Leaving my horse at the outer gate, I walked along the wide avenue nearly to the house. There was a spectral stillness upon the place. Sadness exhaled from everything, to be drawn in with every breath. The old servants were all gone. I had met the once sleek and stolid Lucas, now rheumatic and ragged, begging in the village. Belinda was in the county asylum, and the others were scattered or dead. The scent of the lilacs was gone from the air--the very bushes were rooted up, and lay, sear and dead, by little heaps of earth. A triangle of cloud in the sky cast upon the earth a triangle of shadow, in the midst of which Robert Glen’s home lay as if it were entranced. No sign of happy life met me; but, as I turned aside to look at a certain bench in the shrubbery, a black-and-white snake ran over my foot. I went no further. A woman was seated upon the bench--a fair woman, with hair like dull copper reflecting sullen fire, with a face and form perfect as those of the goddesses of old, a face which betokened an indomitable soul which knew the secret of the power wielded by the gods. She was bending over her clasped hands, her face was turned aside in an attitude of eager waiting, and wore a smile that transfigured it. Slowly approaching her, walking as a man walks in his sleep, came Robert Glen. He threw himself at her feet and laid his head upon her knee. She bent to him with a little rapturous caress, and both faces were as happy as those of the people in Paradise. I turned and went away from the place, and entered its precincts no more. From that hour, I was self-devoted to one purpose--to seek the knowledge that should open the door to her degradation and destruction. In the midst of her success, and in the height of her pride, she should turn black as she was in the day when Lucas drove her. I swore it. So should my friend and my sister, whom she robbed and slew, be avenged. OLD “HARD LUCK” By E. Munson Every one admitted he had a good heart in him. Even his bitterest enemy, Kid Alderson, was willing to make that concession, but qualified it by adding that he “was so blamed unlucky and peculiar, a body never knowed when he _was_ in to clear.” This singularity extended to his name. “H-o-s-s-e-l-k-u-s, accent on the _sel_,” he was wont to explain, with something like a shade of weariness, when a new operator faltered on his long patronymic. Eben J. Hosselkus was engineer of Engine Seventeen-Forty-Three.