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pearly west, Constance was standing, looking off to the distant hills.

"Constance!"

Glen's footsteps had been inaudible on the pliant turf and he had her in his arms before she realized that he was near.

She did not struggle. In her heart she knew-had guessed for long.

"Oh, Glen, Glen," was all she could say, and she said it with difficulty. "You great, big bear. Was it for this that"

"Yes," he interrupted her, "for this." And then, holding her close he tried to tell her what he had so often planned to say; to pour out to her all his past: to make clean his heart of self-resentment and idle thought; to tell her all that had been between Jessica and himself, and then let her judge. But he had no more than said Jessica's name than her hand that was not captive stole up to his shoulder and she turned her sweet face up to him. Her eyes were brimming, but a smile lit all her features. She laid her fingers restrainingly on his lips.

"Don't, Glen," she said. "I understand. She was a dear, sweet girl; I do not blame you. There is nothing for me to forgive."

He could not speak, there was such fullness in his heart. He pressed her brown head to his shoulder and kissed her hair and brow.

"And you love me, Constance?"
"Yes, Glen. I always did."

He raised her dear face and kissed her lips, not passionately, but with reverence, and then, with his arms about her, he led her to the seat by the vine-clad trellis. There he drew her head down on his shoulder and she nestled in his arms like a tired bird, safe home after a long day's voyaging.

"Oh, Glen," she whispered, when he would let her, "how I should have missed you. Yes, yes," she exclaimed, laughing up at him, "must I needs keep saying it? Well, well, I love you, I love you, I love you. No; I can never tell you how much-can never tell you at all if you keep acting that way.

And then, as they sa silent, the yel

low moon of a sudden pushed her sharp prow above the far hills, one brilliant star her consort, and flooded the valley with her gentle light. Higher the barge of the night sea rode, and as the darkness lifted, the whole world seemed receding, leaving the two young lovers alone.

EPILOGUE.

The simple narrative of Glen Noble, a son of New England, is nearly done. The larger story of the Silent Conquest, which once was to have been our caption, that at times has been suggested here, may not be written now. For it is present history, and Time alone may write it as the years go on.

In coming days, when that great author shall finally write "finis" to that story, too, my simple one may, perchance, be remembered casually of men. Then only, fortified by knowledge of events, shall they be competent to say truly if I in my day builded good or ill; if, in brief, the signs of the present time were heeded, and the sons of our foresires redeemed their heritage of the soil or lost it utterly by default to another race and people.

A later day and a later season and once more and for the last time we look abroad over the fair fields round about Cass Corners.

Fair and fertile bask the acres of the Carter farm beneath the noontide sun, stretching, broad and billowly from the honeysuckle shaded porch where Glen sits, to far beyond the Corners.

There, to the southward rears the bald top of Sugarloaf, the grand old patriarch with its many legends. Yonder, in the gateway of the hills, where, in serried ranks, the talking pines are marshaled up the careering heights, scintillates the silvery ribbon of the river, flowing, placid, to the sea.

Nearer to, where the fruitful, watered valley lends a tone of deeper greenery to the view, a herd of Ayrshire cows are grazing peacefully, the mottled white and bay of their glossy sides lending a tinge of quiet animation to the scene; and higher up, in a stumpy pasture lot, which Glen cleared

last winter, a drove of Southdown and Hampshire sheep add just the needed detail to the pastoral scene.

Sweeping houseward from the valley, and up to the greensward of the lawn, come the tillage lands, fat with promise of labor's just reward. The south meadow this season is down to corn, and its breast-high, even-planted stalks form a compact flood of changing green, that slightly billows like an inland sea, and the dreamy rustle of blade on blade comes with the sound of a creeping tide on a shelving shore. The meadow bordering on the east is verdant with the new emerald of just started rowan, where a heavy harvest of mixed grasses has been garnered and stored to the roof-tree in the mammoth barn. Everywhere broods peace and plenty.

