, solemn, and irrevocable vow; and from that
time until the day of her death she was called Sister Anastasia--the
name signifying that she had been re-established. What source of
consolation Anastasia had the rest never divined. How should they guess
that alongside her religious fervor a human love grew ethereally like
an air plant?

NOTE.--Much of this little story is fact. I have supplied details,
dialogue, and passion. For the facts which constitute the
groundwork I am chiefly indebted to Dr. Oswald W. Seidensticker's
very valuable monograph entitled "Ephrata, eine amerikanische
Klostergeschichte." The reader will find a briefer account of the
monastery from the same learned and able writer in _The Century_
magazine for December, 1881.

THE REDEMPTIONER.

A STORY IN THREE SCENES.

PROLOGUE.

The stories we write are most of them love stories; but in the lives of
men there are also many stories that are not love stories: some, truly,
that are hate stories. The main incident of the one I am about to tell
I found floating down from the eighteenth century on the stream of
Maryland tradition. It serves to present some of our forefathers, not
as they seem in patriotic orations and reverent family traditions, but
as they appear to a student of the writings and prints of their own
age.

SCENE I.

The time was a warm autumn day in the year 1751. The place was a
plantation on the Maryland shore of the Potomac. A planter of about
thirty years of age, clad in buckskin shortclothes, sat smoking his
pipe, after his noonday meal, in the wide entry that ran through his
double log house from the south side to the north, the house being of
the sort called alliteratively "two pens and a passage." The planter's
wife sat over against him, on the other side of the passage, carding
home-grown cotton wool with hand cards. He had placed his shuck-bottom
chair so as to see down the long reach to the eastward, where the
widening Potomac spread itself between low-lying banks, with never a
brown hill to break the low horizon line. Every now and again he took
his cob pipe from his mouth, and scanned the distant water wistfully.

"I know what you're looking for, Mr. Browne," said his wife, as she
reversed her hand cards and rubbed the carded cotton between the smooth
backs of the two implements to make it into a roll for spinning.
"You're looking to see the Nancy Jane come sailing into the river one