for me, that no school-teacher could enter at the law. They knew I was too poor to sit with my legs out of a lawyer's window studying for two years, and let my mother starve!"

“What did you do, sir?" Luther Bosler asked, sitting, like his father, at the table in his shirt-sleeves.

"I merely cubed the radius," Abel Quantrell said, with a firmer grip of his upper lip upon the lip below-that lip which seemed beaked, while his nose was straight as an index-board. "I rode over into Maryland and sat up with the bar of the nearest county there, judge and all, and played a good hand at cards, and staked my quarter's salary. They asked me a sleepy question or two at daylight and passed me into the law. So I extracted the square root of Pennsylvania smallness and moved my habitation to another Dutch county."

"Te Dunkers do not go to law," ventured Katy Bosler.

“Bi'm-by,” Jake Bosler ejaculated, fearing that they had already leanings that way.

"No, bright eyes! And that was what took the square root out of my triumph. I could get love in too generous measure, but business never came. Here sits a pupil of mine: let Ninon tell the rest."

He turned to Hannah Ritner. She swept his pallid and volcanoscarred face with eyes of woe and pride, and answered:

Master, you found your only client, after waiting long—in a murderer. He had taken a human life, but by his crime you and your mother's brood found food. His case was so bad that they gave him to you to defend him, in mockery of your hard condition, for you received not one penny for your toil."

Sho, sho!" from Abel Quantrell; "I cubed myself, though.” "The eloquence of genius in the occasion of despair burst from you like a torrent. The murderer became, in your impetuosity, your only friend. His dark and stony nature poured forth the springs of fervent tears. The judge sat trembling, your rivals were astonished and abashed. All German-derived people, after that, went to you with their suits and cases, and found you just as God. You left us, then, for greater fields of use, and, by prosperity, you fell to be a man!"

"Nothin' but persewerin'," from the old-maidish face of Job Snowberger, with his sheepish and insinuating side still set on Katy.

"Job Snow," Hannah Ritner commanded, " be more respectful to my dear master!"

"Bi'm-by," meaninglessly from Jake Bosler, who executed the parental feat of throwing some corn "slappers" with his fingers into Katy's plate, a yard distant.

Only Nelly Harbaugh seemed to blush at this homely method of serving food.

"Teacher," Nelly said to Abel Quantrell, "which is best to live for-affection or greatness?"

"I have had all my happiness in career," replied the old man, with his pallid hand in his bosom, laid firmly on his heart. His eyes, ranging around the table, rested with some kindling embers of power upon Luther Bosler. "My career, for a quarter of a century, was to fight Power. Sometimes I fought it when it was rightful power-not often. For power, as I found it in my exile in these Middle States, was the power of old sociability, of cliques and lodges, of amiable ignorance and deadly prejudice resisting innovation. This dull majority had sat upon my heel; I turned and bruised its head."

"Soon-down, Luter. Bi'm-by!" from Jake Bosler, toward his son, glancing at the half-plowed fields.

Jake had taken off his shoe, and was examining his not very sightly foot with an eye to stone-bruises. No spirituality in the conversation bribed him from thrifty thinking on his crops.

66

'Retaliation is not the spirit our Lord changed this world in," Luther Bosler said, his dark eyes intelligently following Abel Quantrell.

Hannah Ritner's eyes shone with all their might of compassion, as she turned on Luther, before the old man could speak the repartee his folded lip concealed:

"Sir, Master Quantrell's retaliations were never upon the weak. He soared among the eagles in his indignations. We humble Germans he led by the hand as high as we could go, and there we saw him battling with the power enthroned in the sun. He defended slaves escaping over the free-State line. He assailed Freemasonry in its brutality toward a human life. He broke the power of ignorance in Pennsylvania and made Education one of the tyrants there, with the power to tax, like forked lightning in its hands. We sluggish Germans did not always understand him; we had not his mercurial sensitiveness to the injuries of simple multitudes-of women,

of illiterate children, of poor, black slaves. But we felt that something of Messiah had come among us with righteousness in his hands, and we set him in the seats of power until-"

"The lower Yankee interest in his nature made him desert you," said Abel Quantrell, bitterly. "Yes, Ninon, I gave myself to career like the bright, impetuous waters of the Blue Mountains, which at last subside in the shallow and malarious estuaries of the bay. I laid down career, and I am dead. Look at me-whited, withered, wigged, and limping! Have I not thrown myself away?"

"No, master!" the woman answered in fervent eloquence. "The world has captured you, but not your principles, and, like our old German emperor, Barbarossa, you sleep in the cavern till the freedom of our land shall awaken you."

"I have a son," the old man said. never again in my enfettered self."

