"What are you doing out here this time of night, my little fellow?" said he. "I'm afraid of papa," sobbed the child, "he said he'd skin me alive if I didn't get out of his sight." "What is your name? Where do you live? what bad thing have you been doing?" said the Dr., all in a breath. "I live in a shanty out there, I am Fanny Green. I ain't done anything bad but cry, and I couldn't help it, for papa was striking mamma so." "Well, come with me, Fanny, I'll take you to your home, and I won't let your papa hurt you." "Are you an angel?" said Fanny, feeling of the hand that held hers. "No, I'm a man, my little girl." "I thought you were one of those angels dressed in white that mamma told me about; they take folks to heaven, and I want to go there, I don't want to go home." They had now reached the wretched hovel that the child called her home, and she began to weep afresh. "O, no, no! I dare not go in," she said, clinging convulsively to her protector, "I'm afraid he will kill me." While she was speaking, the door was roughly flung open, and her unnatural parent rushed out, brandishing a heavy club; but, at sight of the figure clad in white, he dropped his bludgeon and ran off, howling like a wild beast deprived of its prey. With a glad cry the child bounded into the shanty, and he heard her childish voice saying "mamma, don't be afraid any more, papa has gone way off." On reaching his room, the Dr. was relieved to find that his absence had remained undiscovered, and he drank himself off to sleep. He was, however, suddenly awakened quite early in the morning by loud exclamations coming from daddy, and, in the intervals, he distinguished the sound of the same childlike voice which was associated with his night's adventure. Immediately calling his old servant, he inquired the meaning of the commotion. "'Tween you and me," said daddy indignantly, "there's more distruction; little Fanny Green's mother is dead; that brute of a husband has fairly killed her; knocked her skull in with a club." "When did it happen?" "O, in the night; Fanny had run out door for to get out of his reach, and 'tween you and me, she says a man with a white dress on led her back, and she found her mother dead on the floor. O! we're havin' on't dreadful now days; spirits walking the airth, never no good comes of sich things." The murder and the reputed ghost, whom several of the inhabitants testified to having seen at the midnight hour, was the absorbing topic of conversation in the immediate neighborhood where the tragedy was enacted. For several days succeeding the affair Hank Glutter's saloon was the general rendezvous of the wonder-loving country people round about. All appeared to enjoy the tippling vastly more than Hank himself.