The next day, at dusk, Cousin Henry led the way to Beckey's cabin, followed by mother, Ruth, Sam, and myself. Aunt Beckey looked better and brighter. She declared that she felt strength flowing into her from the little wooden idol that she held clasped tightly to her bosom. And it did not occur to the good simple soul that the chicken-soup might be responsible for this new-born strength! The backyard was densely packed with negroes, but not one was allowed to enter. Inside the cabin, the scene was worthy of a painter. The primitive lamp-an iron bowl of lard-oil, with a wick floating on the surface-burned with a black smoke above the flame, and cast strange, flaring, hobgoblin shadows on the whitewashed walls. Henry drew a chalk circle in the middle of the floor, marking inside of it ridiculous designs, which it pleased him to call cabalistic. Then he swung a lighted censer, chanted a Latin hymn, and was withal so grave that even I dared no longer smile, though the pungent odor of the incense set me sneezing.

Aunt Beckey's dark figure lay motionless on the bed; but her great hollow eyes followed Henry's every motion with painful eagerness, until at a signal from the impromptu doctor, my mother stepped forward and tied a cool bandage across the hot lids.

Gran'mammy bared her daughter's swollen rheumatic limbs, and Henry rubbed them gently for about half an hour. Then he said: "I find, Aunt Beckey, that the snakes are now all in the right leg. The fetich has troubled them so much that they are trying to get out. The only thing to do is to cut open the foot, and they will drop out of themselves. Are you willing?" "Go on," said Aunt Beckey.

"Stand back, all of you!" cried Henry. "No one must come near me but Sam. He must hold the basin."

I saw a twinkle in the small boy's eye, and I crept pretty near myself, unrebuked by my absorbed cousin. He pierced the foot with a sharp lancet, and the blood flowed freely. The light was so dim that for all my efforts I could not quite see what was going on. But I noticed that Sam held the oblong box in one hand; and from time to time an exclamation from one of this precious pair-"There is another!" "Don't let it get away!" "Four, is it?" or some such significant cry-set us all quivering with excitement. "That is all," said Henry at last. She is saved."

66

He bound up the foot, and took the bandage from Aunt Beckey's eyes. "Fetch another light," he said quietly.

Then he held the basin, so that she could examine its contents; and there were at least six wicked-looking little snakes. "Those who have eyes to see, let them see," said that wretched Henry, without so much as the flicker of an eyelash!

I can hear Aunt Beckey's scream of joy to this day! Then how she wept! What blessings she called down on the head of the arch impostor! What shouts of "Glory! Glory!" resounded through the little room! How the darkies outside took up the strain, and all night long praised the Lord in singing and in prayer.

As for my dear mother, she was so divided between indignation and laughter that she had to hurry away. She was so conscientious that she could not

reconcile herself to such a tremendous fraud as that which Henry had practised; and yet, when she saw our dear old Aunt Beckey fast getting well, how could she help being grateful to the clever and mischievous boy who had brought it about?

My father heard the story with an unmoved face. "Lucky I was not here, you young rascal," he remarked.

"Lucky for Aunt Beckey," said Henry dryly.

Certainly, Aunt Beckey did get well, and appeared better in mind and body for her strange experience. She has not been tricked since; thanks perhaps to the fetich that she wears like an amulet over her heart; or to the charitable prayers that she is in the habit of offering for Aunt Sini.

"No mo' curses shell come home to roost on my head," she says, with slow, solemn words; "fur I bless, an' I curse not, an' I pray fur dem dat 'spitefully uses me; an' dis I shall do forevermo', as long as I live on de earth, an' my name is Beckey Bonner."

.

Thomas Chalmers Harbaugh.

BORN in Middletown, Md., 1849.

GRANT-DYING.

IT seemed to me that yesternight
I heard the branches sighing
Beneath my window, soft and low:
"The great war chief is dying!'
His marches o'er, his battles won,
His bright sword sheathed forever,
The grand old soldier stands beside

The dark and silent river;

Whilst fame for him a chaplet weaves
Within her fairest bowers,
Of Shiloh's never-fading leaves,

And Donelson's bright flowers;
Grim Vicksburg gives a crimson rose,
Embalmed in deathless story,
And Appomattox adds a star

To crown the wreath of glory.

