er" fluttered weekly, for "ten dollars a year, in advance."
Insufferable in the glare of a Sabbath sun, bleak, windy, and flaring in
the gloom of a Sabbath night, and hopelessly depressing on all days of
the week, the First Presbyterian Church lifted its blunt steeple from
the barrenest area of the flats, and was hideous! The civic improvements
so enthusiastically contemplated by the five millionaires in the earlier
pages of this veracious chronicle--the fountain, reservoir, town-hall,
and free library--had not yet been erected. Their sites had been
anticipated by more urgent buildings and mining works, unfortunately
not considered in the sanguine dreams of the enthusiasts, and, more
significant still, their cost and expense had been also anticipated by
the enormous outlay of their earnings in the work upon Devil's Ditch.

Nevertheless, the liberal fulfilment of their promise in the new house
in the suburbs blinded the young girls' eyes to their shortcomings in
the town. Their own remoteness and elevation above its feverish life
kept them from the knowledge of much that was strange, and perhaps
disturbing to their equanimity. As they did not mix with the immigrant
women--Miss Jessie's good-natured intrusion into one of their
half-nomadic camps one day having been met with rudeness and
suspicion--they gradually fell into the way of trusting the
responsibility of new acquaintances to the hands of their original
hosts, and of consulting them in the matter of local recreation. It thus
occurred that one day the two girls, on their way to the main street for
an hour's shopping at the Villa de Paris and Variety Store, were stopped
by Dick Mattingly a few yards from their house, with the remark that, as
the county election was then in progress, it would be advisable for
them to defer their intention for a few hours. As he did not deem it
necessary to add that two citizens, in the exercise of a freeman's
franchise, had been supplementing their ballots with bullets, in front
of an admiring crowd, they knew nothing of that accident that removed
from Devil's Ford an entertaining stranger, who had only the night
before partaken of their hospitality.

A week or two later, returning one morning from a stroll in the forest,
Christie and Jessie were waylaid by George Kearney and Fairfax, and,
under pretext of being shown a new and romantic trail, were diverted
from the regular path. This enabled Mattingly and Maryland Joe to cut
down t