hooting their wolf?"

"Any one else would be safe, grandfather--except poor Ralph!"

"Go yourself then. May-day!"

"I would, grandfather! I would not be afraid!" She put her soft little
hand on his cheek to turn his head to look into her confident eyes.

"An able and worshipful ambassador!" he said banteringly.

"Oh, grandfather, this is no time to risk quarrels among the settlers,
and bloodshed. Oh, the herders would kill him! And the Injuns all so
unfriendly--they might take the chance to get on the war-path again when
the settlers are busy killing each other--and oh, the cow-drivers will
kill Ralph Emsden!"

All this persuasion was of necessity in a distinct loud voice;
unnoticed, however, for a crisis had supervened in the play of the
children by the chimney-place settle, and the sanguinary struggles and
scalping in the storming of the fort were blood-curdling to behold to
any one with enough imagination to discern a full-armed and fierce
savage in a kernel of corn, and a stanch and patriotic Carolinian in a
pebble. But when Peninnah Penelope Anne, all attuned to this high key,
burst out weeping with commensurate resonance, all the vocations of the
household came to a standstill, and her mother appeared, surprised and
reproving, in the doorway.

"Peninnah Penelope Anne," she said with her peculiar exact deliberation
and gift of circumlocution, "it is better to go and sew your sampler
than to tease your grandfather."

"She does not tease me--I have not shed a tear! That was not the sound
of my weeping!" he declared facetiously, one arm protectingly about the
little sobbing figure.

"He does not like his grandchildren to climb about him like squirrels
and wild cattle," the lady continued. Then irrelevantly, "Long stitches
were always avoided in our family. The work you last did in your sampler
has been taken out, child, and you can sew it again and to better
advantage."

"And earn your name of Penelope," said Richard Mivane.

But he was putting on his hat and evidently had some effort in prospect,
for how could he resist,--she looked so childish and appealing as she
sat before the fire, weeping those large tears, and absently preparing
to sew her sampler anew.

While Richard Mivane, by virtue of his early culture, the scanty remains
of his property, his fine-gentleman habits and traditions, and the
anomaly of his situation, was the figure of most mark at the station,
its ruling spirit was of far alien c