ot believe anything, except by fits and starts;
but one of your prayers would do my mother good. If she could be half as
peaceful as you are, I should be happy."

Lurton walked away down the gallery from Albert's cell, and descended
the steps that led to the dining-room, and was let out of the locked and
barred door into the vestibule, and out of that into the yard, and
thence out through other locks into the free air of out-doors. Then he
took a long breath, for the sight of prison doors and locks and bars and
grates and gates and guards oppressed even his peaceful soul. And
walking along the sandy road that led by the margin of Lake St. Croix
toward the town, he recalled Charlton's last remark. And as he
meditatively tossed out of the path with his boot the pieces of
pine-bark which in this lumbering country lie about everywhere, he
rejoiced that Charlton had learned to appreciate the value of Christian
peace, and he offered a silent prayer that Albert might one day obtain
the same serenity as himself. For nothing was further from the young
minister's mind than the thought that any of his good qualities were
natural. He considered himself a miracle of grace upon all sides. As if
natural qualities were not also of God's grace!

CHAPTER XXXI.

MR. LURTON.

It was a warm Sunday in the early spring, one week after Mr. Lurton's
conversation with Charlton, that the latter sat in his cell feeling the
spring he could not see. His prison had never been so much a prison. To
perceive this balminess creeping through the narrow, high window--a mere
orifice through a thick wall--and making itself feebly felt as it fell
athwart the damp chilliness of the cell, to perceive thus faintly the
breath of spring, and not to be able to see the pregnant tree-buds
bursting with the coming greenness of the summer, and not to be able to
catch the sound of the first twittering of the returning sparrows and the
hopeful chattering of the swallows, made Albert feel indeed that he and
life had parted.

Mr. Lurton's three months as chaplain had expired, and there had come in
his stead Mr. Canton, who wore a very stiff white neck-tie and a very
straight-breasted long-tailed coat. Nothing is so great a bar to human
sympathies as a clerical dress, and Mr. Canton had diligently fixed a
great gulf between himself and his fellow-men. Charlton's old, bitter
aggressiveness, which had well-nigh died out under the sweet influences
of Lurton's pea