without stopping-"it was such an infer- Anne's pupils had, of course, exhaustnal den;" and again Anne wrote, address-ively weighed and sifted the new teacher, ing the second postmaster, and asking for and had decided to like her. Some of the letter. This postmaster replied, after them decided to adore her, and expressed some tardiness, owing to his conflicting their adoration in bouquets, autograph engagements as politician, hunter, and oc- albums, and various articles in card-board casionally miner, that the letter described supposed to be of an ornamental nature. had been forwarded to the Dead-letter Of- They watched her guardedly, and were fice. This correspondence occupied Octo- jealous of every one to whom she spoke; ber and November; and during this time she little knew what a net-work of plots, Rast was still roaming through the West, observation, mines and countermines, surwriting frequently, but sending no per- rounded her as patiently she toiled manent address. Now rumors of a silver through each long monotonous day. mine attracted him; now it was a scheme These adorations of school-girls, although for cattle-raising; now speculation in lands but unconscious rehearsals of the future, along the line of the coming railroad. It are yet real while they last; Anne's adorwas impossible to follow him-and iners went sleepless if by chance she gave truth he did not wish to be followed. He especial attention to any other pupil. The was tasting his first liberty. He meant adored one meanwhile did not notice these to look around the world awhile before little intensities; her mind was absorbed choosing his home: not long, only awhile. by other thoughts. Four days before Still, awhile. Christmas two letters came; one was her own to Rast, returned at last from the Dead-letter Office; the other was from Miss Lois, telling of the serious illness of Dr. Gaston. The old chaplain had had a stroke of paralysis, and Rast had been summoned; fortunately his last letter had been from St. Louis, to which place he had unexpectedly returned, and therefore they had been able to reach him by message to Chicago and a telegraphic dispatch. Gaston wished to see him; the youth had been his ward as well as almost child, and there were business matters to be arranged between them. Anne's tears fell as she read of her dear old teacher's danger, and the impulse came to her to go to him at once. Was she not his child as well as Rast? But the impulse was checked by the remainder of the letter. Miss Lois wrote, sadly, that she had tried to keep it from Anne, but had not succeeded: since August her small income had been much reduced, owing to the failure of a New Hampshire bank, and she now found that with all her effort they could not quite live on what was left. "Very nearly, dear child. I think, with thirty dollars, I can manage until spring. thing will be cheaper. I should not have kept it from you if it had not happened at the very time of your trouble with that wicked old woman, and I did not wish to add to your care. But the boys have what is called fine appetites (I wish they were not quite so 'fine'), and of course this winter, and never before, my provisions were spoiled in my own cellar." The chaplain added a few lines of his own when he sent these letters to Anne. Winter had seized them; they were now fast fettered; the mail came over the ice. Miss Lois was kind, and sometimes came up to regulate his housekeeping; but nothing went as formerly. His coffee was seldom good; and he found himself growing peevish-at least his present domestic, a worthy widow named McGlathery, had remarked upon it. But Anne must not think the domestic was in fault; he had reason to believe that she meant well even when she addressed him on the subject of his own short-comings. And here the chaplain's old humor peeped through, as he added, quaintly, that poor Mistress McGlathery's health was far from strong, she being subject to "inward tremblings,' which tremblings she had several times described to him with tears in her eyes, while he had as often recommended peppermint and ginger, but without success; on the contrary, she always went away with a motion of the skirts and a manner as to closing the door which the chaplain thought betokened offense. Anne smiled over these letters, and then sighed. If she could only be with him again-with them all! She dreamed at night of the old man in his arm-chair, of Miss Lois, of the boys, of Tita curled in her furry corner, which she had transferred, in spite of Miss Lois's remonstrances, to the sitting-room of the church-house. Neither Tita nor Père Michaux had written; she wondered over their new silence. Dr. Then every Colonel Bryden, coming in soon "Then steal away, give little warning, Say not good-night, but, in some brighter clime, When Anne knew that the funeral was over, that another grave had been made under the snow in the little military cem Anne had intended to send to Miss Lois | earth. all her small savings on Christmas-day. afterward, and looking upon the calm face, She now went to the principal of the had said, gently, school, asked that the payment of her salary might be advanced, and forwarded