upon the wall; the mignonette is in the window. You feel the hand of Madge trembling upon your arm; she is struggling with her weakness.

A tidy waiting-woman shows you into the old parlor. There is a harp; and there, too, such books as we loved to read.

Madge is overcome; now she entreats: "Let us go away, Clarence." And she hides her face.

"Never, dear Madge! never! It is yours - all yours!"

She looks up in your face; she sees your look of triumph; she catches sight of Frank bursting in at the old hall door, all radiant with joy.

"Frank! Clarence!" The tears forbid any more.

"God bless you, Madge! God bless you!"

And thus, in peace and in joy, MANHOOD passes on into the third season of our life, even as golden AUTUMN sinks slowly into the tomb of WINTER.

66

SILAS WEIR MITCHELL.

MITCHELL, SILAS WEIR, an American physician, novelist, and writer on medical subjects; born in Philadelphia, February 15, 1829. He was graduated at Jefferson Medical College in 1850. He first gained distinction by his investigations of the venom of serpents. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and numerous other scientific institutions. He has published several valuable professional works, among them "Wear and Tear," Rest in the Treatment of Nervous Disease," and "Doctor and Patient," the last of which appeared in 1888. A volume containing three stories, "Hephzibah Guinness," "Thee and You," and "A Draft on the Bank of Spain," was published in 1880. Dr. Mitchell has since put forth three novels, "In War Time" (1884); "Roland Blake" (1886), and "Far in the Forest" (1889); a volume of fairy-tales, entitled "Prince Little Boy" (1887), and the volumes of poems, "The Hill of Stones" (1882), "The Masque, and Other Poems" (1888), and "The Cup of Youth, and Other Poems" (1889). His most recent works include "A Psalm of Deaths, and Other Poems" (1890); "Francis Drake, a Tragedy of the Sea" (1892); "The Mother, and Other Poems" (1892); "Characteristics" (1893); "When all the Woods are Green" (1894); "Philip Vernon' (1895); "Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker" (1897); and "The Adventures of François" (1898).

THE DUEL.1

(From "Thee and You.")

ONE morning Schmidt proposed to me that we should walk up the Schuylkill to the Falls; and as I was always glad of his company, we set out after our one-o'clock dinner. Where we walked by ponds and green fields and gardens the great city has come and left no spot unfilled; but now, as then, above Fairmount the river rolled broad between grassy hills and bold rocky points. We hailed a boatman just below Callowhill Street, and being set on the far side went away northward along the

1 Copyright, 1880, by the J. B. Lippincott Co. Used by permission.

river-marge. It was lovely then it is so to-day. We walked on, leaving above us on the bank the sloping lawns of Solitude, Sweetbrier's, Eaglesfield, and at last Belmont, and, now by the water-side and now under the overhanging catalpas of the "River Road," came at last to the "Falls." In those days a vast rock extended two-thirds of the way across from the west side, and so dammed up the waters that they broke in foam through the narrow gap on the east, and fell noisily about six feet in a hundred and fifty yards. The rock, I recall well, was full of potholes, and there was one known from its shape as Devil Foot. Of all this there is to-day nothing left, the dam at Fairmount having hidden it under water, but in those times the view from the rock took in a lovely sweep of river down to Peter's Island and far beyond it.

That was a day to remember, and it brought out all that was most curious and quaint and sincere in my German friend. It was mid-October, and a haze which was gray or gold as shade or sun prevailed lay moveless everywhere.

Said Schmidt to me, basking on the rock, "Have you learned yet to look with curiousness at this pretty Nature which for us dresses with nice changes all the days?"

His speech often puzzled me, and I said as much this time. "It is my bad English which I have when I try not to talk my Spenser or my Shakespeare, to which I went to school. It was not a mystery I meant. I would but this say, that it is gainful of what is most sweet in living to have got that wise nearness of love to Nature. Well! and I am not yet understood? So let it be. When a music which pleases you is heard, is it that it fills up full your throat some way and overflows your eyes?"

I was ever sensitive to harmony, and could follow him now. I said, "Yes, there are songs which are most sweet to me,which so move me that I scarce hear them willingly."

