.

"In a few minutes the whole household was aroused, and Dick was off
posthaste for the doctor, for we could not revive Miriam from her
death-like swoon. She seemed as one dead. We worked over her for
hours. She would come out of her faint for a moment, give us an
unknowing stare and go shudderingly off again.

"The doctor talked of some fearful shock, but I kept my own counsel.
At dawn Miriam came back to life at last. When she and I were left
alone, she turned to me.

"'Sidney is dead,' she said quietly. 'I saw him--just before I
fainted. I looked up, and he was standing between me and you. He had
come to say farewell.'

"What could I say? Almost while we were talking a telegram came. He
was dead--he had died at the very hour at which Miriam had seen him."

Mrs. Sefton paused, and the lunch bell rang.

"What do you think of it?" she queried as we rose.

"Honestly, I don't know what I think of it," I answered frankly.

Miss Calista's Peppermint Bottle

Miss Calista was perplexed. Her nephew, Caleb Cramp, who had been her
right-hand man for years and whom she had got well broken into her
ways, had gone to the Klondike, leaving her to fill his place with the
next best man; but the next best man was slow to appear, and meanwhile
Miss Calista was looking about her warily. She could afford to wait a
while, for the crop was all in and the fall ploughing done, so that
the need of a successor to Caleb was not as pressing as it might
otherwise have been. There was no lack of applicants, such as they
were. Miss Calista was known to be a kind and generous mistress,
although she had her "ways," and insisted calmly and immovably upon
wholehearted compliance with them. She had a small, well-cultivated
farm and a comfortable house, and her hired men lived in clover. Caleb
Cramp had been perfection after his kind, and Miss Calista did not
expect to find his equal. Nevertheless, she set up a certain standard
of requirements; and although three weeks, during which Miss Calista
had been obliged to put up with the immature services of a neighbour's
boy, had elapsed since Caleb's departure, no one had as yet stepped
into his vacant and coveted shoes.

Certainly Miss Calista was somewhat hard to please, but she was not
thinking of herself as she sat by her front window in the chilly
November twilight. Instead, she was musing on the degeneration of
hired men, and reflecting that it was high time the wheat was
thrashed,