all she was able to send to the poverty-stricken little household in the church-house. That night she wept bitter tears; the old chaplain was dying, and she could not go to him; the children were perhaps suffering. For the first time in a life of pov-etery, and that, with the strange swifterty she felt its iron hand crushing her down. Her letter to Rast lay before her; she could not send it now and disturb the last hours on earth of their dear old friend. She laid it aside and waitedwaited through those long hours of dreary suspense which those must bear who are distant from the dying beds of their loved ones. In the mean time Rast had arrived. Miss Lois wrote of the chaplain's joy at seeing him. The next letter contained the tidings that death had come; early in the morning, peacefully, with scarcely a sigh, the old man's soul had passed from She ness which is so hard for mourning hearts "WH "RALDY." A STORY OF THE WISCONSIN RIVER. WHAT 'll they do?" "I'm sure I don't know." "Sim won't work, and they're poor as poverty. It's a year since the wife died, and now the old mother's gone. She brought in the pennies right smart." "There he is now." ing Sim Peebles, and had overheard these latter remarks of that gentleman's critics. She was above the medium height, and of a large and imposing figure, though far from graceful. Her large hands swung almost fiercely as she walked, and her tread was hard and masculine. With a mouth and chin handsomely and firmly though somewhat coarsely moulded, her broad and projecting forehead, and brill The two women stopped their whispering as the tall, loosely built figure of Sim Peebles came shambling along the ragged street of "Dearborn City." A look of un-iant, fearless blue eyes, added to the heavy mistakable affliction rested upon his weak but handsome face, and a rag of black stuff was tied decently about his shabby hat. Two children, little more than infants, came running to meet him from the low but fierce-fronted house into which he finally entered with them, and then the two women went on with their interrupted conversation. "Who's a-doing things for them, anyhow? Who fixed her?" "Him, I guess.' braids of flaxen hair which were wound neatly about her head, made her face striking, and even comely. The women turned with a start as they saw her, and realized that she had overheard them. Geralda, or, as she was commonly known, "Raldy," Scott was evidently a woman of whose opinion they stood somewhat in awe. "You didn't offer to help Sim Peebles yesterday," Raldy Scott said, disdainfully, pausing a moment in her hurried "Then he's smarter than I ever give walk. "He was alone there with that him credit for." dead woman and those little children, A young woman who was walking hast- and yet you, his neighbors, women with ily along the street had come close upon husbands and children of your own, nevthem while they were engaged in watch-er offered to help him. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves," she contin- | massed their logs into rafts, and came ued, her eyes flashing, and her language, floating down the river to their homes. which had been much better than that of The village had been planted in the midst her slovenly neighbors, taking on in her of the forest, and from many of its houses excitement more of their peculiar West- were visible the high red walls of the rivern twang. "And here, instead of walk-er as it shot through its wonderful Dells, ing up to his door and saying, 'Sim, can't we help you in your trouble?' you are standing in the street outside, wondering 'who'll help him.' Raldy Scott despises lazy, shiftless Sim Peebles as much as you do; but she washed and dressed his dead mother for him, she fed his children, and, not being quite a brute, she proposes to take care of them till Sim Peebles can get somebody else. He swam in, when the Dells were full of ice, and got my father's body, so that his daughters could bury him decently, and Mart and I don't forget it." And Raldy Scott swung along, leaving her listeners half stunned with her scathing rebuke. "Humph!" said one of them, sullenly; "mebbe Raldy Scott can't always carry things so high." 66 'But the men 'll always stand up for her," said the other one, dejectedly. "They think she's pow'rful smart because she's made two or three trips up in the pines and down on the rafts with the men. It must 'a ben since you come here that she come back the last time with her drunken old father. She sorter looked after him, I reckon. He had fine airy ways, he had, and nothing but a tipsy Irishman, after all; and she with trousers and coat on, jest like the men. Oh"-spitefully-"she ain't pertickeler, Raldy Scott ain't; can swim and pole a raft with any man in the Dells any day. Only since old Roy Scott died she dresses like the rest of us. Her sister Mart's goin' to get married. Likely she wants to, too;" and the two women laughed viperishly. "Perhaps she'll get Sim Peebles," said the other, as they parted; "he's ben a likely young widower some time now," and they laughed a coarse, hateful laugh as they went to their homes. The two or three scores of houses, many of them built of logs, which formed the