sent us that we may be happier when they are past? Miss Winnie used to tell us so. Don't the Bible teach this somewhere? Yes? Then couldn't I a body, I mean - bring misfortune -no, unhappiness, I mean-a little, that some one else could be happier after a while?"

"Why?"

"Because your human judgment is too frail. Who are you that you should dare the devilish business of tantalizing, or, if you fancy the motive good, should try the pleasure of playing God, as if it were a game at dolls?"

She shrank under his severe words and kept her face away from him awhile.

66

Say," he continued, in a few minutes, "do you know that you impress me as if you were trying to justify a case of flirting?"

She only looked at him and laughed a little foolishly. The engineer was puzzled again. Later on, as they were crossing the deeply cut, narrow sheep-paths, she burst out:

"Mr. Linton, didn't God make man first?" as the Bible says.

"Yes and no, both," he replied. "Rationally and spiritually there is no doubt that man is

the older.

Science and revelation agree on this. But physically and sexually he is not. "What I mean," he answered to her wondering look, "is that the mother is the older parent, and —”

"I've always felt," she said wistfully, “that if ever I had a husband I should like him to be older and wiser than me, and — and — that this had been founded in-in-the necessity of things, — that — that -it was a fate which I

could not resist, a sort of compulsion."

Linton felt a little frightened. Was this girl almost proposing to him? Her face did not look like that. It was innocent and had a faraway sort of interest in it.

"In all that shall make him your husband," he said solemnly, "any man that is a man is this." There was quite a pause.

"We feel sure that at first things only divided," he began again, "brother just separated from brother, or rather, I should say, sister separated from sister. They began to bud from each other, and later there was one form from which perhaps all the others budded-and that was the mother. Lastly there was the father the great step out of self. But all this was long

before man's time. Man, however, since the dawn of the human, has developed faster than woman. His wars with his fellows, his struggles with beasts, more rapidly provoked his mental exercise and growth. He may have stood, for a short time, spiritually alone with God while woman beat upon the farther gate of Eden; but when once admitted she peeped out first through the bars into the great Beyond, and into the greater depths of spirituality is peeping yet. Each of the two great resurrections were first announced to woman.'

He saw a new light flash into her face- a something that he could almost worship, and he listened for its message.

"Then God did create things once without a father?" she said quickly, with a hidden face. "Yes."

"You won't think me immodest, Mr. Linton?" She turned her face full up to him now. "I do so much want to know. Who else am I to ask? I don't think any one can tell 'less it's you."

She hesitated a moment.

"You told us how Nature went back sometimes and did things in the old way, didn't you, as in the grasses?"

'Yes, she does that suddenly sometimes yet -goes backward almost in a leap. It is called reversion to

"Then if God creates that way yet sometimes, it's it's not such an awful miracle that we should not be able to believe it, is it, that He could have created Jesus without an earthly father; is it, Mr. Linton? . . . Is it?"

The expectancy in her face was something reverent to the engineer.

"No," he said solemnly. "Tell me why you wanted to know this, little girl." And tenderly he reached out and put a hand upon her hair, as if she were a child.

"Because," she said, "my father says he always stumbles at this miracle-as almost something beyond God."

"And so have I often often often - always-un-until now," he said, with a moisture in his eyes and a dryness in his voice.

She flashed a happy look at him for an instant, and ran through the wood-pile gate into the kitchen.

And while he had felt that he was soaring so far above her, a little child had led him by the hand!

CHAPTER XXXII

"It was autumn, and incessant

Piped the quails from shocks and sheaves,
And, like living coals the apples

Burned among the withering leaves."

"Ah! what a warning to a thoughtless man, could any spot of earth render back an echo of the sad steps by which it hath been trod."-WORDSWORTH.

"The body is the first proselyte the soul makes."-THOREAU.

LATE September, browning from the recent summer drought and the early autumn frosts sere in the fields with ripened corn, but bright along the lanes with white-faced asters and the nodding golden-rod - the orchards glorious in the red splendor of the jenneting and Ben Davis apple.

Here and there the shocks of maize narrowed the perspective of the quarter sections, and the sharp sword-like stubbles stuck up as if this bit of earth were on the defensive against further molestation.

Shan thought, as he heaped the cut stalks of