really had in them the qualities that go, under ordinary circumstances, to make up valuable citizens. Herbert Ransom came of an honorable and once wealthy family at Pensacola, Florida. He was one of what has been rather familiarly termed the "first crop of young men since the war," which means that during the war he was too young to be a soldier, and became a man soon after its close. He was bright, handsome, vain, unprincipled, and yet he passed current in society and married Agnes DeKay, a beautiful girl scarcely sixteen, whose father, a brother of General DeKay, was very poor, very proud and very old. For a time the young people lived a sweet, idyllic sort of life on an old plantation near Mariana, Florida; but Ransom's restless, rollicking nature would not be confined to mere domestic quietude. He tried speculation in cotton with just enough success to lead him swiftly to financial ruin. The plantation was sold at a great sacrifice and Agnes had to return to her father, while Ransom went to western Texas with the avowed purpose of looking after some wild lands belonging to his father's estate, but really with no hope of ever again seeing his wife. He had been gone nearly a year when the news of his tragic death in a street fight in San Antonio reached his relations in Pensacola. Soon after this Agnes' parents died and she was left with an income barely sufficient to support her. She had no children, and, with a widowed aunt, she lived in the old family homestead at Pensacola, until General DeKay came and persuaded her to become his adopted daughter. This meager outline of what seemed to Moreton a most pathetic story, fell glibly from the lips of Miss Crabb, along with sundry shrewd strictures upon social laws that render women so powerless to struggle with adversity and neglect. "When a woman gets married," she observed, "she becomes helpless. She plunges into the gulf of matrimony with a mill-stone at her neck, so that she may be sure to disappear utterly. If she ever again comes to the surface it is but to air troubles for which there is no cure." "If that is the case," said Moreton, "if I were a woman I should try and not marry." Miss Crabb laughed. "Oh, I presume there will always be a majority of fools among us," she replied. "Silly girls and restless spinsters, ready to be martyred for the mere romance of the thing; but you know, as well as I, that this is an awfully one-sided world." "Yes, but you women make it so, don't you know, by decoying us over to your side, thus destroying the equilibrium. If we were the antipodes of each other, now, this would be a gloriously balanced world! All the sorrow-making material on one side and all the joy-bringers on the other!" "You are like the rest--you won't condescend to sensibly argue a question with a woman. You must go off into badinage, as if a woman could not understand and enjoy cogent reasoning. I don't like insincerity, Mr. Moreton."