t, or golden. One
Sunday, a stranger, with a bronzed, weather-beaten face like a sailor's,
leaned over the garden rail, and said to him, "What a fine young
date-palm you have there, sir!"

"Mon Dieu!" cried Pere Antoine starting, "and is it a palm?"

"Yes, indeed," returned the man. "I didn't reckon the tree would
flourish in this latitude."

"Ah, mon Dieu!" was all the priest could say aloud; but he murmured to
himself, "Bon Dieu, vous m'avez donne cela!"

If Pere Antoine loved the tree before, he worshiped it now. He watered
it, and nurtured it, and could have clasped it in his arms. Here were
Emile and Anglice and the child, all in one!

The years glided away, and the date-palm and the priest grew
together--only one became vigorous and the other feeble. Pere Antoine
had long passed the meridian of life. The tree was in its youth. It no
longer stood in an isolated garden; for pretentious brick and stucco
houses had clustered about Antoine's cottage. They looked down scowling
on the humble thatched roof. The city was edging up, trying to crowd him
off his land. But he clung to it like lichen and refused to sell.

Speculators piled gold on his doorsteps, and he laughed at them.
Sometimes he was hungry, and cold, and thinly clad; but he laughed
none the less.

"Get thee behind me, Satan!" said the old priest's smile.

Pere Antoine was very old now, scarcely able to walk; but he could sit
under the pliant, caressing leaves of his palm, loving it like an Arab;
and there he sat till the grimmest of speculators came to him. But even
in death Pere Antoine was faithful to his trust: the owner of that land
loses it if he harm the date-tree.

And there it stands in the narrow, dingy street, a beautiful, dreamy
stranger, an exquisite foreign lady whose grace is a joy to the eye, the
incense of whose breath makes the air enamored. May the hand wither that
touches her ungently!

"_Because it grew from the heart of little Anglice_," said Miss Blondeau
tenderly.

MISS MEHETABEL'S SON

I

THE OLD TAVERN AT BAYLEY'S FOUR-CORNERS

You will not find Greenton, or Bayley's Four-Corners as it is more
usually designated, on any map of New England that I know of. It is not
a town; it is not even a village: it is merely an absurd hotel. The
almost indescribable place called Greenton is at the intersection of
four roads, in the heart of New Hampshire, twenty miles from the nearest
settlement of note, and ten miles from any