of the interior of northern Cape Breton to pour its clear waters into the ocean. No bridge crosses the stream, and the traveler who descends from the heights of Smoky towards the fishermen's hamlet of Ingonish South Bay, which he sees scattered upon a sandy spit at his feet, finds himself halting upon the edge of deep, swift water, with cove on his left and bay on his right, and never a sign of a way across. If his voice is strong and clear, he may waken the fishermen's dogs on the other shore, and, what is more to the purpose, bring a red-haired, blue-eyed lad to the flatboat on the sand, and to the big sweep which will presently urge it across to the foot of the red cliffs. The people

of Ingonish are in part of Irish parentage and in part of Scotch, but they are almost all members of the Roman communion, and made of different stuff from the blue Presbyterian Highlanders who dwell along the coast between Cape Smoky and the head of St. Anne's Bay. In the best of the houses which stand one beyond another on the South Bay beach lives Mr. Baker, whose hospitality makes a journey beyond Smoky a possibility, and more than that, a pleasure. Here may be laid aside the stoicism needed to sustain life during the journey up the north shore, and here, in the midst of restless ocean, tawny sands, red cliffs, undulating forests, and brooks alive with trout, can be found all that nature can give to stimulate happiness or to lull the troubled mind, and all that the reasonable wanderer can expect to find to make his weary flesh comfortable. the days which we spent at Mr. Baker's we learned to love Ingonish more and more, as we explored it by land and by

sea.

In

I.

BY LAND.

The breath of fire floated in the air, making it hazy, softening the mountain contours, giving a wicked look to the sea, and filling me, through its perfume, with the same feeling of unrest that the moose and caribou have as they feel the smoke of burning forests tingling in their nostrils. Looking inland, I saw the hills marshaled along the river, rank behind rank, with their relative distances clearly defined by the smoke. The mercury was above 90° Fahrenheit, and mountain climbing was not to be thought of. Middle Head, seen across the waves, suggested cool breezes, and towards its lean, half-grassy, half- rocky finger, pointing ever eastward, we took our way. From Mr. Baker's, half a mile of sandy road runs northward parallel with an ideally beautiful beach. Then the road bends to the left, inland, while the beach curves to the right, seaward, rising soon into sandy banks, which in turn change to sculptured cliffs at whose foot the sea murmurs.

Terns with black-tipped wings skimmed close to the restless waves, and over the fretted sand where the ripples had left the marks of their lips. No one walked upon the road where man had scratched together badly the same sand which nature had made perfect by the tides.

When I looked at Ingonish beach as it was, silent, lonely, serene, and pure, I thought what it might some day be made if fashionable men and women, on pleasure bent, chanced to discover it and to feel the thrill of its sun-tempered tide, which is as mild as that of their favorite but more southern shores. Now, at least, the absence of hotels where such men and women might be fed and put to bed, if by chance the sea or their own feet cast them upon these distant sands, makes it certain that they will not come to banish Eden by their presence.

Between the sand beach and the road there rises a massive wall of rounded stones, varying in size from a goose egg to a human skull. Can waves alone have raised such a dike? The same question came to me as I studied a similar wall running along the seaward side of the bar which well-nigh makes St. Anne's Bay a lake, and Torquil McLean's ferry a superfluity instead of a somewhat malodorous joy. Perhaps the fact that often, in winter, the ice comes stealing across from Newfoundland and the seas that lie beyond it, and packs itself against St. Anne's bar and all the north coast of Cape Breton, may explain these walls. The thrust of the ice could scour the shallows for miles, and bear along loose stones to the first beach whose sloping face would receive them. The density of the arrangement of these stones, and the abruptness of the front which they present to the sea, point to ice action rather than to that of waves alone. The wall is so high that those walking or driving along the road cannot see the beach, while those bathing cannot see the country inland. Shut in between shingle and sea, we walked the length of the sand, and then climbed to the top of the bluffs of Middle Head.

The evening before, while watching meteors from the beach, we had seen the sky above Middle Head suddenly lighted up by a bright fire. It lasted ten or fifteen minutes, then died away so quickly that we felt sure no building could have been destroyed. Now, on the narrow path leading along the edge of the cliffs we met three men. They bowed and touched their caps with the smiling politeness characteristic of most of the natives, Gaelic or Irish. I asked them what and where the fire had been; and in a few words they said that Rory This had bought the right to cut grass on Sandy That's land, but that after the hay was made a dispute arose as to the price; so the hay had been burned to quiet the trouble. I confess I could not reason