Liz, that there stun'd about fixed me,"
he remarked.

The girl smiled happily, but said nothing.

After a long pause he spoke again.

"Seems to me ye're like what ye used to, Liz," said he, "only nicer, a
sight nicer; an' y' used to be powerful nice. I allow there couldn't
_be_ another girl so nice as you, Liz. An' what ever's made ye quit
lookin' down on me, so sudden like?"

"Jim-Ed," she replied, in a caressing tone, "ef y' _ain't_ got no paper
collar on, ner no glas' di'mon' pin, I allow ye're a _man_. An'
maybe--maybe ye're the _kind_ of man I _like_, Jim-Ed."

To even such genuine modesty as Jim-Ed's this was comprehensible. Shyly
and happily he reached out his hand for hers. They were both seated very
comfortably on the cart-beam, so he did not consider it necessary to
move. Side by side, and hand in hand, they journeyed homeward in a
glorified silence. The oxen appeared to guide themselves very fairly.
The sunset flushed strangely the roadside hillocks. The nighthawks
swooped in the pale zenith with the twang of smitten chords. And from a
thick maple on the edge of a clearing a hermit-thrush fluted slowly over
and over his cloistral ecstasy.

A Tragedy of the Tides.

This is the story of the fate that befell Lieutenant Henry Crewe and
Margaret Neville, his betrothed, who disappeared from the infant city of
Halifax on the afternoon of September 18th, 1749. The facts were
gathered by one Nicholas Pinson from the mouths of Indians more or less
concerned, from members of the Neville family, and from much sagacious
conjecture; and woven, with an infinite deal of irrelevant detail, into
a narrative which has been rigorously condensed in the present
rendering. The industrious Pinson's manuscript, with all its attenuated
old French characters, its obscure abbreviations, and its well-bred
contempt for orthographical accuracy, might perhaps be found even yet in
the Provincial archives at Halifax. At least, if any one be curious to
examine this story in the original, just as M. Pinson wrote it, he may
search the archives of Halifax with a reasonable surety that the
manuscript is as likely to be found there as anywhere else.

There was a faint, opaline haze in the afternoon air, and in the still
waters of the harbor the low hills, with their foliage lightly touched
in bronze and amethyst and amber, were faithfully reproduced. Into a
hollow between two knolls wooded with beech trees, ran a shallow cove,
its