a way they have not known, to the mountain top of perfect peace! All honour to those who, shrinking not from the dark and rugged path, have left

in it their footprints to guide us who tread it now with feebler steps!

CHAPTER IV.

THERE was great silence in the cottage at Mossingay. It had been there ever since the news came. Sally, awkward, blundering, lefthanded, common-place Sally, seemed to feel that there was something very imposing in having had a death in the family; and having a dim, musty sort of notion that utter stillness was the highest possible tribute of respect she could pay to the memory of her master, she acted accordingly. She took off her pegged shoes, put them behind the copper in the back kitchen, and went about the house in her stocking feet. She shook her thick drugget apron menacingly in the cat's face if it ventured to mew, and uttered a long drawn whish-sh through her pursed-up lips if she happened to let the brush

handle fall, or rattle the fire-irons. And when by chance an itinerant Euterpian devotee came round with a barrel organ, and took his stand in the back yard, Sally flew out at the door and whisked the mop in his face with an aspect of such determinate indignation that it arrested the performance at once, and sent the musician off the premises à l'allegro.

As for Martha Brant, as soon as she was satisfactorily convinced that her dear master was "took," she resigned herself to a subdued quietness, and sat by the kitchen fire in her best black gown and clean white cap, severely repelling Sally's whispered attempts at conversation. Sometimes, if in the utter stillness which reigned about the house a faint tapping sound was heard, or the old clock on the stairs gave a sudden creak, she would shut her eyes and repeat her Creed in quick, sharp undertone; and then throw her apron over her head, and refuse to give any answer to Sally's wide-open stare of mute astonishment.

And in the office, too, that room where Stephen Roden used to sit when the day's work was done,

and little Maud came stealing into his thoughts, -in the old-fashioned, neatly-furnished officeall was very quiet too. Once only, since that terrible night when the news came, had anyone entered there, and that was when Martha took her shoes off and made a reverent curtsey at the threshold, and then went in and drew the blinds down, leaving everything else just as it was. The little statuette of Burns upon the mantel-piece, over it the portrait of Stephen's mother, and above that again the painting of the Far West Forest in its black oak frame. And the ordnance maps were lying on the table, with the half finished plan of the Mossingay estate beside them, and the compasses and rules, and plotting scale, just as he had left them a week ago. More than a year's labour spent upon that plan, yet it was never to be finished. And there too, standing near the window, was his easel with a sketch begun upon it, which anyone who knew the place would have recognised as the path through Braeton plantation; his palette was lying by it, with the brush and rest-stick all ready for use when he might

find time to put more touches into it. And in the recess at the left hand side of the fireplace was the old carved wood cabinet with the deep drawer where he kept his choicest belongings; some of his mother's favourite books, one or two tiny little notes all that Maud had ever written to him-a watch-guard she had braided for him last winter, too sacrea ever to be worn; and that spray of young sycamore, very faded now and shrivelled, which he had gathered long ago on the Braeton road, and carefully laid away beside these. But what right has anyone to look into that drawer? Who cannot picture well enough what might be there? Who that has lived through well nigh forty years of life has not gathered for himself some such remembrance of bygone thoughts and joys; whereupon, could other eyes than his own ever rest, they might see there depicted more accurately than any books, words or pictures could ever represent it, the man's own history, the man's own mind. Happy that man, whoever he may be, and howsoever thought of by his fellows, whose secret treasure-house of