It was roughly made of native pine and maple, and varnished with the home-made varnish of the mountains, but the strings gave back the true viol tone, clear and ringing.

Bringing his chair closer to the grate, he placed the instrument in position, drew the bow, and there “in the still of the evening let her talk to him."

He was a mountain boy himself, and as the first soft notes fell on the air, plaintive and piercing, like the cry of the whippoorwill in early spring, he felt the youth stir in him, and heard

ing, like thetes fell on the oy himself. an.

He saw the log cabin high up against the side of the mountain, where the laurel and the sumach grew and the ash made bright the scene with its dark red fruit; where the breeze came laden with the odor of pine from the forest, and the birds touched the highest notes in their shrill treble.

He saw the boy with his sturdy limbs, his bold blue eyes, and his waving hair, barefoot and scantily clad, searching for the earliest berries in summer and the first nuts in the fall—free, joyous, innocent, happy.

He followed him in the “long, long thoughts" of a lad across the distant crest of the “ Devil's Backbone,” and wove with him mystic dramas amid the shades of the haunted ravine.

He sat with him at the feet of the mountain lass, and listened while he poured the crude

poetry of his awakened soul into the sensitive instrument which alone could interpret the mys. tery within him.

He stood beside him and watched the blazing pine knots roar up the cabin chimney, while the old folks in the corner looked at each other across the boy, with that surreptitious tenderness of the eyes which takes the place, in those grown gray, and sure of each other, of the more open demonstration.

He saw the whole twenty-two years of clean humble living ; the unaspiring, pastoral life of the Southern mountaineer, companioned of nature; simple, fearless, brave; scornful of the false, reverent of the true; tender to weakness, fierce to wrong; and, alas! uncontrolled as the elements around him ; crushing, in some mad output of strength, the obstacle in his way, to stand afterwards in awful recoil before the unknown poten. tialities of his own organism.

Full and swelling were the strains that issued from the throat of the violin as it told this idyl of the hills : passionate harmonies pulsating like the overcharged heart; long, tender, yearning notes; sweet, caressing andantes; the very spirit of Love in the guise of Sound.

But now the music changes. Youth's glad symphony is lost in the wild major chords of passion. Note dashes against note like hail against a pane. All the tumult of the moun.

tains, the forest, the roaring stream when storms rive the heavens, is sounded in that mad chro. matic ascending to its climax.

All of nature's after-penance breathes in the sighing minor of the descending scale. Surely that was a human sob that rang through the room: a fellow-mortal's burst of sympathy. No, it was just the old fiddle, who “knew things 'cause she'd been lyin' so long ag'in' his heart.”

And now from out her quivering strings she sends forth a melody so divinely pure, so immeasurably sweet, the coldest ear must open to greet it.

In it are the prayers of mothers, the tears of wives, the sobs of little children--all of unlanguaged pain, all of unlanguaged love.

It is the echo of that song which beats forever against the throne of God in tender, tireless cadence—the united voices of many women pleading for the souls of men.

The violin slips from the Governor's hands, and his head sinks upon his breast.

The old fiddle has “ told her story straight.”

When witnesses were found who corroborated the statements of the prisoner, and jail wardens certified to twenty years of exemplary behavior inside the prison walls, the Governor sent for Abner Hill to be brought to his private office.

The day he expected him he placed the violin in a conspicuous position on the desk.

There was ushered into his presence a tall, angular man with the worn face and stooping shoulders of threescore years; hair scanty, muscles flabby, eyes dull; nothing to bespeak youth but the faint red that crept into his sunken cheek when the servant announced his name. A single stroke of sin, and its after-writing on the brain, had done the work of twice twenty years.

He stood inside the door with downcast eyes and nervous, fluttering hands.

The Governor called his name, and something in the kindly accents gave him courage to look up.

Something else in the homely, humorous face that no man ever looked into without loving gave him courage to speak; and his eye caught sight of the violin.

Reaching a trembling hand out to his dumb friend as though for confidence, he whispered, hoarsely:"Guvner, what did she tell you fer me? What did my old fiddle tell you ?”.

The Governor waited for a moment, perhaps to steady his voice; then, laying both hands on the shoulders of the other, his eyes reading with a father's tenderness the piteous, expectant face, he said:

“Abner, she says—the old fiddle says—that you can go back to the mountains. And, my man, may God go with you!”

The convict stood for a moment like one

struck dumb, a womanish pallor overspreading his cheek; then, with a cry which his listener never forgot, he threw his arms around his liberator, and sobbed like a heart-broken child.

And the Governor was not ashamed to admit that something tightened in his throat and broke out at his eyes, too.

Winners by Their Own Lengths.

RALPH CONNORS.

ADAPTED from “ Black Rock.” Many strange Christmas Days have I seen, but that wild Black Rock Christmas stands out strangest of all.

The sports passed off in typical Western style. In addition to the usual running and leaping contests, there was rifle and pistol shooting, in both of which old Nelson stood first, with Shaw, foreman of the mines, second.

The great event of the day, however, was to be the fourhorse race, for which three teams were entered-one from the mines driven by Nixon, a citizens' team, and Sandy's from the lumber camp. The race was really between the miners' team and that from the woods, for the citizens' team, though made up of speedy horses, had not been driven much together and knew neither their driver nor each other. In the miners' team were four bays, very powerful, a trifle heavy perhaps, but well matched, perfectly trained, and perfectly handled by their driver. Sandy had his long, rangy roans, and for leaders a pair of half-broken pinto bronchos. The pintos, caught the summer before upon the Alberta prairies, were feet as deer, but wicked and uncertain. They