It is now nearly thrice twelve months since the date of the locally famous wedding, and the Carter and Noble. farms have long since been made one great possession. And as Glen in the rest of the noontide hour looked abroad over the acres that he ruled and compared them with what would probably have been his lot had he not, as the Major said, been true to his country's calling, his heart swelled with gratitude to Providence and his lips breathed fervently a prayer of thanks.

Not that his battles were won and over! Far from it. New responsibilities rose each day; but, as Stevenson has said so well: "To travel well is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor."

"It is not meant," wrote one of God's noblest noblemen, "that the enjoyments of life should be few and intense, but many and gentle; and great happiness is the sun of a multitude of drops. * ** They who are seeking enjoyment in remote ways, abandoning the very things that make me supremely joyful, a hope of immortality, a present and paternal God, the sun, the face of the world, the clouds, the trees. and the birds which keep house in them, and the air, the innumerable. grass. It is not anything that I own; it is no stroke of good fortune, no

special success that rejoices me. It is nothing but the influence of these things in which every man has common possession-days, nights, forests, mountains, atmosphere, universal and unmonopolized nature. But having eyes they will not see, and ears they will not hear, and a heart they will not understand. As the old prophet touched his servant's eyes, and he beheld the mountains filled with the angels and chariots of God, and feared no more; so, methinks, if I could bring the eager thousands forth who pant and strive for joy, only for joy, and unseal their eyes, they should behold and know assuredly that happiness was not in all the places where they delve and vex themselves. In the presence of these heavenly hours, riches touched with the finger of God, would say. 'Joy is not in me.' Fame would say, 'It is not in me.'"

Beecher loved the country and he preached the country because of that love, but higher and before even his devotion to it, prompting most of his preaching of it, was a humanitarian. principle.

In Glen's cup of happiness there was but one bitterness, and he sighed with the pain of regret as his gaze wandered across the gray, heavy highway to the meadow on its opposite side, where, in the centre of luxuriant green, the little burial plot lay, its white shafts glistening, over which vines twined luxuriously, trained by loving hands.

The Grey and the Carter acres had not been united, for the old doctor still drove on his rounds, but in his journeyings through the neighborhood on his errands of mercy he often, in the heat of the long days, dozed in the deep hood of his chaise and dreamed of the time when they would be. He was often a visitor upon Glen and Constance, and several times since they had been married the Major had driven over from Ludlow to the farm.

Upon such occasions, at the conclusion of a merry repast, he and the doctor would draw their chairs in the shade of the veranda and while away the long, dreamy hours. The tide of

undesirable immigration was still sweeping over the country, and the native-born were drifting away. These conditions the two old patriots discussed with animation and their hearts were often sore with regret, but they had done what they could to better the conditions and their solace was to be found in that fact.

Avallonea, the lawyer in name only, is in prison, serving a twenty years' penalty, imposed by the federal court for perjury and false registration under the immigration laws.

Of Clarence Burland little news ever came back to these hills. After Burland senior had been delivered his certificate of election for value received, and he went to Washington, his famous country place changed hands, and the ill-reared son never came back to the scene of his early escapades. He was last heard of vaguely as a participant in a Texas feud.

The summer after she had left home, Flora, wedded but deserted, crept back to the scene of her girlhood, weary and alone. Knowing that she had been more sinned against than sinning, Constance and Glen would have received her and offered her a home, but she would accept nothing from any of them, save the old doctor's ministration, and then, silently accepting Glen's offer, she laid her dead child by the side of the mound where loving ones with breaking hearts had lain brokenhearted Allan MacLaren that spring, and then went away, a silent, remorseful figure, out into the world.

Of another, Badessiao, it is fitting to tell. He lived to be tortured by his memory only a few months. There was no human witness to the manner by which fate devised to remove him. All that was known of the incident was what he told ramblingly. He was found one morning in his ramshackle stable, bloody, mangled, and nearly dead. He had some difficulty with the worn-out horse, which he used as a medium for venting his bitternes of soul, and had attacked it savagely with a pitchfork. Goaded by pain beyond further endurance, the animal had turned on its per

secutor and crowded the man into a stall, striking and stamping upɔn him until he lay in a swoon.

