Eleanor rose. "I hope you will excuse us, Mrs. Emery," she said. “Pray do not let us break up your evening, but I think that I had better take my sister home. She and Mr. Morris are old friends, and she feels this very much."

Mr. Armstrong telephoned for our carriage, and he also telephoned to the hospital to learn the latest news concerning Mr. Morris. It seemed that he had reached his destination safely, but was unconscious; and although his life was in no immediate danger, he would probably have a long, serious illness. We all recognized the reserved nature of the message, "in no immediate danger," and our hearts sank.

Eleanor was very gentle with me. She did not reprove me for my outburst, and after we were in the carriage she took my

hand in hers, but I snatched it away. "Don't touch me!" I cried fiercely. "You are as cold and hard as a stone. You ought to love him with your whole heart, but you have no heart, and you leave it to me to grieve for him; to me, when I am only the least of his friends." Eleanor said nothing.

"I am sure that you are responsible for this accident," I went on, rendered quite beside myself by her calmness. "He was thinking of you when his foot slipped. If you had been a little good to him, instead of trying to help a lot of people in clubs, it would not have happened. And perhaps you have killed him," I added.

"I never got the note," said Eleanor. "No, it came at noon, and I put it on the mantelpiece in the library with your other letters, and I did not remember to give them to you; for you were at home only long enough to take your tea and dress for the club." Aunt Esther handed her the letters, and Eleanor took them and started to go upstairs.

"I am tired," she said, "and so I will say good-night. Julia, you must tell aunt Esther why we came home early." "I hope you were not badly beaten," said aunt Esther.

"Beaten?" Eleanor repeated vaguely, with a curious, absent look on her face. "Oh, in whist? No, thank you; at least I don't remember. I think I think I will say good-night."

no answer.

I told aunt Esther the news, and then I hurried upstairs; but, quick as I was, Eleanor had already locked the door between her room and mine. I knocked, but had no response. I knocked again, and again there was I paused and listened. There was a faint, muffled sound on the other side of the door. I knew then that Eleanor was crying, and the fact awed me, for I could not remember having heard her cry since father died, six years ago.

"Eleanor, let me in," I begged. "I understand it all now, dear. Please forgive me, and please, please let me in."

But Eleanor would not open the door. I was so wretched that I was sure I should stay awake all night; for how could I sleep until she had forgiven me? And then I fell asleep while I was thinking it over, miserable, faithless wretch that I was!

In the morning I awoke earlier than usual. The door was open between Eleanor's room and mine, and everything looked so pleasantly familiar that my first feeling was, what it always is, joy that I was in this happy world. Then I remembered that perhaps there would never be any joy for us again.

I went softly into Eleanor's room.

She was lying on the sofa, with her wrapper on, and a letter tightly clasped in her hand. Her face was so pale that I was frightened at first, and thought she had fainted; but I soon found she had fallen asleep after a long, anxious night. How long and how anxious it had been I could only faintly fancy, for a glance at her face made me conscious that my sorrow was a childish feeling compared with hers.

While I was standing by her, Eleanor opened her eyes. I shall never forget the look on her face when she tried to smile as if nothing had happened.

"We shall hear some good news today, dear," she began; then her lip trembled, and then - it was she who was sobbing, with her head on my shoulder and my arms around her neck.

"Julia, he does love me," she said. "You need not tell me that when I have known it for six years."

"I did not know it, and I don't think he knew it until lately, but" She held up the letter by way of an ending to her sentence. I could not help seeing the first words.

At last I comprehended everything. "Yes, I love him," I said firmly. "I love him like a brother, like a father, like a grandfather, if you will. Darling, does that make you jealous? Are n't you willing that I should love him like a grandfather, Eleanor dear?' The next morning aunt Esther and Eleanor went to the hospital, but they returned with sad faces. Edward Morris was still unconscious.

January 24. We have had a terrible week. Mr. Morris has concussion of the brain, and his recovery is doubtful. Eleanor has abandoned all her clubs, and does not seem to care any longer what people think, but she is very quiet and calm.

February 3. I am quite used to Mr. Morris's illness now, for everything is so exactly the same at school and at dancing school. I should die if I were as unhappy all the time as I was that first night; so I try to think that he is going to get well, and to forget Eleanor's sad face.

though it is possible that he may linger for weeks, or even months. I cannot grasp the idea of his dying. It seems impossible that he can go away from us altogether. In the beginning I realized all the possibilities, but now that we have had this respite I can't believe that anything so overpoweringly sad will happen; and after all, there is still a faint chance that he may rally.

