"I want my horse fed pefore daylight," whispered Katy-“ te strawperry roan, that racks. Please let that man sleep, and wake me without noise. I'll pay you now."

After a night of strange, deep, yet haunted sleep, Katy was awakened and started on her journey. Another creek flowing out of the mountain's mane, gave access to pierce the mountain's head, and by abyss and overhanging height, rock and cascade, narrow pass and cave, the fainting child went on, crossed the South Mountain, and looked back on nature wildly broken and uptilted, and she scaled the next mountain's notch among frozen cascades which she felt to be tributaries of the Antietam.

"Tick-a-tock-a, tick-a-tock-a, tick-a-tock-a!"

From the fissure she descended there suddenly stretched under and away, like a golden scarf, the zone of a prodigious valley in snow and field, stack and large barn, pike and town, miles on miles; soft to the hollow palm of heaven as the young head of David, in its silken curls and rosy blushes to the transparent hand of the prophet, full of shining oil.

The sun was sinking in the west, and as it basked upon the faint gray line of the North Mountain, thirty miles away, it seemed to Katy, this eve of Christmas-day, to be the star of Bethlehem the wise men had followed, and the abundant plain to be the gifts they had brought the new-born baby in the stall-gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

She was delirious now, and only knew the town in the foreground of the great valley to be Waynesboro, and down the mountain tripped her gallant roan

"Tick-a-tock-a, tick-a-tock-a, tick-a-tock-a!"

Waynesboro has been passed; she knows the old Dunker meeting-house on the Little Antietam, with its ten doors and windows in the low story of stone; she is in the noble woods above the lower road in the valley, and sees the old white Dunker mill; and she has fallen from her horse to the earth at the monastery door and read the notice posted there:

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'By order of the trustees of the Snow Hill Society, the undersigned do hereby notify the loafer or vagrant not to call for lodging or otherwise annoy the people, as the law will be used."*

The fainting soul applied the warning to herself: she passed through the long, narrow house by an open hall, passed to the rear * The author copied this from the door of Snow Hill Dunker Nunnery.

and saw no one, and entered the little dairy among the shining pans and tins.

In the water seemed a circle of silver or gold mystically rippled.

"Te ring!" sighed Katy, and sank upon the cold floor.

When she could see, or recollect, she was in bed and very weak, yet somehow happy. She heard singing of a queer, shrill kind, and looked upon something that shone upon her finger. What could it be that had slid, as if from heaven, upon her slender hand?

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Dear," spoke a voice heavy with music and tenderness, like the bass of Lloyd Quantrell singing, “you have found your weddingring."

Hannah Ritner was standing by the bed, as well as Abel Quantrell, both looking at her with interest gracious and mutual.

Katy looked again at the dear-bought ring, and saw that Hannah had nothing like it upon her hand.

"Won't you give her one?" Katy whispered to Abel Quantrell. "It is so comforting! It makes me feel that Lloyd is mine."

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Hannah," said Abel Quantrell, "we always were in love: cube it! Love, multiplied by offspring, and once again by opportunity, make the three times the base. Take the child's ring, and I will put it on your hand and call you 'wife.'"

'No, master. The sacrifice shall be complete: your younger son by this marriage would suffer in his careful sense of honor. Our son has become nature's own, and does not need that we should wear a ring."

"Sho! this child is not married.-Are you, Kate?"

Katy flushed even in her weakness, but, remembering the promise of secrecy made to her lover, she took the ring from her hand and gave it to Hannah Ritner.

I come a good ways to git it, teacher," she said, "but maype it pelongs to you. Oh, I feel so happy. What is it?"

"This," said Hannah Ritner, holding up a little sleeping babe which she drew from Katy's bed. "Here is Saint Christmas, born in the dairy of them who never marry.—Take the child, master, and look at it awhile--your second grandchild—while I ride for the doctor!"

As the old man looked at himself in the third generation, and

Katy wondered what it all could mean, they heard the single-footed racker go out the lane :

“Tick-a-tock-a, tick-a-tock-a, tick-a-tock-a!”

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

PURITAN, JESUIT, AND GERMAN.

SNOW HILL was a remnant; once a wilderness cloister, or society, which had possessed bright-eyed converts and intellectual piety; but with beauty and youth intellect had also died here, and the old printing - apparatus and printed books, the natural music and mechanical craft, traces of which still continued, only emphasized the dullness and strained devotions of a fragment, which had property enough to make internal contentions, and where Job Snowberger had till now been the beau and baby.

Katy's baby was the first convert Snow Hill had made in many a year, and Job's "nose was out of joint," as the saying goes.

