"Take that away," said Ephraim, tossing it to the end of the table: "I want a silver fork."

"Silver fork, sir! Bless my soul, sir! any; never heard of such a thing, sir."

We haven't got

"Never heard of a silver fork, you idiot!" shouted Ephraim; "why, everybody uses them."

"No, sir; I think not, sir. I've lived with first-quality people, sir, and they all use this kind. Never saw any other kind, sir; didn't know there was any. Do they have 'em in furrin parts, sir?"

"Get out!" said Ephraim, savagely. He was becoming somewhat annoyed and bewildered by the utter disappearance of so many familiar things.

But the breakfast was good, and he was hungry, so he fell to with hearty zest, and, although he found the steel fork clumsy, it did him good service. At the conclusion of the meal, Ephraim walked rapidly to his office,-the office that he had occupied for nearly sixty years. As he opened the door, he expected to find his letters in the box wherein the postman thrust them twice or thrice a day. They were not there. The box itself was gone.

"Too bad! too bad!" exclaimed Ephraim. "Everything conspires to delay me to-day. I suppose I must sit here and wait for that lazy letter-carrier to come, and ` meantime my business must wait too."

[We have not space to give in detail the various awkward misapprehensions of our Old Fogy on that awkward day. He found that letter-carrier and letter-box alike had vanished, and at the shrunken post-office learned that there would be no mail till the next day, and that they had never heard of such a place as Chicago. When he began to talk of telegraphing, and informed his hearers that he wished to get the quotations of the London Stock Exchange for that morning, he was taken for a madman. His talk about steamers and steam fireengines failed to improve the opinion as to his sanity. And when at

the wharf he talked of receiving a cargo of wheat by rail, and of loading twenty thousand bushels that day, and that on an iron vessel, the people around showed decided symptoms of locking him up as a lunatic. Talk about photographs, hard coal, Pacific railroads, etc., did not add to his reputation for sanity, and he finally fled for safety, not knowing what terrors might be preparing for him.]

"I know," he said, as he rushed onward, "what it all means. This is the Past. Some mighty hand has swept away the barrier of years, and plunged me once more into the midst of the life that I knew in my youth, long ago. And I have loved and worshipped that past! Blind and foolish man! I loved it! Ah, how I hate it now! What a miserable, miserable time it was! How poor and insufficient life seems under its conditions! How meanly men crawled about, content with their littleness and folly, and unconscious of the wisdom that lay within their reach, ignorant of the vast and wonderful possibilities that human ingenuity might compass!

"There was nothing in that dreary past that I could love, excepting"-and Ephraim was almost ready to weep as he thought that the one longing of his soul could not be realized-" excepting those who were torn from my arms, my heart, my home, by the cruel hand of death."

The excitement, the distress, the anguish, the wild terror of the day came back to him with accumulated force as he hurried along the footway; and when he reached his own home he was distracted, unnerved, hysterical.

With eager but uncertain fingers he pushed open the front door, and went into his sitting-room. There a fresh shock came to him, for he saw his wife in the chair she had occupied in the old time, long, long ago. She arose to greet him, and he saw that her dear face wore the kindly smile he had known so well, and that had added much to his sum of happiness in the years that were gone.

He leaped to clasp her in his arms when he heard the sweet tones of her voice welcoming him; his eyes filled with tears, and the sobs came, as he said,

"Ah, my dearest, my dearest! have you, too, come up from the dead past to meet me? It was you alone that hallowed it to me. I loved-loved you-I-"

He felt his utterance choked, the room swam before him, there was a ringing noise in his ears, he felt himself falling; then he lost consciousness.

He knew nothing more until he realized that there was a gentle knocking near to him, as of some one who demanded admittance at the door. He roused himself with an effort, and almost mechanically said,

"Come in."

He heard a light step, and he opened his eyes. He was in his own bedroom, the room of the present, not of the past, and in his own bed. It was Nelly who knocked at the door; she stood beside him.

"It is time to get up, grandpa," she said.

"Wh-where am I? What has happened?" Then, as his mind realized the truth, he said, "Oh, Nelly, Nelly, how I have suffered!"

"How, grandpa ?"

"I-I-but never mind now, my dear; I will tell you after a while. Run down-stairs while I prepare for breakfast. But, Nelly, let me tell you not to believe what I said to you about the glories of the past: it was not true, my child, not true. I have learned better; I talked to you like a foolish old man. Thank God, my dear, that you live late in the world's history. No man is more unwise or more ungrateful than he who finds delight in playing the part of An Old Fogy."

IN THE AUTUMN WOODLANDS.

SUSAN WARNER.

[Under the pseudonyme of "Elizabeth Wetherell" Susan Warner published in 1850 "The Wide Wide World," a novel which had an extraordinary success. She subsequently published numerous novels, in which the virtues and the faults of the first were repeated, but not the extended popularity. Her works are defective in style and in characterization, and are full of a somewhat strained religious sentimentality, yet the story is very skilfully managed, and appeals strongly to those to whom the plot is the chief element of a novel. From the "Hills of the Shatemuc," a work which inculcates an excellent moral, we extract an eloquent descriptive picture of American autumn scenery, written with photographic particularity. Miss Warner was born in New York in 1818, and died in 1885.]

MISS HAYE, however, had never sent her fingers over the keys with more energy than now her feet tripped over the dry leaves and stones in the path to Mountain Spring. She took a very rough way, through the woods. There was another, much plainer, round by the wagon-road; but Elizabeth chose the more solitary and prettier way, roundabout and hard to the foot though it was.

For some little distance there was a rude wagon-track, very rough, probably made for the convenience of getting wood. It stood thick with pretty large stones or heads of rock; but it was softly grass-grown between the stones, and gave at least a clear way through the woods, upon which the morning light if not the morning sun beamed fairly. A light touch of white frost lay upon the grass and covered the rocks with bloom, the promise of a mild day. After a little, the roadway descended into a bit of smooth meadow, well walled in with trees, and lost itself there. In the tree-tops the morning sun was glittering; it could not get to the bottom yet; but up there among

the leaves it gave a bright shimmering prophecy of what it would do; it was a sparkle of heavenly light touching the earth. Elizabeth had never seen it before; she had never in her life been in the woods at so early an hour. She stood still to look. It was impossible to help feeling the light of that glittering promise; its play upon the leaves was too joyous, too pure, too fresh. She felt her heart grow stronger and her breath come freer. What was the speech of those light-touched leaves, she might not have told; something her spirit took knowledge of while her reason did not,-or had not leisure to do; for if she did not get to Mountain Spring in good season she would not be home for breakfast. Yet she had plenty of time, but she did not wish to run short. So she went on her way.

From the valley meadow for half a mile it was not much more or much better than a cow-path, beaten a little by the feet of the herdsman seeking his cattle or of an occasional foot-traveller to Mountain Spring. It was very rough indeed. Often Elizabeth must make quite a circuit among cat-briers and huckleberry-bushes and young underwood, or keep the path at the expense of stepping up and stepping down again over a great stone or rock blocking up the whole way. Sometimes the track was only marked over the gray lichens of an immense head of granite that refused moss and vegetation of every other kind; sometimes it wound among thick alder-bushes by the edge of wet ground; and at all times its course was among a wilderness of uncared-for woodland, overgrown with creepers and vines tangled with underbrush, and thickly strewn with larger and smaller fragments and boulders of granite rock. But how beautiful it was! The alders, reddish and soft-tinted, looked when the sun struck through them as if they were exotics out of witch-land; the Cornus