don't want to rub it out. You can't rub anything out that's ever been; but you can do better than rub it out."
"What do you mean?"
"Take things just the way they are," said Susan, "and show what can be done. Perhaps you'll stake a new channel out, for others to follow in that haven't half so much chance as you have. And that's what you will do, too," she added.
"Susan!" he said, "if there's anything I can ever do, in this world or the next, for you or your folks, that's all I ask for, the chance to do it. Your folks and you shall never want for anything while I'm alive.
"There's one thing sure," he added, rising. "I'll live by myself and be independent of everybody, and make my way all alone in the world; and if I can make 'em all finally own up and admit that I'm honest with 'em, I'm satisfied. That's all I'll ever ask of anybody. But there's one thing that worries me sometimes—that is, whether I ought to come here so often. I'm afraid, sometimes, that it'll hinder your father from gettin' work, or—something—for you folks to be friends with me."
"I think such things take care of themselves," said Susan, quietly. "If a chip won't float, let it sink."
"Good-night," said Eph, and he walked off, and went home to his echoing house.
After that, his visits to Joshua's became less frequent.
It was a bright day in March—one of those which almost redeem the reputation of that desperado of a month. Eph was leaning on his fence, looking now down the bay and now to where the sun was sinking in the marshes. He knew that all the other men had gone to the town-meeting, where he had had no heart to intrude himself—that free democratic parliament where he had often gone with his father in childhood; where the boys, rejoicing in a general assembly of their own, had played ball outside, while the men debated gravely within. He recalled the time when he himself had so proudly given his first vote for President, and how his father had introduced him then to friends from distant parts of the town. He remembered how he had heard his father speak there, and how respectfully everybody had listened to him. That was in the long ago, when they had lived at the great farm. And then came the thought of the mortgage, and of Eliphalet's foreclosure, and—
"Hallo, Eph!"
It was one of the men from whom he took fish—a plain-spoken, sincere little man.
"Why wa'n't you down to town-meet'n'?"
"I was busy," said Eph.
"How'd ye like the news?"
"What news?"
There was never any good news for him now.
"Hain't heard who's selected town-clerk?"
"No."
Had they elected Eliphalet, and so expressed their settled distrust of him, and sympathy for the man whom he had injured?
"Who's elected?" he asked, harshly.
"You be!" said the man; "went in flyin', all hands clappin' and stompin' their feet!"
An hour later the doctor drove up, stopped, and walked toward the kitchen door. As he passed the window, he looked in.
Eph was lying on his face, upon the settle, as he had first seen him there, his arms beneath his head.
"I will not disturb him now," said the doctor.
One breezy afternoon, in the following summer, Captain Seth laid aside his easy every-day clothes, and transformed himself into a stiff broadcloth image, with a small silk hat and creaking boots. So attired, he set out in a high open buggy, with his wife, also in black, but with gold spectacles, to the funeral of an aunt. As they pursued their jog-trot journey along the Salt Hay Road, and came to Ephraim Morse's cottage, they saw Susan sitting in a shady little porch, at the front door, shelling peas, and looking down the bay.
"How is everything, Susan?" called out Captain Seth; "'bout time for Eph to be gitt'n' in?"
"Yes," she answered, nodding and smiling, and pointing with a pea-pod; "that's our boat, just coming up to the wharf, with her peak down."
THE DENVER EXPRESS.
BY A.A. HAYES
Any one who has seen an outward-bound clipper ship getting under way and heard the "shanty-songs" sung by the sailors as they toiled at capstan and halliards, will probably remember that rhymeless but melodious refrain—
"I'm bound to see its muddy waters
Yeo ho! that rolling river;
Bound to see its muddy waters
Yeo ho! the wild Missouri."
Only a happy inspiration could have impelled Jack to apply the adjective "wild" to that ill-behaved and disreputable river, which, tipsily bearing its enormous burden of mud from the far North-west, totters, reels, runs its tortuous course for hundreds on hundreds of miles; and which, encountering the lordly and thus far well-behaved Mississippi at Alton, and forcing its company upon this splendid river (as if some drunken fellow should lock arms with a dignified pedestrian), contaminates it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
At a certain point on the banks of this river, or rather—as it has the habit of abandoning and destroying said banks—at a safe distance therefrom, there is a town from which a railroad takes its departure for its long climb up the natural incline of the Great Plains, to the base of the mountains; hence the importance to this town of the large but somewhat shabby building serving as terminal station. In its smoky interior, late in the evening and not very long ago, a train was nearly ready to start. It was a train possessing a certain consideration. For the benefit of a public easily gulled and enamored of grandiloquent terms, it was advertised as the "Denver Fast Express;" sometimes, with strange unfitness, as the "Lightning Express"; "elegant" and "palatial" cars were declared to be included therein; and its departure was one of the great events of the twenty-four hours, in the country round about. A local poet described it in the "live" paper of the town, cribbing from an old Eastern magazine and passing off as original, the lines—
"Again we stepped into the street,
A train came thundering by,
Drawn by the snorting iron steed
Swifter than eagles fly.
Rumbled the wheels, the whistle shrieked,
Far rolled the smoky cloud,
Echoed the hills, the valleys shook,
The flying forests bowed."
The trainmen, on the other hand, used no fine phrases. They called it simply "Number Seventeen"; and, when it started, said it had "pulled out."
On the evening in question, there it stood, nearly ready. Just behind the great hissing locomotive, with its parabolic headlight and its coal-laden tender, came the baggage, mail, and express cars; then the passenger coaches, in which the social condition of the occupants seemed to be in inverse ratio to their distance from the engine. First came emigrants, "honest miners," "cow-boys," and laborers; Irishmen, Germans, Welshmen, Mennonites from Russia, quaint of garb and speech, and Chinamen. Then came long cars full of people of better station, and last the great Pullman "sleepers," in which the busy black porters were making up the berths for well-to-do travellers of diverse nationalities and occupations.
It was a curious study for a thoughtful observer, this motley crowd of human beings sinking all differences of race,
