which suggested in him remote age, and this in the presence of Miss Wilmot! It was not all resentment against Paul, however, which filled his thought: this momentary conviction of age always brought with it a sense of a life spent without its proper dues.

It was at the top of the cliff that he met Alec Bevanne, who was having a brief run for exercise, and who stopped, panting, a vivid red coming and going in his cheeks.

"Are n't you feeling well?" asked the young man, halting as he saw the other's face.

"As well," answered Uncle Peter, out of the gloom, "as a victim of both God and man could be supposed to feel."

"Now, Mr. Warren, what have you got against God and man?" asked Alec Bevanne good-naturedly. He liked Uncle Peter, and always found any kindness shown him more than repaid in amuse

66

"Simply defrauded of my birthright, that is all, Mr. Bevanne! I was the elder son, and yet Paul's father, my younger brother John, got it all, except an annuity to me. When John died, I naturally expected some readjustment of affairs, but no! The same annuity comes, and Paul, it seems, steps into his father's whole estate. There has been fraud somewhere; now tell me, whose was the fraud?"

"Oh no! You take too dark a view of it. If I were comfortable I should not worry about might-have-beens, though I admit that it looks queer."

Uncle Peter shook his head and dragged his companion into a slower walk.

"There's a mystery somewhere," he said simply; "I've suspected it all my life. Little hints out of my childhood come back: for instance, I remember, when my brother John was born,- an occasion which naturally made a great impression upon me, going into the library and finding my father there with a tall man in black. They had some papers with them, and they stopped talking when I came in. I can remember as distinctly as if it were

"Great-great-grandfather Warren troubling you to-day?" he asked jocosely.

"He is always troubling me," said Uncle Peter. "In my soul of souls I feel him crouching, ready to spring."

"Well, what about your other trouble? Pour it all out, and you will feel better."

The words were comforting, and the wavering mind of Uncle Peter wavered assent.

"It is something I would not tell everybody, but you have a face to be trusted. I should confide in that face if I met it disembodied in the Desert of Sahara!" "All right! Go ahead!"

my head and said something about its being hard on somebody; I presume the experience through which I was passing made me extraordinarily sensitive to receive and to retain impressions.

"Is he bright?' the man said. My father shook his head. Until then I had thought that they were talking about me, and lately I have begun to suspect, in thinking it all over, that my first impression was right. The answer that that man made is still vivid in my mind, though it has puzzled me from that day to this: "Then you will have less difficulty in carrying out your plan.' Now, Mr. Bevanne, what do you think of all this?" The young man was whistling, and his

eyes were filled with amused wonder. Was this some of Uncle Peter's romancing, or had it really happened?

"I think," he answered, "that the whole thing is extraordinary, and some time I should like very much to hear more of it. But this is not a picnic mood. Down there I see Mrs. Warren and Miss Wilmot literally wasting their sweetness on the desert sand. Shall we join them ?" "Yes, by all means," assented Uncle Peter, with his wrinkled smile. "That's a charming girl! Now, if I were you!" "If you were I," said Alec Bevanne, in sudden dejection, "you would probably be as big a fool as I am; but you are not I, so congratulate yourself."

It was while this conversation was going on that Paul Warren had climbed the high white sand dune guarding the beach, and had come full upon the tidal river that flowed here between sand-bound banks, blue toward a bluer sea. Long reeds and grasses, washed by tide waters, grew at its edge, and drooping willows dipped their pale green fronds into its intense color. There were ripples on its surface, and the reeds and grasses swayed; it was a day of strong breeze, and mighty waves, and heroic moods. Idly following the motion of the water, Paul became suddenly aware that Alice Bevanne was leaning against the golden-brown bark of one of the willows not far away, and with the sight of her he suddenly remembered one of the shadows that lay for him across the sun. Unobtrusively he watched her, full of a wistful desire to atone to her, through some finer shade of courtesy, for having had a father like that. To him she was as perfect an enigma as he had ever found: aloof, silent when he was near, she often watched him with those wonderful eyes which seemed to make her face all vision, yet persistently avoided him, probably because she could not so soon forget the family hate. Now, leaning as with the sudden abandon of utter weariness against the tree, with her hands clasped about the bark, she was looking down into the river. Soft gleams of brown and of gold came

from its pebbled depths; green reflections from the feathery leaves above quivered there, where the blue of the sky was mirrored back in softer, tenderer blue. So intent was the gaze of the girl's eyes that Paul could almost have believed her to be holding communication with some water spirit of the stream. The whole slender figure wore a curious expression, like the look he had more than once seen in her eyes, as of one who asked nothing and expected nothing, not even to understand. She had the face of one whom no fate could find unprepared.

