capture of Bald Eagle. This rumor was corroborated among Dick's special set by their remembrance of his keen sympathy with Wyatt's previous disappointments, and of his vexation when he had been chosen by the colonel to carry that third recall to his friend; so that, though in their intimate assemblings much compassion was expressed for him, there was no doubt of his responsibility, nor of the verdict of the court-martial, except exception which would have astonished nobody more than Dick — in the mind of the colonel. Very vivid

to the recollection of old "Slow-andSure" was the gratitude shining in the young fellow's eyes when he understood the kindness intended by the trust confided to him. Very profound was his conviction that there had been no paltering with the delivery of that trust.

6. If

"Bald and stout as I am, I can yet feel how impossible that boy finds the public accusation of the comrade who died in saving his life!" he had told himself, staring rather dimly at Dick's sword, when the adjutant had brought it to him, on the day that Dick was ordered under arrest in his quarters. he were in a state to hear reason, I should see him at once; but whichever way the fault lies, there must be a courtmartial. And I'm not afraid that the judge advocate will fail to discover so inexperienced a liar as young Norman with half a dozen questions!"

By the surgeon's commands, Dick's convalescence was spent in a solitude upon which neither sympathy nor blame intruded, and August had dragged itself out before a day was appointed for the meeting of the court. But on a radiant morning in early September, the adjutant appeared in Dick's little sitting-room with two announcements: the court-martial would begin on the morrow, and on the following day Mrs. Wyatt, with her sister and child, would leave Wallace for the East, a departure in accordance with "army regulations," which thrust

the bustle of packing and planning upon the first stupor of bereavement. The adjutant further informed Dick that Mrs. Wyatt's going away necessitated immediate opening of a military chest which Dick and Wyatt had shared during an expedition of the early spring, when they had been detailed to escort supplies from the nearest river town to Wallace. The schedule of these supplies had never been demanded, because the outbreak of Indian hostilities had since then engrossed the attention of headquarters, and the chest which contained these papers still remained in Don Wyatt's "den," where Dick was now desired to search for them.

Mechanically Dick marched along the parade beside the adjutant, who was much more conscious than he of the various greetings, kindly or curious, be stowed upon this first public appearance of the subject of to-morrow's trial. They were going away: Esther, whose friendship he had ranked next to her husband's, and Theo! Oddly enough their enforced departure had not before added itself to his miseries. Yet, he reflected bitterly, the distance of half the world could not increase the estrangement which their utter silence during his illness had already proved to him, and which it was only natural that the widow and sister should feel toward the man whose presumptuous disobedience was held responsible for Don's death!

Here was the door he had always hitherto entered with a gay welcome from lips that would nevermore be gay! Here was Don's den, whose walls were eloquent with the echo of his laugh, and the boyish mischief which he had never outgrown!

Dick was so white and spent as he dropped down on one of the packing cases there were packing cases everywhere that the adjutant glanced nervously at him.

"Perhaps this is too much for you?" he exclaimed. "We might have the chest sent to your quarters?

66

"I'm

No, no!" Dick stammered. all right. We had duplicate keys. Here are mine."

Very heterogeneous were the contents of that chest, which had been packed by Wyatt's hands, always more vigorous than orderly! His properties and Dick's mingled as thoroughly, and in as homely a fashion, as their affection.

The adjutant found a package of accounts, and hurriedly looked over them to make sure of their completeness, while Dick gave himself entirely to a listening, which until now had divided his attention with the search. The sound of a light step, the tones of a soft voice God! was it only three months since he used to lie in wait here to intercept Theo on her way to some garrison merrymaking?

The half-open door was pushed wider. Could all that blackness be Theo, Theo, who was wont to be as brilliant in color as a cactus flower?

Theo had suffered much and bravely within six weeks-grief for Wyatt, sympathy, which knew itself helpless before her sister's trance of desolation; a longing, made of everything tenderest in her nature, to reach and comfort Dick, whom she believed she could console. Now, while each glance of Dick's eyes, each tone of his voice, assured her power, its limitations yet more than its extent overwhelmed her. Even her touch could never heal the blasted future, which stretched away miserably through the years that look so long to youth! With a sudden. storm of tears, she sank down on the packing case from which he had risen.

