ions of the visitor.

"How long he tarries in Zane's homestead!" said the people that spring.
"Hasn't he settled that estate yet?"

"It never will be settled if he can help it," said public Echo, "as long
as there are two fine young women there, and one of them so fascinating
over men!"

Indeed, Duff Salter received letters, anonymous, of course--the
anonymous letter was then the suburban press--admonishing him to beware
of his siren hostess.

"_She has ruined two men_," said the elegant female handwriting before
observed. "_You must want to be the subject of a coroner's inquest. That
house is bloody and haunted, rich Mr. Duff Salter! Beware of Lady
Agnes, the murderess! Beware, too, of her accomplice, the insinuating
little Byerly!_"

Duff Salter walked out one day to make the tour of Kensington. He passed
out the agreeable old Frankford road, with its wayside taverns, and hay
carts, and passing omnibuses, and occasional old farm-like houses,
interspersed with newer residences of a city character, and he strolled
far up Cohocksink Creek till it meandered through billowy fields of
green, and skirted the edges of woods, and all the way was followed by a
path made by truant boys. Sitting down by a spring that gushed up at the
foot of a great sycamore tree, the grandly bearded traveller, all
flushed with the roses of exercise, made no unpleasing picture of a Pan
waiting for Echo by appointment, or holding talk with the grazing goats
of the poor on the open fields around him.

"How changed!" spoke the traveller aloud. "I have caught fishes all
along this brook, and waded up its bed in summer to cool my feet. The
girl was beside me whose slender feet in innocent exposure were placed
by mine to shame their coarser mould. We thought we were in love, or as
near it as are the outskirts to some throbbing town partly instinctive
with a coming civic destiny. Alas! the little brook that once ran
unvexed to the river, freshening green marshes at its outlet, has become
a sewer, discolored with dyes of factories, and closed around by
tenements and hovels till its purer life is over. My playmate, too,
flowed on to womanhood, till the denser social conditions shut her in;
she mingled the pure current of her life with another more turgid, and
dull-eyed children, like houses of the suburbs, are builded on her
bosom. I am alone, like this old tree, beside the spring where once I
was a sapling, and still, like its waters, youth wells