Che Mountain Kood.

I will work him

To an exploit, now ripe in my device,

Under the which he shall not choose but fall;

And for his death no wind of blame shall breathe;

But even his mother shall uncharge the practice,
And call it accident.

SHAKSPEARE (Hamlet).

Other sins only speak, murder shrieks out.
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upward and bedews the heavens.

WEBSTER.

THE MOUNTAIN ROAD.

I

CAN not write the story with my own hands, but I shall dictate it to a tried and trusty friend, for I must have the public know all that I can tell respecting that strange and mysterious death. My name is Henry Wilde, and I was present when it happened. It was a week ago, and in body I have been utterly helpless since that day. I do not think that my intellect was much disordered by the shock; and yet I seem to have lost, in some degree, control over my mind-the power of condensation. Therefore I must tell this story in my own way. If I am prolix—if I linger too much over detail not connected with the act itself, it must be pardoned me.

I am not a young man. I have known Steven Cranston for more than forty years-ever since he and I went to school together in our pinafores. I am forty-eight now. Last week I should have said that he was two years younger; but he stands to-day where they do not reckon ages by earthly measurement. Many who will read these words know what he was as a man-stern, dark-browed, silent, and mysterious. He was all this even as a boy.

At the district school we attended together he seemed to like no one. He might have been a favorite if he would, for he had the most physical courage

I ever knew any boy to possess. He literally feared nothing. He had no equal in the various athletic games with which we whiled away our noonings; and these two traits, of daring and agility, are potent to win the suffrages of boys. Any one else possessing them to such extent would have become a loved and recognized leader; but Steven Cranston was too silent, too forbidding and unsocial. No one would have dared in any wise to interfere with him; but he had none of those dear boy-friendships, those brotherhoods of the soul, whose memory, in after years, has power to thrill so many old men's hearts, and make them happy boys again.

I said he seemed to like no one. I should have made one exception. Nearly opposite to him, on the "girls' side" of the long red school-house, sat Lucia Reynolds, the daughter of one of our wealthiest men. She did not owe her popularity to this circumstance, however. Looking back through the mists of twentyeight years, I can see Lucia Reynolds as she was at fifteen, and I know that I never saw a fairer face. I met her the other day—a woman of forty-three she is now, and older than her years, with a look of patient waiting in her eyes, a settled sorrow round her lipsa woman to whom you would not even pay that saddest compliment, "She must have been beautiful once;" and I turned my eyes away, and back through the fair country of the past, till I could see her, as I saw her twenty-eight years ago, bending over her desk in Ryefield school-house.

Slight, girlish figure; small but perfect features; eyes of the bluest; delicate rose-tint on the dimpled cheeks; full, smiling mouth-I saw them all in the

light and glory of youth, untouched by time. She had a clear, ringing voice, a dancing step, and, better than all, a heart full of love for every living creature; and so every body loved her, and every body included misanthropic Steven Cranston. Indeed, his sentiment for her seemed no mere childish liking. It was more the blind devotion of a Romanist for his patron saint. He would sit and watch her for hours with a look of rapt adoration. Lucia had the heart of a woman, and she could not help recognizing and liking this homage. She accepted, with the graciousness of a gentle queen, the rare flowers and fruit he used constantly to seek for her, and she befriended him in her turn. She was his warm defender when any one censured his coldness and misanthropy, and more than one predicted he would some day win her for his wife.

I never thought so, however. I was five years older than Lucia, and I think I understood her. I felt certain that he must be very different from Cranston who would arouse her heart from its long, delicious, dreaming girlhood, and quicken it into womanhood's passionate yet steadfast love. And yet I used sometimes to fancy that he loved her with a man's passion even then. If she could have returned it how different might have been the current of his future! Does it not seem as if there were some lives to which Destiny is pitiless? lips from which the only cup in all the spheres which could work their healing is dashed. remorselessly?

When Lucia Reynolds was sixteen I left the place, and for many years I went back there but seldom. I kept up, however, a constant correspondence with my sister Bell, and through her was made au courant in all the gossip of Ryefield.