my care. It has the New York postmark."

"Thank you, Miss Laura."

Eagerly Ben's hand tore the envelope and drew out the enclosure.
Swiftly his eyes devoured the lines; they were typewritten and easy to
follow.

"Glory!" he shouted, "glory hallelujah! Listen!"

He read the letter aloud, while Graciella leaned against his shoulder
and feasted her eyes upon the words. The letter was from Colonel
French:

_"My dear Ben_:

_I was very much impressed with the model of a cotton gin and
press which I saw you exhibit one day at Mrs. Treadwells'. You
have a fine genius for mechanics, and the model embodies, I
think, a clever idea, which is worth working up. If your
uncle's death has left you free to dispose of your time, I
should like to have you come on to New York with the model, and
we will take steps to have the invention patented at once, and
form a company for its manufacture. As an evidence of good
faith, I enclose my draft for five hundred dollars, which can
be properly accounted for in our future arrangements._"

"O Ben!" gasped Graciella, in one long drawn out, ecstatic sigh.

"O Graciella!" exclaimed Ben, as he threw his arms around her and
kissed her rapturously, regardless of Miss Laura's presence. "Now you
can go to New York as soon as you like!"

_Thirty-nine_

Colonel French took his dead to the North, and buried both the little
boy and the old servant in the same lot with his young wife, and in
the shadow of the stately mausoleum which marked her resting-place.
There, surrounded by the monuments of the rich and the great, in a
beautiful cemetery, which overlooks a noble harbour where the ships of
all nations move in endless procession, the body of the faithful
servant rests beside that of the dear little child whom he unwittingly
lured to his death and then died in the effort to save. And in all the
great company of those who have laid their dead there in love or in
honour, there is none to question old Peter's presence or the
colonel's right to lay him there. Sometimes, at night, a ray of light
from the uplifted torch of the Statue of Liberty, the gift of a free
people to a free people, falls athwart the white stone which marks his
resting place--fit prophecy and omen of the day when the sun of
liberty shall shine alike upon all men.

When the colonel went away from Clarendon, he left his affairs in
Caxton's hands, with instructions