He came half-way in the door to see the baby, got a glimpse of its palpitating head, and went off into the mill to cry and to blush. Had Job been the sole witness of baby's advent into this world, he must needs have left Katy at the road-side and run away. The old belles of the nunnery looked into the mill and made faces at him, saying, Dummkup," or dunce, and executing little waltzes and jigs quite novel to the holy life.

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Some of these silly virgins peeped through the crack of Katy's door, to see the young mother and babe on Christmas-day, and one walked in, looked at the bed a moment, and said “Kint!” meaning "brat," and turned up her nose and seemed to blow disgust through her nostrils with her eyes; but all that afternoon this woman scoured the tins in the dairy till they were bright enough to look into, and show her reflected, unexpressive face, the wick of whose experience had never been trimmed and lighted, so that, in the darkness from it, the bridegroom had gone past.

And that night, when all were gone to bed, this queer, roundfaced, sour-looking woman of forty or fifty years, crawled up the stairs and into Katy's room, and reached beneath the quilts to where the baby lay, and, taking it tenderly forth, put it against her breast,

and saying, "Bubbelly, bubbelly, labe goot," or "baby, by-by," burst into tears.

Katy looked up in wonder, and reached for her child. The woman. turned from her in a kind of quarrelsome pout, sniffed again, and stole away.

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Hannah," said Katy, after she had rested some days and grown strong, "why is love so natural and tangerous?"

"My child, there came into this world a stranger to its nature called Pride, and began to whisper to people till they elected two evil spirits to watch them, called Scandal and Appearances. Since then, no baby has been like the young of other animal life around it, where song and gamboling, innocent delight and no evil-thinking, make nature unceasing Christmas, and every opening bud, or egg, or infant eyelid, a redeeming spirit. Man only, looks beyond life both ways, before and hereafter, for the portion all things, besides, find in living. How came you into the world? Where will you go after the world?' These are the questions which man asks alone. The rest of nature sings and loves, and holds to the life that is."

"No, Mootter Hannah; else why is baby-life?"

"Life aspires to life. Death itself, left alone, rejoices in the seed that is dropped into its decay, that it may sprout and bloom. To Nature, the triumphs of intellect and society are nothing, my child. What are all the vanished empires, the social systems, theology, science, literature, and conquest, to the subtle mechanism of your little babe, which eats and sleeps and dreams, which blesses you and drives down the dark stream of time the mirror and spirit of ourselves? The toil of Shakespeare's head is to Nature lost, but a babe, even of Hagar, the desert animals will protect. Seed is the only end of Nature, and the earth is still its garden. God said to Pride, 'I will put enmity between thy seed and woman's seed.'”

"O teacher, how can I tell people that this is my baby and I haf no wedding-ring? Must I pe wicked?"

"To Pride you may be, my child, but not to Nature. Our sins were forgiven by the blessed and unfathered Master, in the great court of the Pharisees, when he wrote upon the ground with his finger in the dust and said, 'Go; sin no more.'"

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'Our sins. Have you sinned, too, fortune-teller?

Hannah Ritner looked up and saw Katy's dark eyes shine upon her pale, white face.

"I have had a lover and a son," said the seer.

"Was Lloyd's father your lover?"

"Yes."

As the dark woman faintly blushed, Katy leaned over and kissed her and said:

"Then, Hannah, you're my mother."

"I can be your step-mother, my dear child, and I have tried to be. From the day Lloyd brought you to my cabin I have taken a mother's care of you both. But my son is older than Lloyd; Lloyd's mother wore the wedding-ring, and this babe has society's protection, while mine-"

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Why," cried Katy, "Senator Pittson must pe your son?”

My son," spoke Hannah Ritner, proudly, "has the protection of the angel which said, 'Thy son will be a wild man, and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.'* He is in the councils of his country; Nature has never marked him with his Egyptian mother's shame, but in the bright blood of the passover, and he does not fear!"

Katy listened with astonishment at the secrets of a society she had esteemed far above her.

"I told you, my child, that you should find your ring by the book. Let me open a page of the beautiful book of human nature that is printed in the rose-leaves of my heart! I was a child like you, a woman when scarce in my teens, and inspiring love in the master at whose feet I was his pupil. He was strong and weak as Samson of old. I pulled his justice and resistance down, but never sheared his strength away. I sent him on his course, and let him marry and increase, lest the humble life he would lead with me might rob his country of his services."

"Would he marry you, Mootter Hannah ?"

"I would not let him make the sacrifice. I was poor, of influential connections, but romantic and independent like my grandchild, Light. When Abel Quantrell loved me, as I knew, by the intuition which makes me read people's fortunes, I saw his solitude and hunger of heart for my sympathy and companionship, and I knew his poor mother and her large brood were living on his pittance in their distant and rocky New England State. While our Pennsylvania lawyers persecuted him as a stranger, I felt the daring compass of his mind, and saw his infirmities—lame, penniless, ten* Genesis xvi, 12.