When she was done, Miselle persuaded Melusina to take her seat at the instrument, and straightway the house was filled with such melody of sweet German love-songs, operatic morcaux, and stirring battle-hymns, that the open doorway thronged with uncouth forms, gathering as did the monsters to Arion's harp. But when at last the clear voice rang out the melody of the "Star-Spangled Banner," the crowd took up the chorus, and rendered it with a heartfelt enthusiasm more significant than any music; for it was almost election-day, and the old query of "How will Pennsylvania go?" had all day been urged among every knot of men who gathered to talk of the country's prospects. Then came the good old "John Brown Song," and the "Marseillaise," which should be snatched from its Rebel appropriators, on the same principle by which Doctor Byles adapted sacred words to popular melodies. The music over, the little crowd dispersed, and the baby, with its brace of mothers, gone to bed, the new friends sat cozily down and enjoyed an hour or two of feminine gossip, exchanged kisses, cards, and photographs, and so bade good-bye. It seems a trifling matter enough in the telling, but to the lonely Miselle this chance encounter with a comrade was enough to change the whole aspect of affairs; and she sat down to breakfast the next morning, strong in the faith of a brilliant victory over bad roads, oily boats, and rapacious boatmen. A plank walk from the hotel to the station elevates the foot-passenger in Corry above the mud of the streets, through whose depths flounders a crowd of wagons laden with crude oil for the refinery, with refined oil for the freight-trains, with carboys of chemicals, with merchandise, and with building materials for yet more houses. Everything here is new. Not one of the thousand buildings is yet five years old; and of the four thousand people, not the most easily acclimated could yet tell how the climate agrees with him. Indeed, it is so absolutely new that it has not yet reached the raw barrenness of a new place. Nature does not cede her royalty except under strong compulsion, and still does battle in the streets of Corry with the four thousand, who have not yet found time to get out the stumps of the hastily felled trees, to "improve" a wild water-course that dashes down from the bluff and crosses the main street between a tailor's shop and a restaurant, or even to trample to death the wildwood ferns and forest flowers which linger on its margin. When the Coriolanians have attended to these little matters, their city will look even newer than at present. Then shall their grandchildren bring other trees and set them along the streets, and dig wells and fountains, where Kuhleborn may rise to bemoan the desolation of his ancient domain.