Mrs. Grant is going to have the whist club just the same, even though she is his cousin. She says that one can't give up everything for an indefinite period on an uncertainty. I believe that they would play whist on the edge of his grave, all except Eleanor; she does not play whist any more. She and aunt Esther go in every day to the hospital to see if there is anything that they can do, but Mr. Morris does not know them.

February 23. I am so happy that there are no words in the English language to tell my delight. Edward Morris is out of danger. He will be an invalid for a year or two, as he will not be able to use his brain much for a long time; but Edward Morris without a head is so much nicer than any other man with one that it does not matter, and he is going to get well!!!!! I have put all those exclamation points in a row to help faintly to express my feelings. They stand for joy, rapture, happiness, and every other blissful thing. Eleanor is perfectly calm, as usual, but the whole expression of her face has changed, and she looks absolutely se

and when she came home I could see that something unusual had happened. "It is all right, Julia," she replied to my eager questions.

What did he say, dear?" I asked. "How did he look? What did you say? Tell me all about it."

"I cannot tell you what we said, but we have explained everything." "Can't you tell me just one little thing?" I pleaded.

Eleanor began to laugh softly. "He said something when I first came in which will amuse you, Julia. He asked what day it was. Saturday,' I replied. Saturday? Eleanor, how good you were to come here instead of going to the Saturday Morning Club!'"

Eliza Orne White.

I.

LET us go back nearly fifty years to scenes in the Black Hills and upon the upper waters of the Missouri Valley. In that wild environment we shall find a young graduate of Harvard College. He has exchanged the garb of civilization for the red flannel shirt and the fringed buckskin suit of the hunter. The sleek ambler of suburban roads has given place to the shaggy but docile beast of the wilderness, and there is a rifle laid across the saddlebow.

You may see a band of Dacotahs dashing, with streaming hair, upon the flanks of a buffalo herd, and conspicuous in the onset are the red shirt and buckskin of this transient denizen of the desert.

This youth had dreamed from childhood of a forest life. His school vacations had been spent in the New England woods. There he had studied the everchanging aspects of nature. He had found

moods in the sky. He had watched the flowers nodding to the brook. He knew the sounds of woodland life. With an imagination sporting with weird illusions and helped by legends, a crackling branch or the moan of the wind would call up the terrors of a frontier life to which his ancestors had been accustomed. Born with an organization of body treacherously delicate, he had a spirit which spurned repose. He knew little of danger but the dash which led to it. He had the mettle for great deeds. If he could not enact such deeds, he could at least follow the actors in sympathizing recital. Amid the wilds of the Platte he experienced that spirit of energy which, as he contended, the mountains always impart to those who approach them. He sought in the excitement of their presence that rigidity of nerve which was the best substitute for the strength which failed him.

We may get another glimpse of him in the dingy shadows of the lodge of

Big Crow. The dying embers scarcely relieve his form from the almost impenetrable gloom. A squaw throws a bit of bear's fat upon the coals, and the shooting flames light up the pallid features and firm-set jaw of this plucky youth. The braves are crouching about the hearth, speaking of the coming hunt. The young man conceals all symptoms of that exhaustion under which his endurance is to be put to the severest test in the morrow's ride. Thus in the nurture of bravery this wan observer learned to know his dusky companions. He came to comprehend those traits which were confronted with the hardihood of Nicolet, and which he witnessed with the eyes of Brébeuf.

To describe the long years of patient restraint and hopeful study which followed belongs to his biographer. He who shall tell that story of noble endeavor must carry him into the archives of Canada and France, and portray him peering with another's eyes. He must depict him in his wanderings over the length and breadth of a continent wherever a French adventurer had set foot. He must track him to many a spot hallowed by the sacrifice of a Jesuit. He must plod with him the portage where the burdened trader had hearkened for the lurking savage. He must stroll with him about the ground of ambush which had rung with the death-knell, and must survey the field or defile where the lilies of France had glimmered in the smoke of battle. He who would represent him truly must tell of that hardy courage which the assaults of pain could never lessen. He must describe the days, and months, and even years when the light of the sun was intolerable. He must speak of the intervals, counted only by half-hours, when a secretary could read to him. Such were the obstacles which for more than fifty years gave his physicians little hope.

