How clearly he could conjure up the scene that they were enjoying with such keen relish! Only two days before, he had walked among the same tents, staring at horses and gay trappings and painted Amazons as one who noted nothing; yet the agony of the thing he now saw at last lit up all the rest as with a lightning flash, and burned the scene forever on his brain and heart. It was at Wareham, too,--Wareham, where she had promised to be his wife, where she had married him only a year before. How well he remembered the night! They left the parsonage; they had ten miles to drive in the moonlight before reaching their stopping-place,--ten miles of such joy as only a man could know, he thought, who had had the warm fruit of life hanging within full vision, but just out of reach,--just above his longing lips; and then, in an unlooked-for, gracious moment, his! He could swear she had loved him that night, if never again. But this picture passed away, and he saw that maddening circle with the caracoling steeds. He head the discordant music, the monotonous creak of the machinery, the strident laughter of the excited riders. As first the thing was a blur, a kaleidoscope of whirling colors, into which there presently crept form and order. ... A boy who had cried to get on, and was now crying to get off. ... Old Rube Hobson and his young wife; Rube looking white and scared, partly by the whizzing motion, and partly by the prospect of paying out ten cents for the doubtful pleasure. ... Pretty Hetty Dunnell with that young fellow from Portland; she too timid to mount one of the mettle-some chargers, and snuggling close to him in one of the circling seats. The, good Got!--Dell! sitting on a prancing white horse, with the man he knew, the man he feared, riding beside her; a man who kept holding on her hat with fingers that trembled,--the very hat she “'peared bride in” a man who brushed a grasshopper from her shoulder with an air of ownership, and, when she slapped his hand coquettishly, even dared to pinch her pink cheek,--his wife's cheek,--before that crowd of on-lookers! Merry-go-round, indeed! The horrible thing was well named; and life was just like it,--a whirl of happiness and misery, in which the music cannot play loud enough to drown the creak of the machinery, in which one soul cries out in pain, another in terror, and the rest laugh; but the prancing steeds gallop on, gallop on, and once mounted, there is no getting off, unless...