They carried the victim of his own truculence into the house and there laid him on a bed. He lingered for several hours in torture and then died, but before his soul went home he made a full confession of his murder of John Carter and the statement was duly witnessed for presentation to the court.

The old Copley place, however, was not permitted to revert to undesirable hands. It was bought by Glen and the doctor and brought again to a high state of cultivation. Looking about for a tenant for the house, Glen wrote a letter to the Stapletons, and both Mrs. Stapleton and Alec were overjoyed at the chance to forsake a wolf's hole in a city tenement block and get back to the country.

Arrangements were made for them. to take the buildings and a portion of the acreage and work it on shares, and once more the widow was back, as she termed it, "to God's country."

Jessica? Ah, yes, Jessica! I had almost hoped you would have forgotten to ask, until I had told my story and gone on down the highway of time, thanking you for the cheer of your company, but hastening on round. the corner to be lost to identification in the busy throng.

Then you would have speculated and chosen that conclusion seemingly the most logical because nearest your heart. It would scarce have been honest to you, you who have so kindly let me bide awhile with you for the mere return of a little story, imperfectly told. But I was near to risking the blame, for, if truth must-and it must-abide to the end, 1-I——

But there is another way up to it!

You recollect how Hawthorne closes the last page of his Blithedale Romance: "There is one secret-I have concealed it all along, and never meant to let the least whisper of it escape-one foolish little secret. *** It is an absurd thing for a man in his afternoon

*

*

*

an absurd thing ever to nave happened. *** But it rises in my throat-so

let it come. I-I myself-was in love -with-Priscilla."

And so, before that which I had rather not write is said, I would have hastened away, abashed but relieved, and like the paying guest departing, who discovers he has been given an excess of change, I should have attempted by the effusivness of my leavetaking to have distracted your thoughts from a proper reckoning.

But, and there's the rub! I might want to pass this way again. So I'll depart in peace, taking nothing of yours with me but friendship's memory.

It was a week earlier, and Glen was seated as now on the vine-shaded veranda overlooking the valley of peace. The day's work was ende 1 and the last shafts of crimson and gold were lying on the western hills. The rural postman had just brought the mail, and a part of it was the daily paper. Mechanically Glen spread it out before

him.

He could not avoid it. There it was, splurged out in great, garish headlines: "Another divorce in Upper Tendom."

The heading sufficed. With consummate art all the hideous details were crowded into a dozen or so blacklettered lines. Incompatibility was alleged. As the laws of New York. do not recognize that as grounds for divorce, the petitioner had gone to Dakota to secure a residence. Glen read no more, but the face in the picture accompanying the story burned itself into his memory.

Slowly he tore the paper into ribbons and settled back in his chair, letting his gaze rove down the declivity of pasture and meadow, woodland and swale, and on up the heights to the glory of the sunset beyond.

All, all spoke of peace, plenty, and

contentment.

He shook his strong young frame as though waking from a sleep, and was about to rise, but the sound of a voice from the house restrained him.

It was the voice of Constance, youthful, happy, and sweet, singing softly a lullaby.

"Ol' Mammy Coon am huntin' in de darkness ob de bresh,

Huntin' fo' a li'l one dat she los'.
So shut yo' eyes, ma baby,

Or she sees dem shinin' maybe,

An' she t'ink dat yo' belong to her, ob korse.

Dat li'l coon, he sof' as silk, and brown as butternut,

Eyes like stars a-twinklin' in de night.
How she tell de dif'fence 'tween yo',
W'en in de dusk she's seen yo',
Less yo' shut yo' eyes an' draw de latch
string tight?

But if dey shut, ma baby, den yo' needn't be afeard.