"Thus," he said, "I am stirred by the great orchestra of color which is here, but music I know not. How strange is that! And if," he said, "you were to shut your eyes, what is it in this loveliness would stay with you?"

"Oh, but," said I, "no one thing makes it lovely. It is not only color, but sounds, like this rush of water at our feet."

"It is as you say," replied Schmidt. "And what a sweettempered day, with a gray haziness and a not unkindly coolness to the air where the sun is not!"

"A day like Priscilla," I said, demurely.

"Yes," he replied, "that was well said,-like Priscilla. How lovely sad that is," he went on, "to see the leaves shiver in the wind and rain all reds and golds through the air! And do you see this picture behind us, where is that great green fir, and around it to the top, like a flame, the scarlet of your Virginia creeper? And below these firs on the ground is a carpet, a carpet all colors near, and gray pinks to us far away; and under the maples what you call,- ach! the wild words which fail me,-fine broken-up gold and red bits. It is what you call stippled, I mean."

"And the curled leaves afloat," I said, "how pretty they are." "And the brown sedges," he added, "and the crumpled brown ferns, and over them the great splendid masses of color, which do laugh at a painter!"

Then we were silent a while, and the blue smoke went up in spirals from Schmidt's meerschaum. At last he said, in his odd, abrupt way," To talk helps to think. This is a strange coil we have about our good Priscilla. I have been going it over in my own mind."

"I understand it so little," said I, "that I am unable to help you. Can you tell me more of it than I know already?"

"And why not?" said Schmidt, frankly. "This is it —" "But stop!" said I. "If it involves other folks' secrets, I do not want to know it."

"That is my business," returned Schmidt, deliberately filling his pipe. "What I do I settle with my own conscience if I have any; which I know not clearly. How amazing some day to be called to an account for it, and then to put hands in the moral pockets and say, 'Where is it?' Let me talk my dark thoughts out to daylight."

"Well, then," I said, laughing, "go on."

"And first of Oldmixon. There is, I have come to know, a black history of this man in the war. Our good Wholesome was in the way to help him with money, so much that to pay he could not. Then is there a not nice story of a shipwreck, and boats too full, and women which he would throw overboard or not take in from a sinking ship, and sharp words and a quarrel with Wholesome, and these followed by a stab in the darkness, and a good man over in a raging sea and no more seen of men.” "Good Heavens!" said I: "do you mean he stabbed Wholesome?"

"It is so," he replied.

"And then?" said I.

But

"Next," he said, "is some foul horror of women shrieking lonely on a vessel's deck over which go the wailing seas. this Wholesome is by a miracle afloat for hours on a spar, and saved by a passing ship."

"But knowing all this," I said, "why does he not tell it and drive the wretch away?"

"Because," returned Schmidt, "there is another side, - of a little Quaker girl, the ward of Nicholas Oldmixon, who is on a time before this saved from great peril of fear more than of death by this man, John Oldmixon, and then such love between them as may be betwixt a fair woman and a foul man.”

"But," said I, "this does not seem enough to make our present tangle."

"Assuredly never," he went on. "But also the man takes to worse ways, and to the woman's girl-love comes later her belief that here is a soul to save. And, come what will, she, when he has fled away, writes letters in which she makes foolish promise to marry him when he comes back."

"But will she keep such an absurd promise?" I said. "Is she a woman?" he answered.

"There is a creature mingled of angel and fool which will do this thing, and let no man stop her."

"But," I added, "you have not told me why Wholesome. does not go to the recorder and tell his story, and have the Scoundrel arrested."

"Ah, true!" he said. "A day more and the thing would have been; but the beast, well warned by our foolish Quaker war-man, goes swiftly to Priscilla and is penitent over again, and will she save him?"

"And then?" said I.

"This Quaker woman turns my man Wholesome her finger around, and says, 'God has set me the task to marry this man, John Oldmixon, and save his soul alive,' - whatever that may mean, and so she has Wholesome's good promise that he will leave the wretch to her and his conscience forever."

"And so it ends," said I, "and Priscilla is a dead woman. If I were Wholesome, I would save her despite herself, even if she never married me."

"But you are not Richard Wholesome,” he returned. “There is half of him Quaker and half a brave gentleman, and all of him the bond-slave of a woman's foolish will."