your father and yourself," said Salome to Ruby in conversation upon the subject.

"We go among those who need us most-who are ready to receive us," said Ruby. "We do not trouble those who enjoy their degradation; but those who are earnestly seeking the truth and are willing to be led. The field is broad enough for us and we leave to others more fitted for the work, those to whom you refer. There is work for all of us and we should each take the duties we are best fitted to perform.

Ruby's character was a beautiful prism reflecting all of the heavenly light about her. Other natures may show shades of color, hers the full glory of all. Others lived in antagonism to nature's laws, she in perfect harmony with them. Others were seeking flaws in every character, she, in her sympathy, was finding only the germs of good.

Mr. Gladstone's class in self-culture consisted of adult men and women who seemed anxious to attain to the mental and physical perfection he assured them was possible, but who seemed to fail utterly to realize that a teacher can only instruct a person how to accomplish a purpose, but that the effort necessary to success in any direction depends upon the student's receptivity. They seemed to think they should arrive in a few weeks, or months at most, at the very point to which he had attained after twenty years of faithful toil, self-sacrifice and study. They could not give up, as he had done, the fragrant cup of coffee and the tempting steak and game. Their progress must come without self-abnegation. They could not yield to the belief that what enters into a man feeds the quality of his nature, and that to starve out the fierce part of his animal nature he must abjure stimulating food and drink, and to cultivate the more gentle side he must 'feed the lambs,'. or the patient, loving part of the nature.

He had, too, the various dispositions which gather into one class. Women who believed in telling everyone they knew what unkind thing everybody said of them, seeming to think they were doing a favor; women who hated every one their husbands loved; women who could not see why anyone should be able to do anything they could not do; those who would not believe anything which could not be verified by the sense of sight or touch. They were a class of material men and women, the spiritual side of whose natures lay dormant. Mr. Gladstone sought to awaken it if possible.

(To be continued.)

THE VALLEY PATH.

BY WILL ALLEN DROMGOOLE.

CHAPTER IV.

It was the first call the circuit rider had made at the cabin. The doctor chuckled.

"Liked my looks, I suppose," was his reflection, "or else he saw my chicken coop,-these Methodists!"

Old Dilce, none the cleaner for her race with the hog, hobbled forward to say, in the half-complaining tone familiar to her race:

"De preacher ob de gospil am in de house, marster, en he look lack he toler'ble hungry fur his dinner."

The doctor laughed softly, rescuing the saddle bags, thereby bringing upon himself an onslaught from the terrier.

"Well, then," he said, "do you be sure you fix him up a good one."

"Who, me?"

"Yes, you. And tell Ephraim to take the mare to the barn."

The old woman's face wore a knowing look.

"He say he ain't got but jes' a minute ter set. He say he got ter be about his Marster's business."

"Yes," said the doctor, "I have heard something like that before. You had better get the dinner ready, chicken pie and apple dumplings."

Still she didn't move; evidently there was news yet. He waited a moment for its coming.

"Dat little gal f'm down yon'er et toler'ble hearty dis mawnin'."

"Who? what? Oh, Lissy. Did she? Well, I'm glad of that. She's a good girl. You must be good to Lissy."

"I sho am," was the hearty reply. "She mighty p'lite, en thankful. That little gal hab good raisin', sho's you bawn." "Oh, get out with you," laughed the doctor, "the girl knows no more of courtesies than Zip here. Never been beyond the mountain in her life."

"Den she am a bawn lady," declared old Dilce, nothing daunted. "She ain' no po' white trash."

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"See here now, Aunt Dilce, what did the girl give you? Oh, you needn't protest, I know well enough she bought you."

"Fo' God, marster, she ain' gimme a bressed thing. She say she gwine fetch me some terbacky out'n o' her grandpa's patch bimeby, dat's all. En she say she wish ter de goodness you ud come over dar en see her grandpa, he's plumb peart en healthy en dat fond o' comfy! En she e't her bre'kfus tolerble healfy; she sho did."

"Aunt Dilce," said the physician, "my tobacco box is on the mantel; help yourself, you sly old rogue. Now go and get the dinner for the preacher. I am going in to invite him to remain to it."

"You won't have ter baig, I'll be boun'," was the parting shot as she went back to her kitchen.

The doctor opened the door and went in. As he entered his cosy little study, a stalwart robust figure, clad in a rusty black suit of clothes and carrying a worn silk hat in his hand, rose to meet him. The face wore a woe-begone, lugubrious expression, as if the sins of the world had been too many for the broad bent shoulders. A mass of long, sandy, unkempt hair lay upon the sleek collar of the ecclesiastic coat. He was a typical backwoods circuit rider; the air of conscious rectitude, of superior knowledge, and a friendly familiarity with the Holy of Holies that was vouchsafed to but few stamped his calling beyond a shadow of doubting. He extended his hand to meet the physician. "I come in the name of the Master," he said.

