at him, and said aloud, "Call us as soon as you have fitted the shoe"; and then added, in an aside, "Be an hour or so about it." The new acquaintances strolled together to a beautiful pond within sight among the hills.

O that exquisite June morning, with its fresh foliage, its clear sky, its pine odors, its wild-flowers, and its songs of birds! How imperishable in the memories of both it became! How much happier were they ever afterwards for the happiness of that swift-gliding moment!

Leonora spied some harebells in the crevices of the slaty rocks of a steep declivity, and pointed them out as the first of the season.

"I must get them for you," cried Berwick.

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No, no! It is a dangerous place," said Leonora.

"They shall be your harebells," said Berwick, swinging himself, by the aid of a birch-tree that grew almost horizontally out of the cleft of a rock, over the precipice, and snatching the flowers. Leonora treasured them for years, pressed between the leaves of Shelley's Poems.

Thus began a courtship which, three weeks afterwards, was followed by an offer of marriage. Early in the acquaintance, foreseeing the drift of Berwick's eager attentions, Leonora had frankly communicated by letter her suspicions in regard to her own birth.

In his reply Berwick had written: "I almost wish it may be as you imagine, in order that I may the better prove to you the strength of my attachment; for I do not underrate the desirableness of an honorable genealogy. No one can prize more than I an unspotted lineage. But I would not marry the woman who I did not think could in herself compensate me for the absence of all advantages of family position and wealth; and whose society could not more than make up for the loss of all social attractions that could be offered outside of the home her presence would sanctify. You are the one my heart points to as able to do all this; and so, Leonora, whether it be the bar sinister or the ducal coronet that ought to be in your coat of arms, it matters not to me. No herald's pen can make you Under any cloud that could be thrown over your origin, to me you would always be, as Portia was to Brutus, a fair and honorable wife ;

less charming in my eyes.

'As dear to me as are the ruddy drops

That visit this sad heart.'

And yet not sad, if you were mine! So do not think that any future development in regard to the antecedents of yourself or of your parents can detract from an affection based on those qualities which are of the soul and heart, and the worth of which no mortal disaster can impair."

To all which the imprudent young lady returned this answer: "Do not think to outdo me in generosity. You judge me independently of all social considerations and advantages; I will do the same by you; for I know as little of you as you do of me."

They met the next morning, and Berwick said: "Is not this a very dangerous precedent we are setting for romantic young people? What if I should turn out to be a swindler or a bigamist?

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"My heart would have prescience of it much sooner than my head," replied Leonora. "Women are not so often misled into uncongenial alliances by their affections as by their passions or their calculations. The lamb, before he has ever known a wolf, is instinctively aware of an enemy's presence, even while the wolf is yet unseen. If the lamb stopped to reason with himself, he would be very apt to say, 'Nonsense! it is no doubt a very.respectable beast who is approaching. Why should I imagine he wants to harm me ?"

"But what if I am a wolf disguised as a lamb?" asked Berwick.

"I am so good a judge of tune," replied Leonora, “that I should detect the sham the moment you tried to cry baa. Nay, a repugnant nature makes itself felt to me by its very presence. There are some persons the very touch of whose hand produces an impression, I generally find to be true, of their character."

sarcasm.

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"An ingenious plea!" said Berwick with an affectation of "But it does not palliate your indiscretion.' Very well, sir," replied Leonora, "since you disapprove my precipitancy, we will”

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Berwick interrupted the speech at the very portal of her mouth, by surprising its warders, the lips.

And so it was a betrothal.

How admirably had Mrs. Ridgway behaved through it all! How scrupulous she had been in withholding all intimations of Leonora's prospective wealth ! There were young men among the Ridgways, handsome, accomplished, just entering the hard paths of commercial or professional toil. How easy it would have been to have hinted to some of them, "Secure this young lady, and your fortune is made. Let a hint suffice." But Mrs. Ridgway was too loyal to her trust to even blindly convey by her demeanor towards Leonora a suspicion that the child was aught more than the dowerless orphan she appeared.

