wild as ever, and he has Dolf with him."

"How many hands has he with him?"

"Four or five."

"Dr. Lyman asked about you," said George, "and wondered where you were. He said you would be back in three weeks, and that something must have happened."

"It would be lucky for the Doctor's patients," replied Bart, "if something should keep him away three days."

"I guess he wants you to go a-fishing with him. They had a great time down there the other day—he, and Mr. Young, and Sol Johnson. They undertook to put up a sail as Henry and you do, and it didn't work, and they came near upsetting; and' Sol and old man Young were scart, and old Young thought he would get drownded. Oh, it must have been fun!"

And so the boys chippered, chirped, and laughed on to a late bed-time, and then went to bed perfectly happy.

Then came inquiries about Henry, who had written not long before, and had wondered why he had not heard from Barton; and, at last, wearied and worn with his three hundred miles' walk, Bart bade his mother good-night, and went to his old room, to rest and sleep as the young, and healthful, and hopeful, without deep sorrows or the stings of conscience, may do. In the strange freaks of a half-sleeping fancy, in his dreams, he remembered to have heard the screech of a wild animal, and to have seen the face of Julia Markham, pale with the mingled expression of courage and fear.

CHAPTER II.

THE BLUE CHAMBER.

In the morning he found the front yard had a wild and tangled, and the garden a neglected look, and busied himself, with the boys, in improving their appearance.

In the afternoon he overhauled a small desk, the contents of which soon lay about on the floor. There were papers of all colors and sizes—scraps, single sheets, and collections of several pages—all covered with verses in many hands, from that of the young boy to elegant clerkly manuscript. They seemed to represent every style of poetic composition. It would have been amusing to watch the manner and expression with which the youth dealt with these children of his fancy, and to listen to his exclamations of condensed criticism. He evidently found little to commend. As he opened or unrolled one after another, and caught the heading, or a line of the text, he dashed it to the floor, with a single word of contempt, disgust, or derision. "Faugh!" "Oh!" "Pshaw!" "Blank verse? Blank enough!" Some he lingered over for a moment, but his brow never cleared or relented, and each and all were condemned with equal justice and impartiality. When the last was thrown down, and he was certain that none remained, he rose and contemplated their crumpled and creased forms with calm disdain.

"Oh, dear! you thought, some of you, that you might possibly be poetry, you miserable weaklings and beguilers! You are not even verses—are hardly rhymes. You are, one and all, without sense or sound." His brow grew severe in its condemnation. "There! take that! and that! and that!"—stamping them with his foot; "poor broken-backed, halting, limping, club-footed, no-going, unbodied, unsouled, nameless things. How do you like it? What business had you to be? You had no right to be born—never were born; had no capacity for birth; you don't even amount to failures! Words are wasted on you: let me see if you'll burn." Lighting one, he threw it upon the hearth. "It does! I am surprised at that. I rather like it. How blue and faint the flame is—it hardly produces smoke, and"—watching until it was consumed—"no ashes. Too ethereal for smoke and ashes. Let me try the rest;" and he did.

He then opened a small drawer and took out a portfolio, in which were various bits of bristol-board and paper, covered with crayon and pen sketches, and some things in water-colors—all giving evidence of a ready hand which showed some untaught practice. Whether his sense of justice was somewhat appeased, or because he regarded them with more favor, or reserved them for another occasion, was, perhaps, uncertain. Singularly enough, on each of them, no matter what was the subject, appeared one or more young girl's heads—some full-faced, some three-fourths, and more in profile—all spirited, all looking alike, and each having a strong resemblance to Julia Markham. Two or three were studied and deliberate attempts. He contemplated these long and earnestly, and laid them away with a sigh. They undoubtedly saved the collection.

That night he wrote to Henry:

"DEAR BROTHER,—I am back, of course. It is an unpleasant way of mine—this coming back. It was visionary for me to try a fall with the sciences at Hudson. You would have been too many for them; I ran away. I found Colton sick at Cincinnati. The Texan Rangers had left. I looked into the waters of the Ohio, running and hurrying away returnlessly to the south-west. Lord, how they called to me in their liquid offers to carry me away! They seemed to draw me to linger, and gurgle, and murmur in little staying, coaxing eddies at my feet, to persuade me to go.

"How near one seems to that far-off region of fever and swamp, of sun and sea, of adventure and blood, and old buccaneering, standing by those swift waters, already on their way thither! Should I go? Was I not too good to go, and be lost? Think of the high moral considerations involved? No matter, I didn't go—I came! Well!

"On reflection—and I thus assume that I do reflect—I think men don't find opportunities, or, if they do, they don't know them. One must make an opportunity for himself, and then he will know what to do with it. The other day I stood on the other side of the Chagrin waiting for an opportunity, and it didn't come, and I made one. I waded through, and liked it, and that was not the only lesson I learned at the same time. But that other was for my personal improvement. A man can as well find the material for his opportunity in one place as another. See how I excuse myself!

"Just now, I am a reformed young Blue Beard. Fatima and her sister may go—have gone. I have just overhauled my 'Blue Chamber,' taken down all my suspended wives, and burned them. They ended in smoke. Lord! there wasn't flesh and blood enough in them all to decompose, and they gave out no odor even while burning. I burned them all, cleaned off all the blood-spots, ventilated the room, opened the windows, and will turn it to a workshop. No more sighing for the unattainable, no more grasping at the intangible, no more clutching at the impalpable. I am no poet, and we don't want poetry. Our civilization isn't old enough. Poets, like other maggots, will be produced when fermentation comes. I am going about the humdrum and the useful. I am about as low in the public estimation as I can well go; at any rate I am down on hard land, which will be a good starting-point. Now don't go off and become sanguine over me, nor trouble yourself much about me.

"'The world will find me after many a day,' as Southey says of one of his books. I doubt if it ever did. The Doctor contends that Southey was a poet; but then he thinks I am, also!

"What a deuce of a clamor is made about this new comet or planet! What a useful thing to us poor, mud-stranded mortals to find out that there is another little fragment of a world, away some hundreds of millions of miles, outside of no particular where—for I believe this astronomical detective is only on its track! The Doctor is in ecstacies over it, takes it as a special personal favor, and declaims luminously and constellationally about writing one's name among the stars, like that frisky cow who, in jumping over the moon, upon a time, made the milky way. I've always had some doubts about that exploit; but then there is the mark she left. Your friend Roberts