occupied nearly three days, lest he should return only to find Annie a raving maniac. With all his earnestness he warned her against the mousing visits of the evil-minded hag who was destroying her life, and he even threatened to expel her by violence; but he perceived that it would only add fuel to the flame of jealousy, and intensify Annie's suspicions. He abandoned his visits to the Mission, except on the most urgent necessity.

The time arrived again for another of his regular journeys to Los Angeles, and, parting from Annie with un wonted tenderness, he set out with a promise to return speedily. During his absence the lying hag spent day and night with Annie, and poured into her ears, itching with that strange and infatuated eagerness of jealousy, all her envenomed hate against the absent husband.

Tom kept his promise, and returned promptly in two days, bringing his wife an elegant gold watch and a rocking-chair. But no Annie came forth to greet him. Seeking her in her room, with a smile and a hearty, "Well, my dear, how has the time gone?" he found her silent and delirious with jealousy. She turned her face away to the wall, and refused to speak.

Not only was Annie indeed sick, but she feigned to be dying. For days together she persistently refused all nourishment at his hands, but kept some concealed, of which she secretly partook in his absence.

Does the reader, upon this announcement, cry out against the woman, and feel disposed to reproach me for having even described such a character? It is hard to look with allowance upon such a wickedness as this, and perhaps few of us would have done it, but we must be lenient in our judgment. We must pardon many an offense, heinous and despicable though it may seem, to the weakness and the madness of a jealous woman. She

stooped to this base act of wickedness to try if her cup of married love was wholly drained; and in that awful night when Tom sat beside her whom he thought dying, far from any habitation of man, with no one near but the mute and stricken savage, crouching in the corner and rigid with terror, with no sound borne on the midnight air but the dismal yelling of the coyotes, as they dashed themselves against the wattled corral, and were hurled back upon the ground, he spoke to her with such true and piteous tenderness of love, that her sick heart returned from its wanderings, and she told him all, with tears, and begged forgiveness.

After seven years of married life, Tom was still so little learned in the devious ways of woman's jealousy, that he could not look upon this misdeed with any allowance. He forgot the large and generous pity of that saying of Seneca, "Quem pœnitet peccasse pene est innocens." Forgive her! the act seemed to him so inexpressibly despicable that he turned away in silence and in loathing.

He took his rifle, and walked forth in the clear, crisp moonlight. After the first burst of passion had passed away, his soul was filled with that saddening and ineffable bitterness which longs for death, and the sweet and quiet rest of the grave, and he murmured: "Ah, Mary! my lost, lost Mary!"

Hardly knowing whither he went in his blinded and bitter despair, he approached his corral, and saw the coyotes dimly fleeing away across the champaign. Mechanically, he cocked the rifle, and put it to his shoulder. Then he brought it down, and placed the muzzle against his cheek. He touched the trigger, and in the very last moment he dashed it away, and, with a keen and hellish shriek, the bullet cut the still moonlight.

Next day he saddled his favorite horse, and, after a cold and careless farewell, he rode away. Week after week passed away, and there came no tidings of his rovings; month passed into month, and brought no report from the wanderer. What his wife endured from suspense can only be imagined,

"The hope, and the fear, and the sorrow,

All the aching of heart, the restless, unsatisfied longing,
All the dull, deep pain, and constant anguish of patience."

What was he doing? He penetrated the savage wilds of Arizona. He made long journeys across its trackless deserts, without any aim, and returned on his trail, without any purpose. Now he mined a little, and now he joined himself to a squadron in pursuit of Apaches, and, leaping in his stirrups with the old ringing yell of his youth, he sought death at the hand of the tawny savage. An arrow-wound, which brought him to the very mouth of the grave, brought him also to remorse, and to a yearning for his home. While he was yet convalescent, he set his face steadfastly homeward-an old man at thirty-two, with his cheeks seamed and bronzed, and his fine, black, curly poll half turned to gray. But he was still Tom, and his better nature had only slumbered.

The story ends well. Alas, alas! for both of them, it had not ended so years before. At last he is approaching his house. It is evening. He sees the familiar light of his "parlor" window shining under the old forked whiteoak. He spurs his jaded horse into an amble. Hark! There is borne to his ears, on the still evening air, a feeble and uncertain squeal. What! Is it possible? Is it a

He spurs his horse again, and the old fellow almost

jams his nose against the parlor door. Tom alights, and flings the rein over the horseshoe nailed to the oak. He knocks, and they open. He enters. Exclamations all around. He looks about him. They go to the bed, and gently turn down the counterpane. Upon my word, it

is a

Tom settles back on one foot, plants the other ahead, folds his arms across his breast, and, with a perfectly unmoved countenance, but with a light of infinite gladness in his eye, and of a reconciliation never again to be broken, he salutes : "Ah, he's a buster!"

25*

HISTORICAL.

A ROYAL ROAD TO HISTORY.

Well-were it not a pleasant thing

To fall asleep with all one's friends;
To pass with all our social ties

To silence from the paths of men;
And every hundred years to rise

And learn the world and sleep again;
To sleep through terms of mighty wars,
And wake on science grown to more,
On secrets of the brain, the stars,
As wild as aught of fairy lore;
And all that else the years will show,
The Poet-forms of stronger hours,
The vast Republics that may grow.

TENNYSON.

O the youthful student who aspires to "climb the steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar," no part of that steep looks more formidable than the mountains of History. It is not their ruggedness, but their sheer height. Let us be thankful that the clean beasts and the unclean and the fowls of the air were so numerous in Noah's Ark as to leave no room for whatever parchment records that wise patriarch may have preserved. When the conquering Caliph applied the torch to the vast magazine of papyrus scrolls in Alexandria, he said, "If there be anything good in them it is contained in the Koran, and whatever is bad in them ought to be destroyed." When any other than one of those inscrutable persons,