lovely July morning of the centennial year--all save the hush and awe that hung about old 'Mahbin mill. Over by the waste weir, with musical splash and laughter and faint little clouds of spray, a tumbling sheet of water was disappearing into the cool depths below; but here, in the broad, beaten roadway around the worn threshold, was impressive silence. The busy whir and hum and clatter was all stilled, though elsewhere this had been a bustling Monday morn. Men spoke in low, awe-stricken whispers, and went on tip-toe over the creaking floor within. Peace and contentment, life and prosperity, flooding sunshine, laughing-water, merry-throated birds made glad the scene around; but within was silence and mystery and death. Here, prone on the flour-dusted floor of the old office lay all that was mortal of gray-haired Sam Morrow, the miller, murdered by murder most foul, as one and all could see; and young Dick Graham, his right-hand man for years, had gone, gone no one knew whither. In all its peaceful history, Nemahbin had known no such sight or sensation as this. Thirty years had the old mill been the rallying-point of the farmers, to the exclusion of the attractions of the tavern in the little town. Morrow was a character--a man who read and remembered, a man who took the papers and had an opinion, backed by good reasoning, of public men and public affairs of the day. He grew to be an authority on many and most subjects, but he never grew to be popular. Morrow had an ugly temper when crossed, a lashing, venomous tongue when angered, and, of late, there had been growing up among the farmers who drove thither with their grain a suspicion that old Sam, in his grasping, money-loving greed had become unscrupulous. In this there was rank injustice. Crabbed and ill-tempered as the man had often been, surly and rough of speech as he had become, there did not live a more rigidly honest man--his word was his bond. His own dealings were beyond question, and six months before his death no man within a thirty-mile radius of Nemahbin had ever been heard to hint at such a thing as sharp practice at 'Mahbin mill.