wearing and singing. He knew these now for the voices
he had heard in his dreams. He tried to force some of the bread down his
parched and swollen throat, but failed; the coffee strangled him, and he
threw himself upon the bench.

The forest again, the night-wind, the whistle of the axe through the
air. Once when he opened his eyes he found it dark. It would soon be
time to go to work. He fancied there would be hoar-frost on the trees
in the morning. How close the cabin seemed! Ha!--here came his little
sister. Her voice sounded like the wind on a spring morning. How loud it
swelled now! "Lu! Lu!" she cried.

The next morning the lock-up keeper opened the cell door. Luther lay
with his head in a pool of blood. His soul had escaped from the thrall
of the forest.

"Well, well!" said the little fat police-justice, when he was told of it.
"We ought to have a doctor around to look after such cases."

A Lady of Yesterday

"A LIGHT wind blew from the gates of the sun," the morning she first
walked down the street of the little Iowa town. Not a cloud flecked the
blue; there was a humming of happy insects; a smell of rich and moist
loam perfumed the air, and in the dusk of beeches and of oaks stood the
quiet homes. She paused now and then, looking in the gardens, or at a
group of children, then passed on, smiling in content.

Her accent was so strange, that the agent for real estate, whom she
visited, asked her, twice and once again, what it was she said.

"I want," she had repeated smilingly, "an upland meadow, where clover
will grow, and mignonette."

At the tea-tables that night, there was a mighty chattering. The brisk
village made a mystery of this lady with the slow step, the foreign
trick of speech, the long black gown, and the gentle voice. The men,
concealing their curiosity in presence of the women, gratified it
secretly, by sauntering to the tavern in the evening. There the keeper
and his wife stood ready to convey any neighborly intelligence.

"Elizabeth Astrado" was written in the register,--a name conveying
little, unaccompanied by title or by place of residence.

"She eats alone," the tavern-keeper's wife confided to their eager
ears, "and asks for no service. Oh, she's a curiosity! She's got her
story,--you'll see!"

In a town where every man knew every other man, and whether or not he
paid his taxes on time, and what his standing was in church, and all the
skeletons of his home, a stranger ali