when all at once the leaves of his tree are cut by a flying missile,
and the next second I see my gay fellow tumble headlong from the bough,
and fall in a helpless little heap on the grass. I start up in affright,
and hear a passing boy call out to another, over the way,

"I brought him down, Jim."

Involuntarily I clinch my hands.

"You little coward!" I exclaim, "it is _you_ who should be brought down!
You are too mean to live."

He laughs brutally, and goes on, whistling indifferently, while I pick
up the dead squirrel lying at my feet.

I find myself crying, before I know it. Not alone with pity for the
squirrel; something else is hurting me.

"Is this the masculine nature?" I ask some one--I don't know whom.

Perhaps it is one of those questions which are flung upward, in a blind
kind of way, and which God sometimes catches and answers.

"Are they made this way? Was it meant that they should be brutal?"

I am still holding the squirrel and thinking, when I hear my name, and
turning see my neighbor over the way, Mrs. Purblind's brother, standing
near me.

"Good morning, Mr. Chance," I say, rather coldly.

All men are hateful to me at that moment; to my mind they all have that
boy's nature, though they keep it under cover until they know you well,
or have you in their power.

"The little fellow is dead, I suppose," he said.

"Yes," I answer with a sob which I turn away to conceal. I don't wish to
excite his mirth. Of course he would only see something laughable in my
grief, and he couldn't dream what I am thinking about.

"You mustn't be too hard on the boy, Miss Leigh," he says quietly; "it
was a brutal act, but that same aggressiveness will one day give him
power to battle in life against difficulties and temptations as well. It
will make him able to protect those whom a kind Providence may put in
his charge. Just now he doesn't know what to do with the force, and
evidently has not had good teaching. I'm sorry he did this; it hurts me
to see an innocent creature harmed, and still more I am sorry because
it has hurt you."

He is standing near me now, and as I raise my eyes, I find him looking
at me with a sweet earnestness, that wins me not only to forgive him for
being a man, but to feel that perhaps men are noble, after all.

His look and tone linger with me long after he has gone, as a cadence of
music may vibrate through the soul when both musician and instrument are
mute.

The day after thi