homely, straggling street of Dearborn City, were inhabited almost wholly by lumbermen. During a large part of the year these men were away from their families cutting wood in the pines; but when the ice began to break, and the great spring flood of the majestic Wisconsin rolled down from the north, they | and the roar of its torrent rose upon their hearing perpetually. Just below the site of the village there was a break in the high red sandstone which lined the river for miles-with occasional rifts like this one-and here, when the current would permit, the rafts paused in the spring long enough for those to land who were not absolutely necessary to conduct the unwieldy argosies to the distant Mississippi. If the current was too strong for the rafts to stop, as was generally the case, the men sprang into the boiling rapids and swam ashore. Many a life even of experienced river pilots had been lost in the attempt, and it was in this way that Roy Scott had perished. He had indeed been an Irishman, and a dissipated one, but he had belonged to a wealthy and honorable family. He squandered his patrimony early in life, however, emigrated to the New World, and pushed into the wilds of what was then the farthest West. There he became enamored of the exciting life of the lumbermen of the Wisconsin, entered into it, met and married a quiet Swede girl, the daughter of one of his hardy comrades, and from their strange union had sprung the gentle Martha and the large-featured, fair - haired Geralda, whose Northern phlegm and endurance were united with the quick wit and intense passion of her Irish ancestors. | LEROY TALBOT SCOTT, RIVER PILOT. 1843. home. The girl never saw this without a secret | little ones were safely in bed, to Mart and thrill, for her father, years before she was her own trim though only less humble born, had climbed unaided up the beetling crag, and had hung by one hand between heaven and earth while he had written it. Humph, Mart Scott!" she had said, sharply, to her quiet and unimpassioned sister, "what are you made of, that you can hear these things, and yet sit there like a block?" 66 But Martha, with her pale Northern face and stolid Swede manner, cared more for the stout young pilot who was going to marry her than for all the stories of her reckless father's exploits. To her, whose frame was less robust than Geralda's, and who had always lived at home with her gentle mother, he had seemed only a carousing debauchee, whose absence in the pines was a pleasant relief, and whose coming was dreaded like the coming of a cyclone. To tell the truth, Martha regarded Raldy, who at sixteen had donned man's attire, as the disapproving neighbor had truly said, and had gone, under the leal though maudlin protection of her father, to do lumbermen's work and share lumbermen's fare in the rough life of the pineries-she regarded Raldy with almost as much dread as she had had of her dead father. But Raldy Scott, though she might be dreaded, was thoroughly respected by every man, woman, and child in Dearborn City. She was the soul of honor, and by hard work and economy she and Martha had managed to bury their father and mother decently, and then to pay off the mortgage on their little home. Raldy Scott had a brusque and forbidding manner, but, as Sim Peebles and many another man and woman had found out in times of trouble, underneath it beat a kind and generous heart. Raldy Scott was as good as her word; and when the little funeral procession which followed Sim Peebles's mother to the grave moved away from the desolate hut, which Raldy's strong neat hands had cleansed and purified, Raldy herself, with her brave, straightforward face held up defiantly to her gaping neighbors, had led one of the sobbing babies, while their shambling father, looking strangely kempt and tidy, walked beside the other. Then they had come home again to the little hut, and every day through the dreary November weather Raldy Scott had tended the orphaned children, and kept the cabin o' days, hastening home, when the "What you goin' to git for your pains, Raldy?" said a kindly old lumberman to her one day. He had befriended her father, and Raldy could not answer him curtly. "Talk behind my back-and experi ence," said Raldy, half smiling. But Mart was to be married at Christmas-time, so that Raldy felt she could afford to earn less for a while; and indeed, though she would not have allowed it to herself, she was becoming almost fond of the life which she was leading in Sim Peebles's cabin. "You're a powerful hand to work, Raldy," said Sim to her one day, as he sat watching her swift and energetic movements about his cheerless little kitchen. Raldy stopped, and squared her elbows, looking straight at him from under her great forehead. "I'm setting you an example, Sim Peebles," she said, slowly. "You're clever, and you're kind; you did me a great service once, and I'll never forget it; but if you had half the work in you that I have, you needn't be so all-possessed poor that you can't pay an honest woman for tending your wee bits and cooking your venison." Raldy's tone forbade reply or argument, and Sim Peebles slunk guiltily away. A day or two later he came in with a new brightness in his face. "Say, Raldy," he began, half sheepishly-for Sim Peebles had been "raised" in semi-luxury in some Eastern State, had loafed ever since he could remember, and hardly knew whether the announcement which he was about to make would be really creditable to him or not-"could you get along-I mean, would you stay and look after things here till I come back, if I go up in the pines till spring?" Raldy laughed a rather incredulous laugh. "What are you going to do up in the pines ?" she asked at length. 