Lawrence found Bessy in the orchard under apple trees that were pyramids of pearly bloom. She looked at him through the twilight with reproach and aloofness in her eyes. But he put out his hands and caught her reluctant ones in a masterful grasp. “Listen to me, Bessy. Don’t condemn me before you’ve heard me. I’ve been to blame for believing falsehoods about you, but I believe them no longer, and I’ve come to ask you to forgive me.” He told his story simply and straightforwardly. In strict justice he could not keep his mother’s name out of it, but he merely said she had been mistaken. Perhaps Bessy understood none the less. She knew what Mrs. Eastman’s reputation in Lynnfield was. “You might have had a little more faith in me,” she cried reproachfully. “I know—I know. But I was beside myself with pain and wretchedness. Oh, Bessy, won’t you forgive me? I love you so! If you send me away I’ll go to the dogs. Forgive me, Bessy.” And she, being a woman, did forgive him. “I’ve loved you from the first, Lawrence,” she said, yielding to his kiss. I. _I am the product of the centuries. I am the child of the aeons which were. I have always been and I shall always be. To make me it has taken fire, water, star-dust, the Spirit of God, the lives of a million people and the lights of a million suns. I have grown from heat and star-dust to the Thing Which Thinks. What has happened to me has been good: what shall happen will be better, for I am Evolution, and Evolution goes ever upward. Life has been good, Death will be better, for I am the Cause of all the Past, making toward one great Effect. My debt to the Past is great. Let me in part repay it by doing the best I can, following the light within me. And the clearest light is Kindness._ JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE. The History of the Hals THE FATHER OF THE TURF IN TENNESSEE. CHAPTER VII. By JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE The other day I inquired of Uncle Berry how he thought Maria would compare with the best horses of the present day. In reply he said: “If I were forty and Maria four years of age, I would not want a greater fortune than I could win with her at Fordham and Saratago.” He thinks the improvement in training and the condition of race tracks accounts for the difference in time of this and former days. He thinks if the horses of the present day were galloped, in sweats, sixteen or twenty miles under eight or ten Mackinaw blankets, and every morning and evening galloped four miles and repeat under two or three blankets and ran their races on deep, heavy tracks, as formerly, they would make slow time, and very few of them would be seen on the turf at the age of nine years, and I agree with him.