"Well, you found the door open, at all events," replied the physician; "I tarried awhile with the sick down the valley. Resume your seat, sir."

"Death and disease walk the earth," chanted the divine in solemn measures. "Sorrow an' desolation walk hand in hand. One sows an' another reaps, and no man knoweth what a day may bring forth. My brother, I am come in the name of the Master. I come not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. I have come to beg you to repent-to warn you and to teach you."

"I'm a terri

"Wait until after dinner," said the doctor. ble old fool, I reckon, but I like to take my lesson on a full stomach. Sit down there, Brother Barry. I am going to fill a pipe for you, and introduce you to my dog Zip; then I am going to give you a good dinner, another pipe, and a peep at the prettiest colt in this valley. Then I'm going to send you up those stairs into my guest chamber, 'the upper room' where you are to have a bath, a nap, and

remain as long as you choose. Heavens! don't object, man; doesn't your Methodist nose tell you there is chicken in the air? Chicken pie, and here is Aunt Dilce come to tell us it is on the table. Come out; we will talk religion some other time."

Brother Barry, however, seemed disposed to argument. "My Master's business," he protested, though decidedly more feebly than at first-"I must be about it: I cannot tarry."

"Why," laughed the doctor, "I thought you were sent here to seek a lost sheep. I tell you, sir, you've run against the toughest old ram that ever tried to butt its own brains out. You may spend a week on me if you are so inclined, but you are not commanded to starve meanwhile; on the other hand you are told not to muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. Come out to your fodder."

The invitation was too hearty for resistance. The Methodist placed his tall hat on the table and followed the doctor out to dinner. It was the first of many they were to take together, these two whose lives were to cross but not, in the finer sense, to touch each other; these two, the one broad and warm with the sunshine of all charity, the other narrow and ignorant and immovable, making religion a dark and unreal thing and demanding of its advocates a life of perpetual gloom in a path beset by dangers, curses, terrors; these two, the one with his eye fixed ever upon the sun, the other a groveller among the glooms, believing always in the depravity of humanity and always bearing the burden of its rescue.

The Methodist made himself at home from the moment he entered the doctor's door. He was made as welcome as any might desire; only upon matters of religion the physician refused to talk. But Brother Barry was a man of infinite resources, and failing to take the doctor by one means he had recourse to others. That he would be converted at the last the circuit rider held no shadow of doubt. The first night of his arrival, when the physician had been sleeping for hours he was awakened by a tremendous thumping upon the floor of the chamber overhead.

He sprang from his bed with a start and ran to the door of the little old-fashioned stairway that went up from his own bedroom. His thought was that Brother Barry was again "surrounding the throne," an exercise that had kept him awake for more than an hour during the earlier night. But this was more serious; Brother Barry was calling for a light.

"Fetch a light, brother; fetch a light quick, and pencil and paper; I have got a thought."

The doctor's gray head was thrust well into the doorway. “Oh, you go to sleep, Brother Barry," said he, "and trust the Lord for another." And closing the door the old infidel went chuckling back to bed.

They were odd companions, these two; yet each was interesting to the other. The preacher regarded the doctor with a kind of pious pity, while the physician's feeling for him would have partaken largely of contempt but that his good heart recognized the fact that the Methodist was honest even in his ignorance. After three days Brother Barry threw his saddlebags across the back of the fleabitten mare and took his departure. In that three days' time he had vainly endeavored to impress the doctor with a sense of his great danger, and had been laughed at, or cut off with the offer of a pipe or a plate of fruit. He had been ready to swear a dozen times; only the respect in which he held his cloth had been sufficient to prevent an outbreak. The doctor had sworn a dozen times, and more. Yet he had never once lost patience; not even when his guest had pronounced with tragic attitude, the "Woe! woe! to them that are at ease in Zion." All he had said was, "Hell!" and he had laughed even while saying that.

CHAPTER V.

A red rose bush bloomed by the cabin door, and the bees were busy among the honeysuckle trailing the piazza and crowding the windows of the miller's house. Not that the dusty old miller or his sharp-voiced wife ever gave a thought to the training of the vines; they were Alicia's; her hand, with the assistance of Al, had put them there and carefully tended them until they were a bower of bloom, where the bees came summer days, hunting for honey among the pink and pearl-white blossoms.

Doctor Boring recognized her spirit everywhere about the picturesque little place the first morning he went to call upon his neighbors there. He had felt something like admiration for the miller as he stood for a moment looking over the gate into the pretty sloping yard with the newly whitewashed cabin in the centre. There was an air of thrift about the place, as if the little mill on the creek had earned its full measure of toll. Even the greens in the garden seemed to have outgrown the vegetables of other gardens. The peas were clambering up their cedar