It is but a few years since I went with a party of students from Harvard College, across the neighboring country,

to a stately home graced by the venerable presence of him who bears one of the earliest and greatest of the historic names of New England. The rank grass of the rolling prairie, the clink of the pony's hoof in the wild defile, the charge of the infuriated bull, the impet uous young hunter reeling in his saddle, were things that belonged to the young ambition of forty years before. The youth, now grown in fame, stood among the guests of that summer afternoon to receive the homage of these gathered visitors. Leaning upon his staff, with an eye of kindly interest, the great historian received his unknown pupils. I recall how I felt standing beside him; that the rolling lawn with its exquisite finish, and the shade of the trees grouped in conscious gravity as if mindful of a completed nature, were in fit unison with that well-rounded reputation which belonged to him who stood before them.

And what did Francis Parkman stand for, in these later years, to such young disciples?

Before he had graduated from college there had sprung up in America a new school of historical writing. Most of the members of it were in Cambridge and in Boston, growing with the libraries, public and private, which in those days were most conspicuous in that region, and which are a necessity in historical development. It was only two years before Parkman became a freshman at Harvard that the first chair of history in any American college was filled there by Jared Sparks, and it was to this Mentor that the young historian was later to inscribe his first venture in

historic narrative. When Jared Sparks took his place behind a professor's desk, George Bancroft had been before the public for four years with the initial volume of his life work. When Sparks, a few years later, became the instructor of Parkman, the service which that professor had already done to our own his

tory was the most conspicuous that any American had rendered. Sparks had then completed the first series of his American Biography. He had told in it, for the first time, with scrupulous care, the stories of French discoveries in the great West, where his young friend was to follow him. He had edited the Diplomatic Correspondence of the Revolution, had written the Life of Gouverneur Morris, and had established for his countrymen the ideals of Washington and Franklin.

In strong contrast both in subject and method with what Bancroft and Sparks were doing, and much nearer the model which the young aspirant already figured, was a new writer, who, in the very year when Sparks assumed his professorship, made the name of Prescott synonymous with the best that our western scholarship in history at that time could hope to offer for European distinction.

Parkman had already published his Pontiac, and had lapsed into a condition of body that made it seem as if his genius were to be permanently eclipsed by his infirmities, when a still more brilliant opening of a career was signalized by the appearance of The Rise of the Dutch Republic. Ten years were to pass before Parkman could produce the first of that series of books with which his name is indissolubly connected, and by which he has made the story of the rise and decline of the French rule in North America entirely his own. By this time, Motley, in his United Netherlands, had rounded the measure of his fame, and Prescott and Sparks had left us.

In these four conspicuous historians, who thus conjointly relieved their countrymen from any reproach for want of distinction in a dignified branch of letters, Parkman had examples of brilliant merit, and their careers supplied to his recuperated energy incentives and models. The rising historian was now in his forty-third year, but his mind had been drilled under such exactions and had been

forced to such restraints as few men had ever encountered. Remembering this, we can better understand the remarkable repression of superfluities in the treatment of his themes. He was too genuine to be an imitator, but the eclectic instinct had become strongly developed by his being obliged to hold in his memory what had been read to him. It is not difficult to see how the school of American historians that had grown up in these forty years had an influence upon him, while at the same time his own independence of character enabled him to emancipate himself from any thralldom.

In two, at least, of these contemporary historians there were symptoms of a still older school of historical writers. These had subjected historical documents, especially if the contributions of actors in the scene, to the revision of the pedagogue. It was a fashion never stronger anywhere than in New England, where the characteristics of ancestors have always been viewed tenderly.

The treatment of such material was a test in Parkman's mind of what may be called an historical integrity. I remember hearing him once make a strong protest (in a way which was always more incisive in his talk than in his books) against this misuse of revision. He believed that the actual record made in the thick of a conflict, and not a decorous paraphrase of it, was the true one. "In mending the style and orthography, or even the grammar," he said, "one may rob a passage of its characteristic expression, till it ceases to mark the individuality of the man, or the nature of his antecedents and surroundings." Speaking again of editorial glosses of the letters of Dinwiddie, Parkman referred to their "good English without character, while as written they were bad English with a great deal of character. The blunders themselves," he adds, "have meaning, for Dinwiddie was a blunderer, and should appear as such if he is to appear truly."

Such utterances as these made honesty