shining that had made his heart so glad. It had vanished,--its message withheld, its mystery unrevealed, like an illusion, like a fagged-out enthusiasm, like the futile words of a prayer without the fervor of faith. He could not believe it. Again and again he sought a new posture, a new hope. He followed its closer neighbors along the steeps of the mountain as they journeyed toward the west in the sky above. The tint of the heavens was changing presently,--a lighter blue. The golden moon grew of a pearl-like lustre. The stars waxed faint. The clouds were red. And here was the gray day hard upon him, and in the earth naught of value, for in the sky he had lost a star. How strong, how resistless of advance, was the riding up of the great sun! Get ye away, illusions, and glamours, and dreamers of dreams! Such a definite visible world! How full of fixed facts! He saw, as he stood, the shanties of the workmen in the Cove, where the mists were hustling off in great haste, as if too tenuous, too unsubstantial, too inutile, to hold ground in the face of the strong practicalities dawning over the horizon. The smoke was curling up from the chimney of Cap'n Lucy's cabin, where breakfast was cooking. The cows were at the bars. All the woods were lustrous with moisture, and splendidly a-glint with the yellow sunbeams striking aslant through them. The distant mountains were blue and amethyst and violet and purple,--a rhapsody of color. Here and there, as if the rain had painted them, boughs of sumach and sourwood were scarlet in the woods; the sweet-gum showed flecks of purple leaves, and the hickory had occasional flares of yellow. The goldenrod had burst into bloom, and with this seal of the autumnal season stamped upon the land came Julia along the road, her bonnet hanging on her shoulders, her head bare, her face like spring itself, her hands full of flowers that she scattered as she sang. How her fresh young voice rang against the turmoil of the current from the Lost Time mine, like some sudden burst of joy from out the fretted tides of a troubled life! As she tossed the flowers, and glanced over her shoulder to see where they fell, Larrabee crossed the log laid from one deeply gullied bank to the other side of the road, to serve foot passengers when the water was high in wet weather. She paused, and looked at him with a frown. The unwonted corrugations in her fair young brow changed her inexpressive face almost out of recognition. He stood in silent deprecation for a moment. His heart was sore. His life was full of trouble of many sorts and degrees. That æsthetic loss, that sense of bereavement because of his vanished star, outrankled them all.