Mammy Coon, she hab to let yo' be.
She lonesome 'thout her sonny,
But she 'bliged to trabble, honey,
'Case I 'ow dis li'l coon belong to me!"

She moved to where Glen sat and with her strong, brown hands that showed she was used to out-of-doors, she caressed the chestnut locks on his forehead as his head lay back. He reached up and captured one of the little hands and held it a willing prisoner, while he smiled up into her laughing eyes.

"Got that Glen boy to sleep, finally?" he asked.

"Yes," answered Constance, "I gave him that cotton mooley cow he's devoted to and he went to sleep with it in his arms. The doctor says he's a chip of the old block for love of animals. I know he is for contrariness."

He pinched the firm, warm flesh of her arm in punishment.

"Are you happy, dear?" she asked, bending her head until her brown hair swept his face.

"Happy, my precious, my wife?" he replied. "Yes, very happy. Happy in the blessed heritage of toil and the strength to do it; happy in a few rare friendships; happy in the sight of these glorious, everlasting hills, and happy, O, my very own, in your dear love."

The End

NOTE-Readers of the magazine who have found enjoyment in Winslow Hall's story, "Glen Noble," as it has appeared in these pages, will undoubtedly be pleased to possess the novel in book form. Necessarily the narrative has been considerably curtailed to fit it for serial publication, and much of the book that is sweet and strong has been unavoidably omitted. In its entirety, this exceptional story of New England, with its love, adventure, and wholesome sentiment will well repay a rereading. -The Editor.

THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

W

By WILDER D. QUINT

HEN a great and world-wide religious movement reaches a certain point in its development it is well for humanity in general, whether of it or outside it, to pause for a moment in the mad rush after material things and ask what it means; to survey it on all sides and from all angles impartially; to judge whence comes its strength and to estimate once and for all its appeal to the common heart of man.

All but one of the tidal waves of religion that we know to-day have historical perspective, and can simply and easily be accounted for. Judaism, Brahminism, Buddhism, Christianity, Mohammedism, the Reformation-all have long since exhibited their own cause for being. Chance had no more part in their rising than it has in bringing to the gaze of mortals on this little spinning-top called the world some blazing comet marking the heavens with a trail of splendor never seen before by human eyes. And we are far enough away from the inception of them to recognize the truth.

With that important spiritual and moral movement which has arisen within a generation and whose remarkable and ever-increasing power is a part of daily experience, the case is somewhat different. We find difficulty in seeing the forest because of the trees, so that a good many just and otherwise fair-minded observers are prone to lose their usual sense of perspective in the viewing of a new religion. That is why Christian Science, the latest and one of the most astonishing manifestations of mortal awakening, arouses a violence of controversial assault wholly out of proportion

to the placidity and poise with which it proceeds on its way.

It is not difficult to find reasons for this bitterness; one is that the movement seems to threaten the permanence of certain special interests; another that its serene confidence in itself somehow provokes its hotter-tempered foes to outbursts not wholly judicious. But the chief and truest of all may justly be said to be, so far as the great masses of the people are concerned, that it is seen very much out of focus by those who will not, or cannot, sanely adjust their mental lenses.

But however it is seen, whatever is thought of it, Christian Science is a present-day, active force that must be reckoned with. It is here, and apparently to stay. It is spreading over the whole world. It is drawing to itself thousands upon thousands of the unsatisfied in other denominations and as many more of the altogether unchurched. No longer can jeremiads from the pulpits of older religious institutions drown out its voice; no more is the scorn of the medical profession it is so strongly influencing, sufficient to lessen its daily accessions of converts to any appreciable degree. If it ever were a theory, it is so no more, but a big, powerful, wealthy, highly intellectual condition that confronts us.

Therefore, it is no longer the part of a sensible man to make faces like a little boy, or for any organization to bang on their tom-toms of abuse, hoping, like those mediaeval Chinese armies, to put the enemy to rout by mere noise. The Christian Science cohorts are curiously indifferent to anything approaching an attempted stampede.

One day, when a little more of that

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