He's dying now! the angel Death,
Insatiate and impartial,
With icy fingers, stoops to touch

The Union's old field-marshal,
Who, like a soldier brave, awaits
The summons so appalling,
While o'er the land, from sea to sea,
The silent tear is falling.

Still in his veterans' hearts to-day
His battle-drums are beating;
His bugles always blew advance-
With him was no retreating;
And tenderly, with moistened eye,
Columbia bends above him,
And everywhere the sorrowed heart
Tells how the people love him.

From golden-fruited orange groves
To where the pines are sighing,
The winds waft messages of love
To Grant, the hero, dying.
The Old World sends across the wave
A token of its sorrow;
The greatest chief alive to-day
May fall asleep to-morrow.

O touch the hero gently, Death!
The land is filled with weeping,
And be his passing like a child's—
The counterfeit of sleeping.
A million boys in blue now stand
Around their dying brother;
The mighty world knows but one Grant,

"Twill never know another.

HE walk was enchanting. The air was clear and fresh with just a touch of frost in it, cool in the shadow, but very warm in the sun. In a little patch of garden before the one house upon the island, the clumps of crimson and yellow dahlias had just reached perfection. A collie dog had stretched himself out in the porch. Near by stood a middle-aged woman picking grapes from a trellis. She had in her face that same placid, saint-like expression-the look of Sister Félicienne. "It is the place," thought Miss Gérard, and she longed to talk with her. But the woman looked at her shyly and did not speak. She walked on. The sumachs were blood-red, the maples were pink and gold; at her feet the ground was purple with great beds of wild asters. The little wood-paths running off into the wilderness were ankle-deep with fallen leaves, through which the squirrels scurried away at the sound of her step. She met no one. The rush of summer travel was over; the world and his wife had taken themselves off, and the wonderful island in all its tangled beauty was hers to enjoy alone. All around her, through the flickering leaves, the rapids leaped and shone and sung to the eternal drum, drum, drum of the cataract that thrilled her with its invisible presence. All that she could see delighted and exhilarated her. She gave herself up to this mysterious charm, lingering at every turn to draw long breaths, and to study the book that is open to all men, that no man ever learns. There was an old tree cut all over with names and dates-long-forgotten challenges to Time, some of them already blotted out by his reproving fingers. One name, high above the others, interested her. "Kenyon, 1821." A good name, an uncommon one; she remembered it in an old romance of Hawthorne. Perhaps he had first seen it there, and had stopped in that very place to write it down. "1821." It must have been deeply cut to endure so long. She wondered if Kenyon were still living and who he was.

She wandered down to a reedy spot on the shore, where the rapid, none the

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less swift for being shallow, went gliding along with hardly a ripple. For some time she watched its glassy surface and the smooth pebbles lying there just out of reach; then, turning away, she stumbled and almost fell over a 'rock half hidden in the yellow grass. Her eyes caught some lettering upon the stone, and she knelt down to read it. Many winters had dealt rudely with it-it was almost gone. There was no name; no date; but at last she made out these words:

ALL IS CHANGE
ETERNAL PROGRESS

NO DEATH

She pondered long over this strange inscription. She had never heard of it before. Whose work was it? The old story of the hermit of the falls came back to her; if that were true, he had built his rough shelter within a stone's throw; and but a few yards off he had gone to his death in the river, under the American Fall. Had he carved here at his own gravestone? Or had some hermit of a day, like this of hers, devoted himself to this memorial? No; the man who did that knew the ground well, and loved it as one loves a dear relation. The words would not go from her mind. "Eternal Progress!" The whole spirit of the place was there.

