st fashion. He
saw with grief that the seed had found root. There were some sullen
faces and short answers.

It certainly is a hard thing to keep on fighting an old foe that can
only be beaten, never killed.

Jack stumbled over Cameron in the store-room.

"Cameron," said he with a white, rigid face, "I wish to God this was the
last day of the five years! I should walk out of Hope Mills, and never
set foot in it again, no, not even if they implored me on their knees. A
thankless, miserable set! The lying article in last night's paper made
me mad for a moment, but could not sting: yet the faces of my own men
did as I came through the rooms."

"You've had a hard pull, Jack!" Cameron's voice was fatherly and
soothing. "You might have put your money and your brains in something
that would have proved much pleasanter. But the man who takes up the
first end of a truth always gets hard knocks: it is the people who come
after who find a smooth path. Don't you remember," drawing his wrinkled
face into a queer smile, "the shrewd application your New York lady made
about the children of Israel? Jack, if the salvation scheme of the Bible
was all proved false,--which it never will be, to my mind,--there's so
much wisdom in it beside, that a chap could take it just for a sort of
guidebook in every-day matters, all the same. And now we're going to
have a big fight."

"You think that?" cried Jack, in vague alarm. "I wish Winston was here.
He can always talk so to the point!"

"Well, he isn't: we've got to go through it ourselves. But this settles
it! You see, there's been Price, and Pickett, and Davy, to stir up
strife and bad feeling, and all this outside influence; but my old
woman's praying us through, and I set a good deal of store by her
prayers, Jack! If these ruffians go on, Yerbury'll be half ruined again,
but it is their own fault. I'm not much on capital punishment, but I
would go to the hanging of that McPherson. If he'd staid away, we should
have done well enough."

Jack drew a long, troubled breath.

"I'd let every man go out who wanted to, but I wouldn't pay-him a red
cent, there!"

That evening Jack went down to Larch Avenue. He found Fred and Sylvie up
in arms. Indignation was a mild term.

It was a magnificent night, with a nearly full moon. The light flooded
the wide lawn path, and made shadows of elves and gnomes on the porch,
as the wind wandered in and out the great honeysuckle, whose ripe, rich
perfum