Berwick took a small house in Brooklyn, and prepared for his marriage. Clients were as yet few and poor, but he did not shrink from living on twelve hundred a year with the woman he loved. He was not quite sure that his betrothed was even rich enough to refurnish her own wardrobe. So he delicately broached the question to Mrs. Ridgway. That lady mischievously told him that if he could let Leonora have fifty dollars, it might be convenient. The next day Berwick sent a check for ten times that amount.

But after the wedding, an elderly gentleman, named Keep, to whom Berwick had been introduced a few days before, took him and the bride aside, and delivered to him a schedule of the title-deeds of an estate worth a million, the bequest of the bride's father, and the income of which was to be subject to her order.

"But this deranges all our little plans!" exclaimed the bride, with delightful naïveté.

"Well, my children, you must put up with it as well as you can," said Mr. Keep.

Berwick took the surprise gravely and thoughtfully. With this great enlargement of his means and opportunities, were not his responsibilities proportionably increased?

CHAPTER VIII.

A DESCENDANT OF THE CAVALIERS.

"Pride of race, pride in an ancestry of gentlemen, pride in all those habitudes and instincts which separated us so immeasurably from the peddling and swindling Yankee nation, all this pride has been openly cherished and avowed in all simplicity and good faith." Richmond (Va.) Enquirer.

PEE

EEK sat in the little closet which opened into Charlton's office. Suddenly he heard the crack of a pistol, followed by a volley of ferocious oaths. Efforts seemed to be made to pacify the utterer, who was with difficulty withheld by his companions from following the person who had offended him. At these sounds Peek felt a cold, creeping sensation down his back, and a tightness in his throat, as if it were grasped by a hand. The pistol-shot and the nature of the oaths brought before him the figure of the overseer with his broad-brimmed hat, his whip, and his revolver.

All the negro's senses were now concentrated in the one faculty of hearing. He judged that five persons had entered the room. The angry man had cooled down, and the voices were not raised above a whisper.

"Is he here?" asked one.

No answer was heard in reply. Probably a gesture had sufficed.

"Will he resist?"

"Possibly. These fugitives usually go armed."

"What shall we do if he threatens to fire?"

Here an altercation ensued, during which Peek could understand little of what was uttered. But he had heard enough. His thoughts first reverted to his wife and his infant boy, and he pictured to himself their destitute condition in the event of his being taken away. Then the treachery of Charlton glared upon him in all its deformity, and he instinctively drew from the sheath in an inside pocket of his vest a sharp, glittering dagger-like knife. He looked rapidly around, but there was

nothing to suggest a mode of escape. The only window in the closet was one over the door communicating with the office.

Suddenly it occurred to him that, if he were to be hemmed in in this closet, his chances of escape would be small. It would be better for him to be in the larger room, whether he chose to adopt a defensive or an offensive policy. Seeing an old rope in a corner of the closet, he seized it with the avidity a drowning man might show in grasping at a straw.

He listened intently once more to the whisperers. A low susurration, accompanied with a whistling sound, he indentified at once as coming from Skinner, the captain of the schooner in which he had made his escape. Then some one sneezed. Peek would have recognized that sneeze in Abyssinia. It must have proceeded from Colonel Delancy Hyde.

Standing on tiptoe on a coal-box, the negro now looked through a hole in the green-paper curtain covering the glass over the door, and surveyed the whole party. He found he was right in his conjectures. The captain was there with one of his sailors, an old inebriate by the name of Biggs, both doubtless ready to swear to the slave's identity. And the Colonel was there as natural as when he appeared on the plantation, strolling round to take a look at the "smart niggers," so as to be able to recognize them in case of need. Two policemen, armed with bludgeons, and probably with revolvers; and Charlton, with a paper tied with red tape in his hand, formed the other half of this agreeable company. Peek marked well their positions, put his knife between his teeth, and descended from the box.

Colonel Delancy Hyde is a personage of too much importance to be kept waiting while we describe the movements of a slave. Colonel Delancy Hyde must be attended to first. Tall, lank, and gaunt in figure, round-shouldered and stooping, he carried his head very much after the fashion of a bloodhound on the scent. Beard and moustache of a reddish, sandy hue, coarse and wiry, concealed much of the lower part of a face which would have been pale but for the floridity which bad whiskey had imparted. The features were rather leonine than wolfish in outline (if we may believe Mr. Livingstone, the lion is a less respectable beast than the wolf). But the small