Did she ever regret it? It is hard to tell. Some people love notoriety and to have some one die for them is the climax to earthly triumph. I have often tried to picture in my mind the feelings of poor crippled Lyndal Mason as he walked home through the darkness of the night, with a denser darkness falling like a pall of gloom all around his throbbing heart. In the morning he did not come downstairs at the usual hour, and when his mother went to his room, she noticed a peculiar odor of laudanum on the air. With a wail of injured mother love she fell upon his stiffened form and kissed his white face in a frenzy of despair. Could Mary Mackey have seen this sad picture, would she have been sorry? I do not know. They say she looked stunned when presented with the message written by Lyndal on that fatal night. It was written with an unsteady hand, and said: “Good-bye Mary—your plaything is at rest.” TRUE FRIENDSHIP True friendship never changes, never grows weary of serving, never dies. I have in my mind two men I once knew in Colorado, Barney Kennedy and Fred Gordon—“Little Fred Gordon.” Kennedy was a big, robust son of the Emerald Isle, standing six feet in his shoes, and strong as an ox; Gordon a puny little fellow, born in Iowa, and weighing scarcely 140 pounds. I expected everything of Kennedy, but Gordon was only a little, common place man who would not attract attention. When the gold excitement in Alaska was raging in 1897 these two men left home together, for they had been both friends and companions for many long years, and struck out for the promised land in hopes of finding the delusive metal. But hunting gold in Alaska is full of danger, privations and hardships, and before the first year had passed away these two friends found themselves 200 miles from a doctor, and Kennedy dying of scurvy. The giant was helpless, and dependent on his little friend. Gordon tried to get some one to assist him in taking his sick friend back to Skagway, but these men had come out to dig for gold, and had no time to waste on dying men who were strangers to them. But Gordon’s friendship was of the true sort—the kind that never fails, and only dies with the possessor. He started out alone to drag his friend 200 long, weary, horrible, soul-depressing miles through the trackless snow to a physician. Think of such an undertaking, for friendship’s sake—to drag a 200-pound man on a sledge, with provisions enough to feed them for fifteen days.