industry is a
thousand per cent. better than this invisible agency. I will now take
the fatal candle-snuffer a mile from here, rub it real hard, fling it
aside, and run away."

But he didn't. During the night ten feet of snow had fallen. It lay
all winter too.

Early the next spring there emerged from that cottage by the wayside
the unstable framework of a man dragging through seas of melting snow
a tottering female of dejected aspect. Forlorn, crippled, famishing,
and discouraged, these melancholy relics held on their way until they
came to a cross-roads (all leading to Lagerhaus), where they saw
clinging to an upright post the tatter of an old placard. It read as
follows:

LOST, strayed, or stolen, from Herr Schaackhofer's Grand
Museum, the celebrated Patagonian Giant, Ugolulah. Height 8 ft.
2 in., elegant figure, handsome, intelligent features,
sprightly and vivacious in conversation, of engaging address,
temperate in diet, harmless and tractable in disposition.
Answers to the nickname of Fritz Sneddeker. Any one returning
him to Herr Schaackhofer will receive Seven Thalers Reward, and
no questions asked.

It was a tempting offer, but they did not go back for the giant. But
he was afterwards discovered sleeping sweetly upon the hearthstone,
after a hearty meal of empty barrels and boxes. Being secured he was
found to be too fat for egress by the door. So the house was pulled
down to let him out; and that is how it happens to be in ruins now.

* * * * *

PERNICKETTY'S FRIGHT.

_"Sssssst!"_

Dan Golby held up his hand to enjoin silence; in a breath we were as
quiet as mice. Then it came again, borne upon the night wind from away
somewhere in the darkness toward the mountains, across miles of
treeless plain--a low, dismal, sobbing sound, like the wail of a
strangling child! It was nothing but the howl of a wolf, and a wolf is
about the last thing a man who knows the cowardly beast would be
afraid of; but there was something so weird and unearthly in this "cry
between the silences"--something so banshee-like in its suggestion of
the grave--that, old mountaineers that we were, and long familiar with
it, we felt an instinctive dread--a dread which was not fear, but only
a sense of utter solitude and desolation. There is no sound known to
mortal ear that has in it so strange a power upon the imagination as
the night-howl of this wretched beast, heard