"I must beg your pardon for disturbing you," he said, going near her. She looked up at him, unsmiling.

"You do not disturb me," she answered.

Something in the deep light of her eyes, which had failed to change so quickly the expression they had worn in gazing into the water, arrested him, and he paused on the bank.

"Miss Bevanne," he said, and then stopped abruptly.

"Yes?" asked the girl.

"There is something that I have wanted for a long time to say to you, and it has been difficult, for we are both a little shy," he said, with a boldness which dumbfounded himself. She did not answer him, but waited.

"You know something of the old enmity between your family and mine."

She bent her head in assent, and the strange, pale gold of her hair seemed to make a light about her.

"I hope," he added hesitatingly, "that for you, as for me, it is over. I hope that you do not share the old feeling, or connect it with me?"

The ghost of a little smile flitted across Alice Bevanne's pale face.

"Why do you ask that?" she said quietly. "Do I act like an enemy?"

He was puzzled for a minute, and colored in embarrassment.

"No," he answered, and was silent. Then, as they looked at each other, the girl's eyes wore the look of one about to

smile, but she did not. It was he who smiled.

"I have sometimes been afraid that I annoyed you," he said frankly. "It has seemed to me that you avoid me, and I have been wondering what I could do to make myself not entirely obnoxious. To me it seems best to let old grudges die, and I should like to be friends."

She did not change color, and yet so transparent here was the veil of flesh, that her swift change of mood seemed to leave a physical record in her face. "I have not thought of you as an en

emy, Mr. Warren," she said, holding out her hand.

He took it gladly.

WHEN asked to write a paper relating to Village Improvement, I at once thought of a fragment of manuscript upon which I recently happened among the papers of my father, the late Frederick Law Olmsted, written perhaps fifteen or twenty years ago, but applying with more than passing appropriateness to the conditions of to-day.

"Fifty years ago," wrote my father, "I had a long day's walk with two other boys. As the sun passed behind the hills the road widened before us, the footpaths strayed out from the wheelway, stone walls and pasture lands gave place to picket fences, front dooryards, and houses. Gradually the opening way took the character of a narrow common in which there were great trees standing not at regular distances, not in lines quite straight. In the midst ran a narrow and rather dusty track for wheels, from which now and then branched loops and crossways. Near the fences the turf had been trodden out in broad footpaths from which others prim and straight led squarely off

to the house doors. The houses were some of one story, none of more than two. They were neither steep nor flat-roofed. They were without verandas, porches, umbras, awnings, hoods, or other outworks. Their gables had no overhang or emphasis, no verge boards, brackets, scroll work, or finials. Neither their windows nor the panes in them would be called large or small. Their glass was neither clear, stained,nor wrinkled. Their wooden walls were thin and weak and had been painted white. There were blinds to the windows painted green, but no sign of interior drapery. Yet with these common characteristics no two were quite alike; each had a certain air of unassertive individuality.

"There were two houses like unto the others in form, roof, windows, and paint, but larger and with belfries and spires showing them to be meeting-houses. An 'academy' and schoolhouses, an engine house and a hearse house, two or three small gambrel-roofed stores, were alike crude, simple, and uncouth. In the background there were barns and small outbuildings generally painted red, well

sweeps, martin-boxes on masts, orchards, and glimpses of green fields and distant low mountains. Barefoot boys were driving cows through the streets loiteringly, and most of the grass had been cropped short by these wayfarers.

"There was a graveyard in which an old horse was seeking out such forage as could be found among the abundant asters and goldenrods, burdocks and mulleins, and boys and girls were looking for blackberries in the thickets obscuring the enclosing walls.

"We came to the house where we had been invited to 'pass the Sabbath.' Its occupants were three old maids, -two of them accounted rich. The third, their 'help,' sat with us at the table, and at our repast between meetings the next day made sharp comments on the sermon, starting a little discussion when one of the ladies read the 'actual words of God' in the original Greek; for these ladies were scholars, corresponded with scholars beyond the sea, and had fitted several poor young men for college, aiding them also in their after studies for the ministry.

"When we first came to their home, one was painting the kitchen floor, the other was carrying a basket and trowel, and snipping with garden scissors the straggling shoots of the bushes in the front dooryard. There was no man or boy about the house, yet at night the front door was left unlocked. There were nicely trimmed box borders, and rows of beautiful flowers, as well as tall bushes between the door and the street, and in a similar plat in the rear many more, mingling with current and raspberry bushes, fennel and asparagus.

