de. Once a year
Father Augustin said mass for the repose of the soul of Jean d'Yriex;
but no other memory remained of the horror that blighted the lives of an
innocent girl and of a gray-haired mother mourning for her dead boy in
far Lozere.

THE DEAD VALLEY.

The Dead Valley.

I have a friend, Olof Ehrensvaerd, a Swede by birth, who yet, by reason
of a strange and melancholy mischance of his early boyhood, has thrown
his lot with that of the New World. It is a curious story of a
headstrong boy and a proud and relentless family: the details do not
matter here, but they are sufficient to weave a web of romance around
the tall yellow-bearded man with the sad eyes and the voice that gives
itself perfectly to plaintive little Swedish songs remembered out of
childhood. In the winter evenings we play chess together, he and I, and
after some close, fierce battle has been fought to a finish--usually
with my own defeat--we fill our pipes again, and Ehrensvaerd tells me
stories of the far, half-remembered days in the fatherland, before he
went to sea: stories that grow very strange and incredible as the night
deepens and the fire falls together, but stories that, nevertheless, I
fully believe.

One of them made a strong impression on me, so I set it down here, only
regretting that I cannot reproduce the curiously perfect English and the
delicate accent which to me increased the fascination of the tale. Yet,
as best I can remember it, here it is.

"I never told you how Nils and I went over the hills to Hallsberg, and
how we found the Dead Valley, did I? Well, this is the way it happened.
I must have been about twelve years old, and Nils Sjoeberg, whose
father's estate joined ours, was a few months younger. We were
inseparable just at that time, and whatever we did, we did together.

"Once a week it was market day in Engelholm, and Nils and I went always
there to see the strange sights that the market gathered from all the
surrounding country. One day we quite lost our hearts, for an old man
from across the Elfborg had brought a little dog to sell, that seemed to
us the most beautiful dog in all the world. He was a round, woolly
puppy, so funny that Nils and I sat down on the ground and laughed at
him, until he came and played with us in so jolly a way that we felt
that there was only one really desirable thing in life, and that was the
little dog of the old man from across the hills. But alas! we had not
half