join in their talk, and they were always very indulgent in including the sick man in their conversation.

Miss Flora Smith came with such a bevy of four or five bright young girls, and Curlett looked up at her at first with a good deal of interest, and reached out his thin pale hand to her, and felt her soft warm grasp. She was very pretty, with a bright, alert expression, due, perhaps, to the high arching of her finely pencilled eyebrows. She was very shy for a while, but Curlett could see that she was watching him with a great deal of innocently frank curiosity. He laughed as he talked with the others, for he was prodigiously amused at the difference between the living Flora Smith and the ambrotype picture.

By-and-by the opportunity offered, and Curlett went over and sat down beside her on the smooth hair-cloth sofa. She

out those few precious golden days, clinging lingeringly to every moment as it passed.

On her last day in town it was arranged that she and a number of other girls were to take tea at the Curletts' house, and that a number of young men were to come in after tea to spend the even ing. The young ladies came dropping in about five o'clock, gathering in the library where Curlett sat, and where the slanting sunlight came in under the halfraised green Venetian blinds, lying in wide squares of golden radiance upon the carpeted floor.

It seemed to Curlett that Miss Flora withdrew more than usually far away from him into her innocent reserve. She talked vivaciously and gayly with the other girls, but she had hardly a word for him. It was Rosalind who somehow contrived to leave him and her together. How his sister managed it Curlett never could tell, for women contrive such things very dexterously. He only knew that presently they were alone, and he found

that his heart was beating very thickly and heavily. She had made one helpless effort to go out of the room with Rosalind; now she sat quite still, leaning back in her chair in silence, and he watched her sweet young bosom rising and falling as she wound a thin lace handkerchief around and around her finger. By-andby he broke the awkward silence to tell her he was sorry she was going away the next day.

She replied that she too was sorry.

He wondered if she would ever come back again.

Perhaps she would sometime-again.

There was a long pause, and then he said that he never thought he could be so sorry for anything as he was that she was going away. She did not reply to the tangled speech, and again there was a space of silence.

"Do you know

why I am so sorry?" he asked at last. She did not reply. He gazed ardently at her; she did not lift her eyes, but sat winding the handkerchief around and around her finger. 'Because I love you," he breathed.

The next room was full of the chatter of girlish voices, but the stillness in his ears was as the stillness when the universe was created. Glancing through the open folding-doors, you might see the parlor vivacious with young faces and cloudy dresses, but they two sat alone in all the world. It seemed to him that he had ceased to breathe. By-and-by she shyly raised her brown eyes and looked at him in the face. She did not remove her gaze, and so they sat looking at one another, and it seemed to him as though all things dissolved away between him and her.

"Don't you know I love you?" he breathed again.

Her lips moved, but no sound came. Nevertheless he understood, and he beheld nothing but her eyes looking at him.

"You won't go away to-morrow, will you?" he whispered, breathlessly. And in the same breathless whisper she replied, "Not if you want me to stay." "I do want you. Will you stay?" "Yes."

Then Rosalind came, and at her coming that sphere of golden joy was broken into fragments.

"What are you two doing here?" she said, and her words struck loud upon their passion. Flora got up and threw her arms around her and kissed her once and again, and Rosalind instantly understood it all.

And the ambrotype.

Some three or four days later Curlett and she sat together again in the library. Curlett had read to her the cordial letter he had that morning received from her father, and now they were talking with a broken talk that dropped like honey. Something suggested the ambrotype, and Curlett began telling her all about ithow he had found it, how he used to keep it on his bureau, how he used to stand looking at it and dreaming over it, how it had inspired him to enlist for the war, how it had stood at his bedside in the hospital all the while he had been lingering between life and death. As he talked it seemed to him that it was her portrait

that he was telling her about; he altogether forgot that it was not a likeness of her. She listened in silence and made no response. "I'll get it and show it to you," he said.

Oh, you needn't mind," she said, coolly, indifferently.

"Yes, but I would like you to see it," he persisted; and then she allowed him to go and get it.

