One evening, having climbed farther than I had intended, I lost my way. It was not safe in that neighbourhood to try new pathways in the dark, and chancing upon a deserted shelter, I made myself a bed upon the straw. I found him seated outside the hut when I returned, and he greeted me as if he had been expecting me just at that moment and not before. He guessed just what had happened, he told me, and had not been alarmed. During the day I found him watching me, and in the evening, as we sat in his favourite place outside the hut, he turned to me. "You think it true?" he said. "That you and I sat here years ago and talked?" "I cannot tell," I answered. "I only know that he died here, if there be such a thing as death--that no one has ever lived here since. I doubt if the door has ever been opened till we came." "They have always been with me," he continued, "these dreams. But I have always dismissed them. They seemed so ludicrous. Always there came to me wealth, power, victory. Life was so easy." He laid his thin hand on mine. A strange new look came into his eyes--a look of hope, almost of joy. "Do you know what it seems to me?" he said. "You will laugh perhaps, but the thought has come to me up here that God has some fine use for me. Success was making me feeble. He has given me weakness and failure that I may learn strength. The great thing is to be strong." SYLVIA OF THE LETTERS. Old Ab Herrick, so most people called him. Not that he was actually old; the term was an expression of liking rather than any reflection on his years. He lived in an old-fashioned house--old-fashioned, that is, for New York--on the south side of West Twentieth Street: once upon a time, but that was long ago, quite a fashionable quarter. The house, together with Mrs. Travers, had been left him by a maiden aunt. An "apartment" would, of course, have been more suitable to a bachelor of simple habits, but the situation was convenient from a journalistic point of view, and for fifteen years Abner Herrick had lived and worked there. Then one evening, after a three days' absence, Abner Herrick returned to West Twentieth Street, bringing with him a little girl wrapped up in a shawl, and a wooden box tied with a piece of cord. He put the box on the table; and the young lady, loosening her shawl, walked to the window and sat down facing the room. Mrs. Travers took the box off the table and put it on the floor--it was quite a little box--and waited. "This young lady," explained Abner Herrick, "is Miss Ann Kavanagh, daughter of--of an old friend of mine." "Oh!" said Mrs. Travers, and remained still expectant. "Miss Kavanagh," continued Abner Herrick, "will be staying with us for--" He appeared to be uncertain of the length of Miss Kavanagh's visit. He left the sentence unfinished and took refuge in more pressing questions. "What about the bedroom on the second floor? Is it ready? Sheets aired--all that sort of thing?"