"I ought to have forbidden it," the doctor muttered to himself half a hundred times in the next forty-eight hours. When she had ridden a mile on the road that led to the "lower settlement" she turned an acute angle, and came back on the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle, if I may speak so geometrically. She thus went more than two miles to strike the main trail toward Jenkinsville, at a point only a mile away from her starting-place. She reached the woods in Long Bottom just as Pinkey told her she would, at dark. She was appalled at the thought of riding sixteen miles through a dense forest of beech trees in the night over a bridle-path. She reined up her horse, folded her hands, and offered a fervent prayer for courage and help, and then rode into the blackness ahead. There is a local tradition yet lingering in this very valley in Ohio in regard to this dark ride of Patty's. I know it will be thought incredible, but in that day marvelous things were not yet out of date. This legend, which reaches me from the very neighborhood of the occurrence, is that, when Patty had nerved herself for her lonely and perilous ride by prayer, there came to her, out of the darkness of the forest, two beautiful dogs. One of them started ahead of her horse and one of them became her rear-guard. Protected and comforted by her dumb companions, Patty rode all those lonesome hours in that wilderness bridle-path. She came, at midnight, to a settler's house on the farther verge of the unbroken forest and found lodging. The dogs lay in the yard. In the early morning the settler's wife came out and spoke to them but they gave her no recognition at all. Patty came a few moments later, when they arose and greeted her with all the eloquence of dumb friends, and then, having seen her safely through the woods and through the night, the two beautiful dogs, wagging a friendly farewell, plunged again into the forest and went--no man knows whither. Such is the legend of Patty's Ride as it came to me well avouched. Doubtless Mr. John Fiske or Mr. M. D. Conway could explain it all away and show how there was only one dog, and that he was not beautiful, but a stray bull-dog with a stumpy tail. Or that the whole thing is but a "solar myth." The middle-ages have not a more pleasant story than this of angels sent in the form of dogs to convoy a brave lady on a noble mission through a dangerous forest. At any rate, Patty believed that the dumb guardians were answers to her prayer. She bade them good-by as they disappeared in the mystery whence they came, and rode on, rejoicing in so signal a mark of God's favor to her enterprise. Sometimes her heart was sorely troubled at the thought of Morton's being already the husband of another, and all that Sunday morning she took lessons in that hardest part of Christian living--the uttering of the little petition which gives all the inevitable over into God's hands and submits to the accomplishment of His will.