of them had been heroes and some poets. The stealthy
boyish reader of romantic chronicle at Sidon had learned by heart the
chivalrous story of the emigration. The second column of the "Clarion"
became famous even while the figure of its youthful writer, unknown and
unrecognized, was still nightly climbing the sands of Russian Hill, and
even looking down as before on the lights of the growing city, without a
thought that he had added to that glittering constellation.

Cheerful and contented with the exercise of work, he would have been
happy but for the gradual haunting of another dread which presently
began to drag him at earlier hours up the steep path to his little home;
to halt him before the door with the quickened breath of an anxiety he
would scarcely confess to himself, and sometimes hold him aimlessly a
whole day beneath his roof. For the pretty but delicate Mrs. Harcourt,
like others of her class, had added a weak and ineffective maternity
to their other conjugal trials, and one early dawn a baby was born that
lingered with them scarcely longer than the morning mist and exhaled
with the rising sun. The young wife regained her strength slowly,--so
slowly that the youthful husband brought his work at times to the house
to keep her company. And a singular change had come over her. She no
longer talked of the past, nor of his family. As if the little life
that had passed with that morning mist had represented some ascending
expiatory sacrifice, it seemed to have brought them into closer
communion.

Yet her weak condition made him conceal another trouble that had come
upon him. It was in the third month of his employment on the "Clarion"
that one afternoon, while correcting some proofs on his chief's desk, he
came upon the following editorial paragraph:--

"The played-out cant of 'pioneer genius' and 'pioneer discovery' appears
to have reached its climax in the attempt of some of our contemporaries
to apply it to Dan Harcourt's new Tasajara Job before the legislature.
It is perfectly well known in Harcourt's own district that, far from
being a pioneer and settler HIMSELF he simply succeeded after a
fashion to the genuine work of one Elijah Curtis, an actual pioneer
and discoverer, years before, while Harcourt, we believe, was keeping a
frontier doggery in Sidon, and dispensing 'tanglefoot' and salt junk
to the hayfooted Pike Countians of his precinct. This would make him as
much of the 'pioneer discoverer' as the