BOOKS BY “Charles Egbert Craddock.” (MARY N. MURFREE.) =IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS.= Short Stories. 16mo, $1.25. =DOWN THE RAVINE.= For Young People. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.00. =THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS.= A Novel. 16mo, $1.25. =IN THE CLOUDS.= A Novel. 16mo, $1.25. =THE STORY OF KEEDON BLUFFS.= For Young People. 16mo, $1.00. =THE DESPOT OF BROOMSEDGE COVE.= A Novel. 16mo, $1.25. =WHERE THE BATTLE WAS FOUGHT.= A Novel. 16mo, $1.25. =HIS VANISHED STAR.= A Novel. 16mo, $1.25. =THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN.= 16mo, $1.25. =THE YOUNG MOUNTAINEERS.= Illustrated. 12mo, $1.50. =THE JUGGLER.= A Novel. 16mo, $1.25. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, BOSTON AND NEW YORK. THE JUGGLER BY CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1897 COPYRIGHT 1897 BY MARY N. MURFREE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE JUGGLER. I. Mystery was not far to seek, surely. The great gneissoid crags were moulded by the heat from subterranean fires in remote, unimagined æons. From the deep coves, now so heavily wooded, the once submerging waters had long ago ebbed, following undreamed-of lures, drawn seaward or skyward, or engulfed in still lower depths,--who can say?--leaving the ripple-marks on their rocky confines to tell of their being. In the middle of the bridle-path, touched by every careless passing foot, lay a splintered sandstone slab, the fracture revealing a cluster of delicate, cylindrical, stem-like petrifactions, thus preserving, with the comprehensive significance of nature, so slight a thing as the record of the life of a worm long ages agone, in these fossil traces of primordial vermicular burrowings, here in the midst of a scene that was itself as a register of those stupendous revolutions the incidents of which were the subsidence of vast oceans, and the emergence of continents, and the development of the mighty agencies that made and lifted the mountains. All the visible world gave token of the inexplicable past of creation, of the unrevealed future,--those thoughts of God which are very deep thoughts. And yet, in the blunting of daily use, the limitations of dull observation, the unquestioning acceptance of the accustomed routine of nature, there might seem naught before the eye which was not plainly manifest,--mountain, rock, forest,--the mere furniture of existence. One hardly analyzes the breath of life as it is breathed; even when considered as nearly twenty-one per cent. of oxygen to seventy-nine per cent. of nitrogen, are we aught the wiser, for whence comes it, and alas, why does it go? To those creatures of a day, busy with the day, it seemed that mystery and doubt and troublous questioning had first entered Etowah Cove in the guise of a vagrant juggler, their earliest experience of a modern exponent of his most ancient craft.