"In him I may awake, but

Katy cried, before she could think: "Oh, he was here! We took Lloyd to love-feast. He eat with us Dunkers last Sunday." Sho, sho! No doubt he multiplied the base and height of himself together and the product by the breadth. The cube resulting is still a baby's block."

66

He is a manly lad, master!" said Hannah Ritner, with her great eyes downcast. "Something of his father is there."

"Yes," said Abel Quantrell, languidly, "the complement of his father: he will be as rash to support power that is false, as I was to attack it. In my rowdy son, I see the compensation of my own selfindulgence."

"It is not true!" Katy cried; "Lloyd is a gentleman. He eat te

Passover!"

"I guess he's purty bad, Katy," Job Snowberger said.

ain't a-persewerin'."

"He

"Job Snow!" from Hannah Ritner, "where is your char

ity?"

"Come, Ninon," said Abel Quantrell, with lessening interest in the subject; "I must have my game of cards."

Luther Bosler and his father went back to the field; Katy and Nelly and Job Snowberger went to fruit-peeling again; Hannah

Quantrell had chairs under a tree near the creek nished them a table; from the dwelling the for Sich silver pieces.

Velly Harbaugh no less preacce

pied and silent, and Job Snowberger, the only talking quantity left, got no reply for his chance remarks.

Katy," he said at last, "you is so still, I think you want to come to Kloster Schneeberg."

"Oh, you old fool!" Nelly Harbaugh spoke, "what does she want with your old stupid nunnery? We women want career."

She glanced at Katy, who looked up, her eyes full of tears, and said:

"Nelly, what makes me so ignorant?

Goodness," Nelly Harbaugh answered.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE YANKEE.

TILL late in the day Abel Quantrell played euchre with a spirit compounded of gain and hazard, his opponent sometimes requiring to be stirred from her abstraction, yet seeking to engage him with all her irregular solicitude.

Finally, the old man, as she studied a careful play, closed his eyes, and when she was ready, he did not respond.

The sun was growing low, and Hannah Ritner placed her chair so as to shield him from its glancing rays, as they were dandled on the South Mountain's crest.

"Oh, that this day would bring its result!" she sighed aloud.

A head was in her lap and a kiss upon her hand; she looked

down, and Katy Bosler was kneeling on the ground.

'What is it, simple child?”

'My ring," whispered Katy. "He wants it."

She pointed at Abel Quantrell, sleeping.

Katy held up the mourning ring of Lloyd Quantrell's mother. "Fortune-teller!" said Katy, "this ring Lloyd's mother was married with. Oh, must I lose it, as you told me I would? Can't nothing save it for me? It is all I haf, since I gif Lloyd my accor dion."

Hannah Ritner looked at the ring.

"It is sanctified by death," she said. "Lord rest the soul who made this ring so dear!"

"Lord, let that soul be kind to me!" responded Katy, fervently. "I only want to gif myself to Lloyd, and nothing selfish haf I got but love—te first of love I ever felt. How strong it is, Mootter Hannah!"

“Drive it away, my child! Exert your mind to be free! Rings like this were never made to be worn by poor, ignorant girls. Give this ring to me, and I will wear it for you, and then it never may be lost."

"You, Mootter Hannah! Haf you got te power to keep it always for me? If I gif it to you now, maybe I will lose it, all py myself, and pe foolish.”

"Hush, Katy!" Hannah Ritner pointed to the sleeping sire of Lloyd Quantrell. "Leave it with me to conjure with awhile."

She slipped the ring upon her hand, and Katy stole away.
Abel Quantrell opened his eyes and said:

"The square of self is but half selfish; but the cube of self has higher walls than angels ever scale. Plato, with all his divine reach, could never solve the problem which had baffled the oracle of Apollo."

"Dear master, what was that?"

"To start with one's self-indulgence and multiply it into a sacrifice; to double the cube. Geometry, no more than an oracle, can do it."

'Master, you have always defended the poor."

Sho, sho! Too often from pugnacity, reasoning from them to my own fancied injuries. The humility of the Nazarene never was He who seeks to save his life shall lose it, Ninon."

in me.

66

Master, have I not been seeking to save my life by losing it? Are we ever all unselfish?"

"You have been, or sacrifice has no God, my child! If ever love was willful, suicidal, and martyr-minded, it was yours. I offered you myself, and you refused me: with every right to me, you sent me on my career and blessed me as another's bridegroom, and turned back with all your glorious powers of body and of heart to be, like Hagar, the bride of the wolf, and your habitation in the wilderness. What have you been recompensed in?”

'Career, my master. I saw a work to do."

Sho, sho! I know what that has been: to take the place of danger on the Underground Road and save a slave or two, whose escape to freedom only aggravated the sorrows of the rest, and