"I was just going out," she said, after greeting him, "and so I answered your ring. Did you wish to see my father?" "Yes, if you please," Larry answered. "Then you will have to wait, and I don't know how long. It was time for him to be here an hour ago, and he is usually punctual; but he hasn't come." She noticed, the troubled look on his face, and asked, a trifle anxiously: "Anything the matter, Larry?" "I--I think not; but if he comes, you may tell him my errand. And I will go back, and perhaps I may meet him." Larry explained about the watchman's absence, and then, with a deepening foreboding at his heart, he hurried back toward the immense buildings of the Tioga Iron Company. [TO BE CONTINUED.] A VILLAGE HAMPDEN. by ANTONY E. ANDERSON. It was Saturday evening, and the slender hands of the clock in the village schoolhouse were just crossing each other in their eager haste to tell the Berryville Literary Society that it was nearly ten o'clock, and time to put out the lights. The girls had taken the hint when the clock struck the quarter-hour, and they were chattering like a group of magpies in the darkest corner of the room as they helped each other with their cloaks and wraps. The boys had already drawn their overcoat collars up to their ears. They stood, solemnly and silently, near the door, each one ready to frame the momentous question, "May I have the pleasure of seeing you home?" when the girl of his choice should pass. Some of them looked nervous; others had assumed an air of indifference, which deceived no one. John Hampden stroked his cap, wishing that girls weren't so slow about getting ready. But he forgot the girls in a moment, and began to repeat, under his breath, a few lines of the poem they had been reading that evening: "Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast, The little tyrant of his fields withstood." He wondered who Hampden was, and what he had done to make him famous enough to be mentioned in such a poem as Gray's Elegy. Probably a great general, John decided, who had led vast armies to victory. John smiled to himself. There surely could not have been two persons with the same name more utterly unlike, he thought, than the John Hampden of the poem and John Hampden, the druggist's clerk--"a youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown." Just then two girls stopped before him, and John woke from his dreams to find that the schoolhouse was almost deserted, and that the janitor's yawning little son had begun to put out the lights. The girls, no doubt, thought he had smiled at them, and John had presence of mind enough left to accept the situation. He had meant to walk home with Matilda Haines, but Matilda had disappeared. John felt that he hardly knew Margaret Shirley, she had been away in Boston so long, and he hadn't even been introduced to the young girl beside her.