the soil of America or Europe! But my preface is too long. * * * * * Now and then there is a story where all things work together for evil to the people involved; and these stories have, even for their protagonists, a horrible fascination. The story of Saxe and Mary Bradford is of this nature: a case, as it were, of double chicane. Everything happened precisely wrong. Almost anything happening differently would have given them a chance. If Mary Bradford had been born in Virginia, if her eyes had been blue instead of brown, if Ngawa had come back three hours sooner--Maupassant would have told it all from that point of view. But I am not trying to make literature out of it: it is as history that this story is important to me. Saxe had been engaged to Mary Bradford since her last year in college. Her mother had died when Mary was born, and the Reverend James Bradford had sailed, after his wife’s death, for this little West African mission, leaving his child with a sister. Mary was brought up in America. When she was ten, her father came home for a year and took her back with him; but at twelve she was sent definitely home to be educated. James Bradford could not have conceived of depriving his child of Greek and trigonometry, and from school Mary went to college. She never, at any time, had any inclination to enter upon missionary work, though her religious faith was never at any moment in the smallest degree shaken. From her thirteenth year she had been an active and enthusiastic member of her father’s denomination. She was a bit of a blue-stocking and occasionally somewhat ironic in speech. When I asked Saxe “if she had _no_ faults,” these were all he could think of. When she became engaged to Saxe, she stipulated that she should spend two winters with her father before marrying. The separation had never really parted Mary and her father; they had never lost the habit of each other. You see those sympathies sometimes between father and daughter: inarticulate, usually, like the speech of rock to rock, but absolutely indestructible. There was no question--I wish to emphasize this--about her love for Saxe. I had, for a time, her letters. It was a _grande passion_--to use the unhallowed historic phrase; twenty love stories of old Louisiana could have been melted up into it. Saxe, of course, consented to her going. During the second spring he was to go out, her father was to marry them at the Mission, and they were to return to America after a honeymoon in Italy. There is not one detail that does not, in the end, deepen the irony of it, if you look at it all long enough. Italy! All that romantic shimmer and tinkle against the savage fact that was. She went, and for six months seems to have busied herself happily enough with good little Mrs. Price at the Mission. She picked up a few dialects--she was always remarkably clever at languages. The Mission hangs above a tiny