He stepped toward her, but drew back instantly. How dared he claim her sweet compassion, and that sweeter something to which his pulses thrilled, he whom the certain sentence of to-morrow's courtmartial must estrange from all Donald Wyatt's kin forever!

Vaguely Dick heard the words, and was aware of the adjutant's hasty retreat. Then a trembling hand touched his, and a wistful little face, which had once been gay with dimples, bent over

him.

the cruelty of death reached and roused the stunned sympathies of her sister.

Esther Wyatt stood in the doorway, turning her gray eyes, with their dazed look as of one coming out of blindness to sight, from Theo's bowed figure to Dick rigid with silence. And upon her

band, there flashed the love story that Don and she had watched together. How vexed he had been with Theo's gay caprices! How eager to trust Esther's superior feminine intuition, which was confident that Dick's wooing would end well! Ah, dearer yet to her awakening memory came somebody's account of Don's dying determination to save his friend. She held out her hand to Dick. "This poor little girl is tired out," she said softly. "She has thought and planned and packed for both of us. But you will help her, now that you are so nearly well again?"

He could only touch that fragile hand speechlessly, and turn away.

"He was betrayed. He got the troop out of it again magnificently!" Dick

martial to-morrow" "A court-martial for whom? Dick is not to blame! Don wrote me that night."

Dick lifted his face, wet with suddenly forgotten tears.

"He wrote you that night?"

66

'Only part of a letter. He said could he have said that you and he had quarreled?" Esther hesitated, with a half recollection of words whose one meaning, when she read them, had been that the hand which had written them would never write again. "Surely you made it up before "

"Yes! yes!" Dick exclaimed vehemently. "Has nobody told you how he saved me?"

But Esther could not listen now to the story even of her husband's last exploit. Dick was trying to avoid the subject of that quarrel. Could some doubt of Don's forgiveness stab the grief which she knew was next her own? Yet Don had blamed himself.

"Here is his letter " - she began. "Don't read it!" Dick interrupted nervously. "I - I cannot bear it!" "Just a line or two, to show you" She broke off abruptly, and for one long moment stood motionless, staring down at the boldly written page. Then she stepped toward Dick, lifting her shining eyes, - eyes whose lovelit gaze pierced beyond the barriers of tender human building, and beheld, as her soldier's freed soul might behold, the Truth beautiful exceedingly!

An orderly knocked at the half-open door.

"The commanding officer's compliments, and he is waiting to know whether Mrs. Wyatt can see him," he announced.

The color rushed over Esther's pale face, and vanished as quickly, while Dick sprang to his feet.

"Sit down!" she exclaimed, touching his shoulder. "Brown, ask the colonel to come in here."

"Is mine," she answered, with soft vehemence. "Oh, Dick, remember our generous, fearless Don! Never would he permit another to bear blame for his mistake, and neither can I."

Erect and gorgeous with the full panoply of war, to do deference to this farewell visit to the widow of an officer killed upon the field of battle, the colonel entered the room. But something deeper than his esteem for the forms of his profession stirred his heart as he glanced from Dick's bent head and Theo's startled eyes to the transfigured woman who came to meet him.

"Colonel," she said steadfastly, "in my selfish grief I have allowed you to go very near the doing of a great injustice."

An inarticulate ejaculation was all he could achieve as she paused.

"Before my husband went into that fight he wrote me. Will you hear what he said?

"Let me spare you the reading," the colonel muttered.

Esther looked down at the big sheet of headquarters official paper which held her soldier's last "love-making," and a smile that was more tender than tears flickered over her drooping face.

"Unless it is necessary for you to see the letter I would rather read it," she said, faltered an instant, and began:

"The chief has another chill of prudence, and Dick has just brought me an order of recall, an order which I have, however, decided to disregard, as my scout's report of Bald Eagle's position makes his capture a certainty. "Obedience is the first duty of a soldier," yet a soldier who is also a commanding officer must act according to his own judgment, under circumstances which he knows will justify him to his superior when they can be communicated; and old "Slowand-Sure" is too successful in his career to grudge me another feather in my cap, even though I shall win it rather irregularly. But Dick is furious. He has exhausted eloquence in trying to convince me that I shall ride straight to ruin, breaking every rule in the army regulations on the way.''

