ne does from dreams. The moon was shining brightly
into the room. Rising from my bed, I looked out into the orchard. It was
almost as bright as day. I could plainly see the tree of which I had
been dreaming, and then a fantastic notion possessed me. Slipping on my
clothes, I went out into one of the old barns and found a spade. Then I
went to the tree where I had seen the girl weeping in my dream and dug
down at its foot.

I had dug little more than a foot when my spade struck upon some hard
substance, and in a few more moments I had uncovered and exhumed a small
box, which, on examination, proved to be one of those pretty
old-fashioned Chippendale work-boxes used by our grandmothers to keep
their thimbles and needles in, their reels of cotton and skeins of silk.
After smoothing down the little grave in which I had found it, I carried
the box into the house, and under the lamplight examined its contents.

Then at once I understood why that sad young spirit went to and fro the
orchard singing those little French songs--for the treasure-trove I had
found under the apple-tree, the buried treasure of an unquiet, suffering
soul, proved to be a number of love-letters written mostly in French in
a very picturesque hand--letters, too, written but some five or six
years before. Perhaps I should not have read them--yet I read them with
such reverence for the beautiful, impassioned love that animated them,
and literally made them "smell sweet and blossom in the dust," that I
felt I had the sanction of the dead to make myself the confidant of
their story. Among the letters were little songs, two of which I had
heard the strange young voice singing in the orchard, and, of course,
there were many withered flowers and such like remembrances of bygone
rapture.

Not that night could I make out all the story, though it was not
difficult to define its essential tragedy, and later on a gossip in the
neighborhood and a headstone in the churchyard told me the rest. The
unquiet young soul that had sung so wistfully to and fro the orchard was
my landlord's daughter. She was the only child of her parents, a
beautiful, willful girl, exotically unlike those from whom she was
sprung and among whom she lived with a disdainful air of exile. She was,
as a child, a little creature of fairy fancies, and as she grew up it
was plain to her father and mother that she had come from another world
than theirs. To them she seemed like a child in an old fair