on prosaic creation.

"'Pears like I can't git my breath good in them flat countries," says
Jenkins Hollis to himself, as "John Barleycorn" improves his speed
under the exhilarating influence of the wind. "I'm nigh on to
sifflicated every time I goes down yander ter Colbury" (with a jerk of
his wooden head in the direction of the village).

Long stretches of woods are on either side of the road now, with no
sign of the changing season in the foliage save the slender, pointed,
scarlet leaves and creamy plumes of the sourwood, gleaming here and
there; and presently another panorama of open country unrolls to the
view. Two or three frame houses appear with gardens and orchards, a
number of humble log cabins, and a dingy little store, and the
Cross-Roads are reached. And here the conclusive intelligence meets
the party that Jacob and Cynthia were married by Parson Jones an hour
ago, and were still "a-kitin'," at last accounts, out on the road to
Old Bear.

The pursuit stayed its ardor. On the auspicious day when Jenkins
Hollis took the blue ribbon at the County Fair and won the saddle and
bridle he lost his daughter.

They saw Cynthia no more until late in the autumn when she came,
without a word of self-justification or apology for her conduct, to
lend her mother a helping hand in spinning and weaving her little
brothers' and sisters' clothes. And gradually the _eclat_ attendant
upon her nuptials was forgotten, except that Mrs. Hollis now and then
remarks that she "dunno how we could hev bore up agin Cynthy's
a-runnin' away like she done, ef it hedn't a-been fur that thar saddle
an' bridle an' takin' the blue ribbon at the County Fair."

THE CASTING VOTE.

I.

An election of civil and judicial officers was impending in Kildeer
County when a comet appeared in the July sky, a mysterious, aloof,
uncanny presence, that invaded the night and the stereotyped routine
of nature with that gruesome effect of the phenomenal which gives to
the mind so definite a realization of how dear and secure is the
prosaic sense of custom.

All the lenses of the great observatories of the world had, in a
manner, sought to entertain the strange visitant of the heavens. The
learned had gone so far as to claim its acquaintance, to recognize it
as the returning comet of a date long gone by. It even carried amidst
its shining glories, along the far unimagined ways of its orbit, the
name of a human being--of the man who had discover