rned from the sickening spectacle on the
sidewalk. Drawn again to that horror, they saw it strangely augmented. A
man, hatless, seated flat upon the paving stones, held the broken,
bleeding body against his breast, kissing the mangled cheeks and
streaming mouth through tangles of wet hair, his own features
indistinguishably crimson with the blood that half-strangled him and ran
in rills from his soaken beard.

The reporter's task is nearly finished. The Barwells had that very
morning returned from a two years' absence in Peru. A week later the
widower, now doubly desolate, since there could be no missing the
significance of Hardshaw's horrible demonstration, had sailed for I know
not what distant port; he has never come back to stay. Hardshaw--as
Johnson no longer--passed a year in the Stockton asylum for the insane,
where also, through the influence of pitying friends, his wife was
admitted to care for him. When he was discharged, not cured but
harmless, they returned to the city; it would seem ever to have had some
dreadful fascination for them. For a time they lived near the Mission
Dolores, in poverty only less abject than that which is their present
lot; but it was too far away from the objective point of the man's daily
pilgrimage. They could not afford car fare. So that poor devil of an
angel from Heaven--wife to this convict and lunatic--obtained, at a fair
enough rental, the blank-faced shanty on the lower terrace of Goat Hill.
Thence to the structure that was a dwelling and is a factory the
distance is not so great; it is, in fact, an agreeable walk, judging
from the man's eager and cheerful look as he takes it. The return
journey appears to be a trifle wearisome.

AN ADVENTURE AT BROWNVILLE[1]

[1] This story was written in collaboration with Miss Ina Lillian
Peterson, to whom is rightly due the credit for whatever merit it may
have.

I taught a little country school near Brownville, which, as every one
knows who has had the good luck to live there, is the capital of a
considerable expanse of the finest scenery in California. The town is
somewhat frequented in summer by a class of persons whom it is the habit
of the local journal to call "pleasure seekers," but who by a juster
classification would be known as "the sick and those in adversity."
Brownville itself might rightly enough be described, indeed, as a summer
place of last resort. It is fairly well endowed with boarding-houses, at
the least p