ed down in a steady golden glow over the mass
that mingled its yellow-brown with the black beard of the stricken man.
For the father would not lay away his sleeping child. He held him close,
as the something, the all that was left to him of his lost love. His
head drooped low and his lips rested in a long embrace of the child's
soft wealth of hair.

Mayhap some watching spirit took pity upon the man bereaved; for while
he gazed into the fire, the heavy pressure of the present yielded to a
half-conscious memory of the past, and a dream-like reverie brightened
and darkened, flickered and burned in and out with the red of the flame,
and the white of the ashes.

Duncan Lisle was a boy again. With two little brothers and a half-dozen
black child-retainers, he hunted in the woods of Kennons, sailed boats
on the red waters of the Roanoke, rode break-neck races over the old
fields, despising fences high, and ditches deep, and vigorously sought
specimens of uncouth, out-of-the-way beast, bird and insect. He studied
mathematics and classics, played pranks upon one tutor, and did loving
reverence to another. He planted flowers upon his own mother's grave,
and filled the vases of his stepmother with her own favorite lilacs and
roses. He made houses, carriages, swings, sets of furniture, and all
sorts of constructions for his half-sister Della, who was his junior by
ten years at least.

He edified, not to say terrified, the dusky crowd of juveniles with
jack-o'-lanterns, impromptu giants and brigands, false faces, fire
crackers, ventriloquism and sleight-of-hand performances.

With a decided propensity for fun and mischief, there was also in his
disposition as evident a proclivity to seriousness and earnestness. If
it gave him delight to play off upon a stranger the joke of "bagging the
game," he enjoyed with equal ardor the correct rendering of a difficult
translation, or the solution of an intricate problem.

If sometimes he annoyed with his untimely jest, he always won by his
manly openness and uniform kindliness of nature. He cherished love for
all that was around him, both animate and lifeless. Soul and Nature
therefore rendered back to him their meed of harmonious sympathy.

Duncan was scarcely seventeen when the Plague swept over Kennons. That
mysterious blight, rising in the orient, traveling darkly and surely
unto the remotest West, laid its blackened hand upon the fair House of
Kennons.

Cholera! fearful by name an