s you advised, and planked down a check for
five hundred dollars the minute I got there. 'Now,' said I, 'Bob Jarvis
don't do things by halves; just you take that money, my girl, and get
yourself a ring that's equal to the occasion. I don't care if it's a
cluster of solitary diamonds as big as a section of well-pipe.' Now, I
call that square, don't you? Well, God bless your soul, madam, if she
didn't take that money and skip out with another fellow! Some
white-livered city sneak--beggin' your husband's pardon--who'd been
hangin' around for a year or more. Of course I was stuck when I heard of
it. It was this one told me. She's her sister. I could see that she felt
bad about it. 'It was a nasty, dirty trick,' she said; and I'll
be--demoralized if I don't think so myself, and said so at the time.
But, after all, it turned out a lucky thing for me. Now look at that,
will you?"

I followed his gaze of admiring fondness to where Mrs. Jarvis was,
bridling and simpering under Esculapius's compliments.

"Isn't she a nosegay? But don't you be jealous, madam; she's just
wrapped up in me, and constant," he added, shaking his head
reflectively; "why, bless your soul, she's as constant as sin."

When I told Esculapius of this he sighed deeply.

"What is the matter?" I asked, with some anxiety.

He threw back his head and sent a little dreamy cloud of smoke up
through the acacias.

"I was thinking," he said, pensively, "what a 'wild, strange act of
vengeance' it was!"

I looked him sternly in the eye. "My dear," I said, "I don't think you
ought to distress yourself about that. I never should have reminded you
of it. You were dreaming, you know, and you are not responsible for what
you dream. Besides, dreams are like human nature, they always go by
contraries."

BRICE.

I.

He came up the mountain road at nightfall, urging his lean mustang
forward wearily, and coughing now and then--a heavy, hollow cough that
told its own story.

There were only two houses on the mesa stretching shaggy and sombre with
greasewood from the base of the mountains to the valley below,--two
unpainted redwood dwellings, with their clumps of trailing pepper-trees
and tattered bananas,--mere specks of civilization against a stern
background of mountain-side. The traveler halted before one of them,
bowing awkwardly as the master of the house came out.

"Mr. Brandt, I reckon."

Joel Brandt looked up into the stranger's face. Not a bad fa