financiered a gullible old farmer out of several thousands of dollars in gold, which they had persuaded him it was necessary that he should put in a bag and bury in the ground at a certain hour of a certain night, in order to the speedy discovery of a large mine of diamonds that was certainly upon his farm, and would as surely be brought to light when the gold was exhumed after a certain time, which time was quite long enough for the band to dig up the gold and disperse in all directions, to meet again three thousand miles away. This bit of Cornhill swindling was considered rather sharp practice, even for that locality, and ended by shrouding the girl in an impenetrable mystery, and giving to the old chief a child, who, as she expanded and grew up became quite as dear to his heart as any one of his own offspring; and in fact, by reason of her superior intelligence, she became far more so, for mind ever makes itself felt and admired. Not one of the ethnological, physical, moral, or mental characteristics which mark the Romany tribes was to be noticed in this girl, and wise people concluded that she had somewhere been stolen by the woman, who from fear or policy had left her to her fate and the good old Indian’s care.

Esthetics is not my forte, hence I shall not attempt to describe the young girl. The name she bore was marked on her clothing in Greek letters, which were afterwards rendered into English by a professor of a college whose assistance had been asked by the Indian.

Besides being known far and near as the most beautiful girl of her age, she was also distinguished as by far the most intelligent. She was undisputed queen on the Reservation, not by right, but by quiet usurpation. She looked and acted the born Empress, and her triplicate sceptre consisted of kindness, intelligence, and that nameless dignity and presence inherent in truly noble souls.

Such was the bright-shining maiden, who, attracted by the boy’s cry and actions, now crossed over to the side of young Beverly. Observing his sorrowful appearance, she placed her soft hand tenderly upon his head, and said in tones heart-felt and deeply sympathetic, “Man of the heavy heart, why weep you here? Is your mother just dead?”

The young man raised his head, saw the radiant girl before him, and, after a moment’s hesitation, during which he shuddered as if at some painful memory, murmuring, “No; it cannot be possible!—cannot be—in this part of the world, too! no!” he replied to her, saying, “Girl, I am lonely, and that is why I weep. I am but a boy, yet the weight of years of grief rest on and bear me down. To-day is the anniversary of my mother’s death, and, when it comes, I always pass it in tears and prayer. Since she went home to heaven, I have had no true friend, and my lot and life are miserable indeed. Men call themselves my friends, and prove it by robbing me. Not long ago, there came a man to me—he was very rich—and said, ‘People tell me that you are very skillful with the sick. Come; I have a sister whom the physicians say must die. I love her. You are poor; I am rich. Save her; gold shall be yours.’ I went. She was beyond the reach of medicine, and it was possible to prolong her life only in one of two ways—either by the transfusion of blood from my veins to her own, or by the transfusion of life itself. I was young and strong, and we resolved to adopt the latter alternative, as being the only possibly effective one; and for months, during three years, I sat beside that poor sick girl, and freely let her wasted frame draw its very life by magnetically sapping my own. Finally, I began to sink with exhaustion and disease similar to her own, and, to save my life, was forced to break the magnetic cord, and go to Europe. As soon as it was severed she sunk into the grave, and then I returned, and received a considerable sum of money in the nature of a loan. This favor was granted me as a reward for my pains, time, and ruined health. I was to return it from the proceeds of a business to be immediately established. At that time I resolved to purchase a little home for those who depended on my efforts for the bread they ate, and so wrote to a man who called himself my friend, but who is the direct cause of most of the evil I have for ten years experienced. This fellow pretended to deal in lands. I put nine hundred dollars—half I had in the world—in this man’s hands, to purchase a fine little place of a few acres, which place he took me to see. I was pleased with it, and saw a home for those who would be left behind me when I was dead. A few days thereafter this ghoul came to me again, and represented that gold bullion being down he could make considerable profit for me in three days, would I make the investment. I handed over the remainder of my money. The three days lengthened into years. Instead of being a capitalist he was a bankrupt—was not in the gold business, and had no more control of the land he showed me than he had of Victoria’s crown. Meantime, my furniture was seized; I lost my name with the friend who advanced the sum; I became ill, and, in my agony, called this man a swindler. To silence me, he gave me a check on a bank. I presented it. ‘No funds!’ And yet he dared call himself an honest man. ‘You have but to unsay the harsh things said about me,’ said this semblance of a man to me one day, ‘and I am ready to pay you everything I owe.’ My mind was unsettled; I listened to him, and the result was that, by duplicity and fraud, more mean and despicable than the first, if there be a depth of villainy more profound, he obtained my signature to an acknowledgment that the money of which he had openly swindled me, then in his hands, was ‘a friendly loan.’ And then he laughed, ‘Ha! ha!’ and he laughed, ‘Ho! ho!’ at me and my misery, and actually suffered a child in our family to perish and wretchedly die for the want of food and medicine. But then he told me that he had buried it properly, respectably, up there in the cemetery, and it was the only truth I ever heard from his lips. But then he sent the funeral bills for me to pay—all the while laughing at my misery—while the lordly house he occupied was redeemed from forced sale with my money, and himself and his feasted luxuriously every day on what was the price of my heart’s blood! Still, they all laughed, ‘Ha! ha!’ and grew fat on my blood. I still have the memory of a dead child, up there in the cemetery. Poor starved child! It is no satisfaction to me to know that this man will die a disgraced pauper, dependent on charity for bread. Still less is it to realize, as I do, that the brothel and the gibbet, the gambling hell and massive prisons, are shadowed in the foreground of his line, and that it will utterly perish from off the earth in ignominy and horror. I would not have it so, but fate is fate; and I see, at least, one dangling form of his race swinging in the air! My prophetic eye beholds——”

As the man uttered these terrible sentences, he shuddered as if horror-stricken at the impending fate of this wronger of the living and the dead, and it was clear to the girl that he would have freely averted the doom, had such a thing been possible.

“Men and cliques,” said he, “have used me for their purposes—have, like this ghoul, wormed themselves into my confidence, and then, when their ends were served, have ever abandoned me to wretchedness and misery.

“Rosicrucians, and all other delvers in the mines of mystery, all dealers with the dead, all whose idiosyncracies are toward the ideal, the mystic and the sublime, are debtors to nature, and the price they pay for power is groans, tears, breaking hearts, and a misery that none but such doomed ones can either appreciate or understand. Compensation is an inexorable law of being, nor can there, by any possibility, be any evasion of it. The possession of genius is a certificate of perpetual suffering.

“You now know why I am sad, O girl of the good heart. I am weak to-night; to-morrow will bring