The low voice, wondrously steadied to its task, ceased, and there was silence, silence in which there floated, through an open window, the clear tones of an officer's commands to a newly joined squad

IN TWO PARTS.

THE PARMENIDES. (January 16.)

THIS evening Hillbrook read from the Parmenides. Then the Dominie: "A question I should like to ask is this: How can a man get so excited about such an abstract proposition as that One is'? Why does it make so many men fanatics, like the Moslem iconoclasts, and why do they take such pleasure and satisfaction in affirming oneness? Parmenides did not have to refute atheism, for he lived before the days of nihilistic theories and agnostic screeds, yet he must affirm The One is.' So, too, Spinoza with his pantheism was called 'God-in

PART TWO.

toxicated.' How are we to account for this enthusiasm ?"

Red Cap. "Is it not because nothing is reasonable until we get a single principle?"

The Dominie. "Yes, perhaps so; but is there not something more? A man wants to have a ramrod down his back and feel that there is something there. It is a great satisfaction to feel and make an affirmation, and I think Carlyle is right when he says that it makes a man larger to have something fixed to formulate. But then, why in the world do people take so very much pleasure in this particular statement, Being is'? Is it not

perhaps that it gives more pleasure to be a positif, as the French call it, than a negatif, more pleasure to affirm than to deny or to doubt, and the most general affirmation you can make is that being is? Then, too, it is. Here is another affirmation."

Hesperus. "Is not this pleasure of asserting that being is analogous to one's delight when he discovers a new relation in the world and cries out 'Eureka'?"

The Theologian. "This desire to posit something, to make an assertion, is universal. Even Mr. Huxley fell a victim to it when he invented the word ' agnostic.' Every one else was an ist or an ic or an er, and he wanted a tail, too." Red Cap. "Is there not a moral feeling at the bottom of this pleasure in finding unity? One's disquiet in the presence of duality is like the disquiet that some people feel before they have experienced what they call conversion. They are at war with themselves because their will has not yet established unity by a definite act of choice."

The Pilgrim. "Is not the object of the whole dialogue to show that abstract reasoning and quibbling, if carried too far, leave simply nothing, and does not this dialogue at its conclusion leave us hanging in mid-air?"

The Parson. "Is it not a lesson against prolixity and looseness of terms?"

The Dominie. "But Hegel says that the Parmenides marks the highest point of Plato's thought. My own idea is that unity is a great thing to have, and that it is rather the mark of a high mind. Think how pleased Newton was, trembling so that he could not make his calculations: a stray idea had been captured. This attempt to unify is also an impulse of sanity. The people who are only sprinkled with facts are neither sane nor interesting. And so it is with the impulse to stand for something and be a positif. This is the impulse of youth, and the converted man, too, gets a unity that he did not have before. But do

we confer any greater reality on reality by these attempts to prove it? If it is really real, why not simply recognize its reality? By trying to prove it, do we not rather loosen the belief? You can't prove first principles, and very few of us can prove even fourth or fifth principles." THE REPUBLIC, I.-IV. (January 23.)

The Pilgrim read from the first four books of the Republic, and then suggested innumerable questions arising from what he had read.

The Dominie. "But we can't choose a fishpole in a forest of saplings, so we shall have to ask you to pick one out for us, and tell us which of all these subjects you prefer to discuss."

The Pilgrim. "Well, then, let us have the religious question. Here is Socrates trying to work a religious reformation by bringing forward all the bad parts of the old Homeric tales, until his hearers have to say that these stories won't do. So nowadays the Jonah story and Elisha's floating axe are brought forward to confuse old-fashioned orthodox believers. But is this the best way to teach the new truth? Does it not do a great deal more harm than good, and would it not be much better to leave these stories alone altogether, and teach something that we do believe?"

The Prophet. "I think you are quite right. There is too much flinging of new discoveries into people's faces. But you can't use the same methods in all cases. I should not talk to my grandmother as I would to a theological student. The great danger is in going to extremes. Some churches are so afraid of superstition that they throw away every ceremony, even baptism and the communion, though these have a real value, however we understand their significance; while others are so overgrown with it that one can hardly find any truth in them. But the mean is hard to follow."

Hesperus. "Plato thought the best religion was the one that produced the best