66 'Chop," answered Sim Peebles, succinctly. "Humph! they've all gone long ago." "No; there's a party going up to Stevens Point next week, and strike off from there." "You can't chop," said Raldy, contemptuously. "Yes, I can, too." "Well, then, go." Raldy spoke crust- | went, as usual, to the little Lutheran ily. She would not give the peeping chapel, the only place of worship which neighbors any chance to accuse her of Dearborn City afforded, and where her spending soft words on Sim Peebles. Yet, mother had been one of the most devout truth to say, she no longer held him in attendants, and having come home again, the low respect which she had expressed she got the dinner and fed the children. in the screed delivered to her gossiping Then she turned them out to play in the neighbors, and which her language to him clearing, and leaving the door ajar-for would seem to indicate. In these long, it was one of the mildest and pleasantest quiet weeks since she had come to live in days of early winter-she went singing his humble cabin, she had detected in the about her work. Sim Peebles watched lonely, saddened man qualities which had her as she moved here and there, and Ralsoftened her heart toward him. He loved dy, independent and imperious as she his children, and though he knew little was, stole now and then a furtive glance enough how to care for them, he yet at him. "minded" them devotedly in his own rough way. Then Sim Peebles's almost womanish face was yet handsome and attractive-when it was clean and shaven; and one day Raldy had come unexpectedly upon him with his eyes wet with tears, gazing upon a picture, which her quick-but no pride, no ambition. But he's vision noted, before he could put it away, as a likeness of his old mother. "He's handsome," she thought, dreamily, as she gave a casual glance at Sim's waving hair and large brown eyes; "but," coming to herself a little, "how shiftless he is! But he's kind," wandering off again, "and he's done some brave deeds honest," thought Raldy again; "nobody ever said Sim Peebles wasn't honest; there's nothing mean about Sim Peebles, and that's one reason," excusingly, "why he's so poor;" and then her thoughts drift "Humph!" said Raldy to herself, quite angry at a little secret tenderness which the sight had evoked in her, "Sim Peebles puts on considerable about his mo-ed off to what Mrs. Jenks and Mrs. Smith, ther; but I notice he didn't get her a new dress while she was here, and if she had enough to eat, it was because she hoed the clearing and dug the potatoes." Still, it was a fact, and Raldy, in a dim, unwilling way, knew it, that she was daily growing to set a higher value upon Sim Peebles than he deserved, and she felt this more definitely than before when he told her that he was going "up in the pines." There was in her a strange, an unreasoning aversion to having him go, glad as she was to see him developing something of the courage of a man. her hateful neighbors, would say, if she should happen, by chance-of course she wouldn't, even if Sim should ask herbut what would they all say, what would Mart say, if she should ever happen to marry Sim Peebles? Here Raldy checked herself, for she was standing absently, with a plate of butter in her hand, the butter in great danger of slipping, and her song quite still. She had been singing the old revival hymn: "And when I pass from here to Thee, Dear Lord, dear Lord, remember me." Sim saw his opportunity, and seized it, and as she hurried into the little pantry and out again he spoke quietly and ear "That's what I've been thinking, Raldy-something like, I mean. When I'm gone away, remember me." She had repelled so fiercely the young men who, won to admiration by her spirit and good looks, had dared to make her any overtures, that Raldy had never yet had a regular love affair, and, as is usual-nestly: ly the case with a strong and self-reliant woman, weakness had won where force had failed. She could not help acting a little more tender and approachable than her wont as the day drew near for Sim Peebles to go; and Sim-poor Sim, who had come to worship the very ground that Raldy trod-Sim felt it, but he did not dare to speak. "I'm not likely to forget you, with the youngsters under my feet all day," retorted Raldy, with asperity. "You have been very kind to me and mine," continued Sim, with a choice of words which proclaimed an early training He was to start on a Monday, and Ral- greatly superior to that of the rough men dy had patched and darned his clothes till around him. Raldy recognized this suhe was fit to go. Sunday morning she | periority. It was, indeed, one of Sim's |