"No rural cemetery, no village improvement association, no branch of the Art Decorative, no reading club for the art periodicals, no park or parklet, no soldiers' monument, no fountains, no florist's establishment, not a single glass house, no bedding plants, no ribbon gardening, no vases, no lawn mowers, no rustic work, nothing from Japan, in all the long street.

"Since then, I judge, all these things have come; the village is connected with the metropolis by railroad, it is enriched by summer visitors, a large hotel has been built, several retiring men have built very unretiring villas on the street, several of the old houses have been 'fixed up,' many fences have been taken down, tar walks have been laid, and correspondents of the press fill columns with reports of improvements:

"And yet no village abounding in the beauty that has come to us with these is as beautiful to me as was this of which I have described the more prominent objects. None has the attraction for an artist. None so engages the admiration of thoughtful travelers.

"The reason is no doubt a little complicated, but more than in anything else it lies in the fact that there was one consistent expression of character, and that character simple, unsophisticated, respectable.

"I confess that while I am pleased with all these things that have come in of late, and praise the work of architects and gardeners, engineers, and sanitary engineers, decorators, and æsthetes, I do not think that the villages which have gained most from them, or from the admirable labors of beauty-organizing women, are likely to impress visitors of the best intuition and the highest culture as pleasingly, gratefully, and hopingly as those of the general character and aspect I have endeavored to recall.

"There were then hundreds of villages of this general description, every one of which would now excite great admiration from men of good taste. They have now, at some points, taken on town airs, killing what remains of their former character; at other points, they have become neglected and slatternly. Lastly, the pursuit of beauty through decoration has set back any character they had, either as a local distinction, or as a class, which if found in Norway or Java would have been known as the beauty of an American village. The beauty, on the other hand, that

they have acquired is largely a common, extrinsic beauty, which might as well have been produced anywhere else. Much of it even would have been attainable, and may even be found in greater degree and measure on the outskirts of large commercial towns, and in European or Australian towns, as well as in New England or Maryland.

"What was the ancient beauty of an American village, with its bare, bleak, cheap, utilitarian structures, its cramped dooryards, its meagre and common ornaments, its fences and straightlacedness? The answer may be suggested by another question.

"Let a thing be supposed, of greater bulk than the largest of our fine Fifth Avenue private habitations, to have been made for a mere common purpose of trade by the work of many men, not one of them ranking among artists, not one of liberal education, men not at all delicate, not nicely fingered, not often even cleanhanded; muscular, sweaty, and hornyhanded; no small part of them rude and clumsy in their ways, tobacco-chewing, given to liquor, slang, and profane swearing. Suppose the thing so produced to have no beauty of carving or color, to be mainly smeared black and white, and any touch of decoration upon it to be more than barbarously childish and clumsy.

"It can hardly be easy for those who best represent what we have been more particularly gaining of late in æsthetic culture to believe that such work can have given the world a thing of supreme beauty. It will be still harder to realize that the coarse, rude, sensual men producing it had in general a deep artistic sense of its characteristic beauty, so that they would protest in stronger terms than Mr. Ruskin ever used, against the putting upon it of anything by which the rare refinement of it might be marred.

Hopkins', lead ever to one thing as beautifully adapted to its special purpose?

"I have seen a high-bred lady and a dull, low, degraded, and sodden seafaring laborer animated at the same instant by the same impulse of admiration, each exclaiming,' The beauty! the beauty!' at the sight of a sailing ship. What is this admirableness, dependent on no single thing done for admiration, no decoration, no ornament, no color of splendor, of a sailing ship?

"Whatever else it may be in the last analysis, it cannot be separated from this fact, that a fine clipper ship, such as we had in America just come to build and rightly sail, when the age of such things passed away, was as ideally perfect for its essential purpose as a Phidian statue for the essential purpose of its sculptor. And it so happened that in much greater degree than it can happen in a steamship, or in the grandest architecture, the ideal means to this purpose were of exceeding grace, not of color, but of form and outline, light and shade, and of the play of light in shadow and of shadow in light. Because of this coincidence it was possible to express the purpose of the ship and the relation and contribution to that purpose of every part and article of her, from cleaving stem to fluttering pennant, with exquisite refinement. These qualities, with the natural stateliness of the ship's motion, set off by the tuneful accompaniment of the dancing waves, made the sailing ship in its last form the most admirably beautiful thing in the world, not a work of nature nor a work of fine art.

"If any reader doubts the fascination of this seafaring beauty, the grandeur of it, the refinement, the spur it gives to the imagination, let him read the stories of Clark Russell. But no writer, poet, or painter can ever have told in what degree it lay in a thousand matters of choice choice made in view of ideal refinements of detail, in adaptation to particular services, studied as thoughtfully and as feelingly as ever a modification of tints on painter's palette. One needed but a little