Genre Romance. Page - 17

d when writing the present tale, the gratuities received yearly by the musicians at Christmas were somewhat as follows: From the manor-house ten shillings and a supper; from the vicar ten shillings; from the farmers five shillings each; from each cottage-household one shilling; amounting altogether to not more than ten shillings a head annually--just enough, as an old executant told me, to pay for their fiddle-strings, repairs, rosin, and music-paper (which they mostly ruled themselves). Their music in those days was all in their own manuscript, copied in the evenings after work, and their music-books were home-bound.

It was customary to inscribe a few jigs, reels, horn-pipes, and ballads in the same book, by beginning it at the other end, the insertions being continued from front and back till sacred and secular met together in the middle, often with bizarre effect, the words of some of the songs exhibiting that ancient and broad humour which our grandfathers, and possibly grandmothers, took delight i

bably rewards for his capture which, in the aggregate, offered immense inducement to deliver Anthony Trent to justice. How was Trent to know that Sutton the adjutant was financially secure enough to make the sacrifice? Undoubtedly he had seen Sutton and made the desperate leap.

Sutton determined to safeguard his interests. The baggage for instance, that should not be searched. There might be in it evidence as damaging as that which the brothers of Joseph put into the younger's sack. It would be far better to see the captain and make a friend of him. Why had not Trent been a better reader of character and recognized that in Captain Sutton he had a friend?

Sutton did not know that long ago Trent had seen that in the rich lawyer there was one whom he need not fear. Few were more skilled than the master criminal in the reading of those signs by which men reveal for a second or so the depths of their natures.

Anthony Trent had not jumped from the rails of the big ship because he had seen Sutto

whispered the pirate captain dubiously, aside.

"Speak on!" again commanded he of the blue eyes. "But your life blood dyes the deck if you seek to deceive Jean Lafitte, or Henry L'Olonnois!"

(So then, thought I, at last I knew their names.)

In reply I reached to my belt and drew out quickly--so quickly that they both flinched away--the long handled knife which, usually, I carried with me for cutting down alders or other growth which sometimes entangled my flies as I fished along the stream. "Listen," said I, "I swear the pirates' oath. On the point of my blade," and I touched it with my right forefinger, "I swear that I pondered on two things when you surprised me."

"Name them!" demanded Jimmy L'Olonnois fiercely.

"First, then," I answered, "I was wondering what I could use as a cork to my phial, when once I had yonder Anopheles in it----"

"Who's he?" demanded Jean Lafitte.

"Anopheles? A friend of mine," I replied; "a mosquito, in short."

"Jimmy, he's cr

th whom personally I had but a slight acquaintance, although I knew them somewhat by reputation. The younger one, Clinton Browne, is a young artist whose landscapes were beginning to attract wide attention in Boston, and the elder, Charles Herne, a Western gentleman of some literary attainments, but comparatively unknown here in the East. There is nothing about Mr. Herne that would challenge more than passing attention. If you had said of him, "He is well-fleshed, well-groomed, and intellectually well-thatched," you would have voiced the opinion of most of his acquaintances.

This somewhat elaborately upholstered old world has a deal of mere filling of one kind and another, and Mr. Herne is a part of it. To be sure, he leaves the category of excelsior very far behind and approaches very nearly to the best grade of curled hair, but, in spite of all this, he is simply a sort of social filling.

Mr. Browne, on the other hand, is a very different personage. Of medium height, closely knit, with the lat

ople were blessed and shriven by the tremblingpriests. Outside no bird flew, and there came no rustling fromthe woods, nor any of the homely sounds of Nature. All was still,and nothing moved, save only the great cloud which rolled up andonward, with fold on fold from the black horizon. To the west wasthe light summer sky, to the east this brooding cloud-bank,creeping ever slowly across, until the last thin blue gleam fadedaway and the whole vast sweep of the heavens was one great leadenarch.

Then the rain began to fall. All day it rained, and all the nightand all the week and all the month, until folk had forgotten theblue heavens and the gleam of the sunshine. It was not heavy, butit was steady and cold and unceasing, so that the people wereweary of its hissing and its splashing, with the slow drip fromthe eaves. Always the same thick evil cloud flowed from east towest with the rain beneath it. None could see for more than abow-shot from their dwellings for the drifting veil of ther

icture had flashed across her brain, and there were two figures in it sitting together under a great trailing wisteria that stretched across the branches of a tree she didn't know, and it was herself and Mrs. Arbuthnot--she saw them--she saw them. And behind them, bright in sunshine, were old grey walls--the mediaeval castle --she saw it--they were there . . .

She therefore stared at Mrs. Arbuthnot and did not hear a word she said. And Mrs. Arbuthnot stared too at Mrs. Wilkins, arrested by the expression on her face, which was swept by the excitement of what she saw, and was as luminous and tremulous under it as water in sunlight when it is ruffled by a gust of wind. At this moment, if she had been at a party, Mrs. Wilkins would have been looked at with interest.

They stared at each other; Mrs. Arbuthnot surprised, inquiringly, Mrs. Wilkins with the eyes of some one who has had a revelation. Of course. That was how it could be done. She herself, she by herself, couldn't afford it, and wouldn't b

m, andjudged them with the contemptuous lucidity of nearly twentyyears of dependence. But at the present moment her animositywas diminished not only by the softening effect of love but bythe fact that she had got out of those very people more--yes,ever so much more--than she and Nick, in their hours of mostreckless planning, had ever dared to hope for.

"After all, we owe them this!" she mused.

Her husband, lost in the drowsy beatitude of the hour, had notrepeated his question; but she was still on the trail of thethought he had started. A year--yes, she was sure now thatwith a little management they could have a whole year of it!"It" was their marriage, their being together, and away frombores and bothers, in a comradeship of which both of them hadlong ago guessed the immediate pleasure, but she at least hadnever imagined the deeper harmony.

It was at one of their earliest meetings--at one of theheterogeneous dinners that the Fred Gillows tried to think"literary"--that the young man