He opened the case and handed it to her, and she took it almost listlessly. She looked at it for a little while, and then she said, "Well, I must say I can't admire your taste."

Curlett stared at her for a moment, and then broke into a helpless laugh. He recognized how, as he had one time been so stirred by a fanciful and diaphanous love for that ambrotype, so now she was moved with as diaphanous and as unsubstantial a jealousy.

She reached the picture back to him with a distinct air of offence at his laugh, and before he shut the case he himself looked at the pictured face. How flat it was-how lifeless! It was the countenance of a rather pretty girl-that was all.

So in the lapse of time do our ideals always become flat and lifeless, the realities alone retaining their substance and vitality.

was broiling down as it does in Texas; the broad, dusty streets reminded me of an average prairie town west of the Mississippi, and this impression was further heightened by noting great freight-wagons drawn by sixteen oxen, and scrawny mustangs galloping about, with sunburnt, shaggy - bearded Boers astride of them. There was a flavor of cowboy and sombrero to the scene. With me was Mr. Chapin, the acting United States consul. He had with him official authority to appropriate the body of an American citizen, John Hays Hammond, take him to Johannesburg, to the bedside of his sick wife, and then bring him back to Pretoria. Mr. Hammond was in the town jail, and Mr. Chapin had cheerfully given up his time in order to do this act of mercy for a woman in distress.

Why Mr. Hammond was in jail is another story. Without pretending to pass here upon the merits of Boer legislation, it did strike me that something must be wrong with the judiciary of a country that found it necessary to treat as a felon such a man as John Hays Hammond.

Arrived at the jail, we found the entrance encumbered by dozens of wagons, and learned that President Kruger had that very morning released some fifty of the "Uitlanders" who had been confined as traitors. Hammond was not of this number, so our acting consul applied to the janitor with an official request for him. The jailer, named Duplessis, sent back word that he was too much occupied then to attend to Mr. Chapin, and that he had better return later-in an hour or so. We did as we were ordered, much wondering at this. But on returning to the place we learned that this same Duplessis had meanwhile slipped out himself, taking Hammond with him, for no other reason than that he might thereby himself have a holiday and earn a fee into the bargain. So poor Hammond, after five months of petty torture in the society of black convicts, was on this day robbed of the society of a friend and made to share his sketchy liberty with a jailer, even though the official authority had been given which allowed him two days of liberty.

Sadly we went back to the town, to hear that Hammond had been seen leaving Pretoria for Johannesburg in charge of the jailer, and so our acting consul had a worse than wasted day.

VOL. XCIV.-No. 559.-3

แ

What is that camp doing here in town?" I asked.

"Oh, that is for the President's sentry guard."

"Odd," thought I. "The American President manages seventy millions and doesn't even have a policeman at his door, and here in a republic of two or three hundred thousand whites the President has to be guarded by soldiers." Later I found that whenever Mr. Kruger went to or from the government office he was invariably surrounded by six mounted troopers armed with carbines, and commanded by an officer. The government offices were surrounded by soldiers bearing rifles, and two sentinels paced up and down before the windows of the executive chamber, looking in from time to time to see that all was safe. Of course this room is on the ground-floor. Whether the government indulged in these extravagant military precautions from serious apprehension regarding the President's life, or whether it did so in order to make the farmer constituents believe that the Uitlanders* were plotting to kidnap or assassinate their leader, I do not venture here to express an opinion.

Opposite the five army tents stood a long low house, all the rooms of which were on the ground-floor. A veranda ran along the front, and perhaps six feet of shrubbery separated the stoop from the sidewalk. It was a typical farmhouse, such as a prosperous Boer farmer would be inclined to build, and was almost concealed by lofty shade trees. There was no driveway to the front door, no sign that the house contained any but an average citizen of Pretoria. But at the wicket-gate were two soldiers with rifles, who challenged us as we attempted to pass. My friend the legislator said

* Uitlander is our outlander, German Ausländer, and refers to aliens as distinguished from citizens.