yer and business
agent. It is a thousand pities that Prince is away in Europe."

Two hours after the carriage had disappeared on the road leading to Elm
Bluff, Leo crossed the grassy lawn, and sat down near the gate, on a
rustic bench under a cluster of tall lilacs, which gave their name to
her uncle's home.

A keen north wind whistling through neighboring walnut tree tops, drove
the dying leaves like frightened flocks before it, and ever and anon
the ripened nuts pattered down, hiding themselves under the drift of
yellow foliage, that had sheltered them in cool greenery during summer
heats. Overhead a red squirrel barked and frisked, and across the
pale-blue sky, feathered nomads, teal or mallard, moved swiftly en
echelon, their quivering pinions flashing like silver, as they fled
southward. On a distant hillside cattle browsed, and sheep wandered;
and the drowsy tinkle of bells, as the herd wended homeward, seemed a
nocturne of rest, for the closing day.

How serene, harmonious and holy all nature appeared; and yet a few
miles distant, into what a fierce seething whirlpool of conflicting
passions, of hatred and bloodthirsty vengeance, had human crime plunged
an entire community. We plume ourselves upon nineteenth century
civilization, upon ethical advancement, upon Christian progress; we
adorn our cathedrals, build temples for art treasures, and museums for
science, and listen to preludes of the "music of the future;" and we
shudder at the mention of vice, as at the remembrance of the tortures
of Regulus, but will the Cain type ever become extinct, like the dodo,
or the ichthyosaurus? When will the laws of heredity, and the by-laws
of agnation result in an altruism, where human bloodshed is an unknown
horror?

The apostles of Evolution tell us, that in the genealogical ages during
which man has struggled upward, from the lower stages of vertebrate and
mammal to the genus of catarrhine apes, he has gradually thrown off
bestial instincts, and that the tiger taint will ultimately be totally
eliminated; that "original sin is neither more nor less than the brute
inheritance which every man carries with him, and that Evolution is an
advance toward true salvation." Meanwhile what becomes of the "Survival
of the Fittest", which is only a euphemism for the strangling of the
feeble by the strong? We can understand how perfection, or permanence
of type, individual and national, demands carnage, and entails all the
dire cata