She followed the path again to the outer shore of the island, till far off upon the Canadian side the familiar lines of the convent came out against the sky. At last she stood in sight of home, yet parted from it by the wide river at its fiercest point-by that scene which is the despair of all who try to paint it, either in colors or in words. There was the broken verge of the great Horseshoe, along which the water waited, as if in wonder at its own recklessness, with the shining stretch of unbroken green in it, down which nothing seemed to move. There, too, almost in the centre of the fall, and on its very edge, was the flat rock that the water never covers, even for an instant. As a child, she had often longed for the power to stand there and look down. She had known the Horseshoe well, but never well enough. For the greater fall, unlike its American fellow, permits no one to enter upon intimate relations with it, but holds itself aloof, as Jove did from Semele. From many points upon the shore it is possible to get glimpses of its far-off grandeur. At either end one may draw nearer, and lose one half of it in peering over at the other. But no man has ever seen it all and lived.

Leaving behind her all this tumult of the waters, Miss Gérard turned off into the quiet woods, among the startled squirrels, through the thicklystrewn leaves, and over mossy logs that crumbled when she stepped upon them. Here there were no paths; but she pushed on, until she came out upon another shore, at the southern end of the island. Here a triangular shoal stretches away for a long distance, to a vanishing point where the river divides into two branches that form the American and Canadian Rapids, between which Goat Island lies. This reach of still water, hardly three feet in depth, is smooth as the water of a lake-so smooth that on that day it only lapped gently the grassy bank upon which Miss Gérard sat down to rest. There was little here to attract the eye or to divert the mind. It was a quiet

nook, where one might easily drowse away an hour in a waking dream. And before long such a dream began to steal in upon Miss Gérard-a dream of her past life, in which, one by one, came trooping back, unbidden, a host of recollections, some sad, some bright; all its great events, and others so slight that they had been long forgotten.

To-day all these forgotten things came back with strange vividness as she sat alone in sight of the very spot where her career of ingratitude had begun. An hour passed and left her still absorbed, struggling against herself in her own defence, this time with indifferent success. At last she forced herself to think of other things. She looked out over the quiet shoal to the point beyond it, where the rapid changed its course and broke into two streams; beyond that still to the distant river, that looked as calm as the water at her feet. She could see the white sail of a boat there miles away. She wondered how near the rapid it would be safe for the boat to come. What if it should venture too near and be drawn down beyond the reach of help? It would not take long. From that place to the great fall could hardly be a minute's journey, by the river.

The shadows were growing longer. Just one look at another place close by, and she would turn back to the hotel, and then to the ferry. It was time to go on.

Stretching from the south shore of Goat Island straight out into the heart of the boiling rapid are three wonders of Niagara, that till lately were inaccessible three feathery islands, known as the Three Sisters, separated from their huge brother by three chasms, over which light bridges have been thrown. Through these channels, that it is always wearing deeper, the river plunges in three sister torrents, all beautiful, yet resembling each other only faintly as sisters are wont to do. The first stream, that falls over its black rocks like a net-work of jewels, is comparatively shallow, yet it would be unsafe to set foot in it. The first island, like the others, is a jungle of pine and birch and swamp-maple, struggling up between mossy rocks and the decayed stumps of older growth. Miss Gérard did not wait here long, for just at the end of the bridge she found an artist sketching. She remembered his face at the hotel, and perhaps he remembered hers, for he eyed it curiously over his easel. She went on over the second torrent, which breaks into a bar of foam above the bridge and tumbles all in a heap below. Queer little bits of rainbow play about the foaming places, but if looked for twice are not to be found. She watched for them a moment or two, and then followed the path along over the middle isle to its farther shore, where some wooden steps lead down to the rocks below the last bridge. She was well out into the river, and this was the point she wanted. Here she seated herself close upon the brink of the third torrent, which is deeper and wider and wilder than the others. As she looked up at it, the water formed for her its broken horizon line against the sky, and seemed to come tearing down out of the blue distance, as if all the evil spirits of Baron Fouqué were struggling and snarling in it for the mastery. It was of all colors from bottle-green to black; and, at its lowest point, the water was lashed into showers of drops, tossed high into the air and glittering like bits of ice. The gulf is perhaps thirty yards in width, and beyond