*

"I wonder if old Shep's relations and friends," said Jim, as we stood
under the arc light in front of my house, "ever came to forgive the
people who took him away from his flocks and herds."

"After what I've seen in the last few minutes," said I, "I haven't the
least doubt of it."

"Al," said he, "these be troublous times, but if I believed all that
what you say implies, I'd go home happy, if not jolly. And I almost
believe you're right."

"Well," said I, assuming for once the role of the mentor, "I think that
you are foolish to worry about it. We have enough actual, well-defined,
surveyed and platted grief on our hands, without any mooning about
hunting for the speculative variety. Go home, sleep, and bring down a
clear brain for to-morrow's business."

"To-day's," said he gaily. "Tear off yesterday's leaf from the calendar,
Al. For, look! the morn, dressed as usual, 'walks o'er the dew of yon
high eastern hill.'"

CHAPTER XVII.

Relating to the Disposition of the Captives.

It was not later than the next day but one, that I met Giddings, alert,
ingratiating, and natty as ever.

"When am I to have the third stanza?" I inquired, "the one that's 'the
best of all.'"

This question he seemed to take as a rebuke; for he reddened, while he
tried to laugh.

"Barslow," said he, "there isn't any use in our discussing this thing.
You couldn't understand it. A man like you, who can calculate to a hair
just how far he is going and just where to turn back, and--Oh, damn!
There's no use!"

I sympathize with Giddings, at this present moment, in his despair of
making people understand; for I doubt, sometimes, whether it is possible
for me to make the reader understand the conditions with us in Lattimore
at the time when poor Trescott lay there in his fine house, fighting for
life, and for many things more important, and while the wedding
preparations were going forward at the General's house.

To the steady-going, stationary, passionless community these conditions
approach the incomprehensible. No one seemed to doubt the city's future
now. Sometimes the abnormal basis upon which our great new industries
had been established struck the stranger with distrust, if he happened
to have the insight to notice it; but the concerns _were there_ most
undeniably, and had shifted population in their coming, and were turning
out products for the markets of the world.

That they had been evolved magically, and se