orating the noun with an
insincerity of flourish that was quite in the spirit of his text, when
he heard a gentle tapping. The woodpeckers had been busy about the
roof during the day, and the noise did not disturb his work. But the
opening of the door, and the tapping continuing from the inside,
caused him to look up. He was slightly startled by the figure of a
young girl, dirty and shabbily clad. Still her great black eyes, her
coarse, uncombed, lusterless black hair falling over her sun-burned
face, her red arms and feet streaked with the red soil, were all
familiar to him. It was Melissa Smith--Smith's motherless child.

"What can she want here?" thought the master. Everybody knew "M'liss,"
as she was called, throughout the length and height of Red Mountain.
Everybody knew her as an incorrigible girl. Her fierce, ungovernable
disposition, her mad freaks and lawless character were in their way as
proverbial as the story of her father's weaknesses, and as
philosophically accepted by the townsfolk. She wrangled with and
fought the schoolboys with keener invective and quite as powerful arm.
She followed the trails with a woodman's craft, and the master had met
her before, miles away, shoeless, stockingless, and bareheaded, on the
mountain road. The miners' camps along the stream supplied her with
subsistence during these voluntary pilgrimages, in freely offered
alms. Not but that a larger protection had been previously extended to
M'liss. The Rev. Joshua McSnagley, "stated" preacher, had placed her
in the hotel as servant, by way of preliminary refinement, and had
introduced her to his scholars at Sunday school. But she threw plates
occasionally at the landlord, and quickly retorted to the cheap
witticisms of the guests, and created in the Sabbath school a
sensation that was so inimical to the orthodox dulness and placidity
of that institution, that, with a decent regard for the starched
frocks and unblemished morals of the two pink-and-white-faced children
of the first families, the reverend gentleman had her ignominiously
expelled. Such were the antecedents, and such the character of M'liss,
as she stood before the master. It was shown in the ragged dress, the
unkempt hair, and bleeding feet, and asked his pity. It flashed from
her black, fearless eyes, and commanded his respect.

"I come here to-night," she said rapidly and boldly, keeping her hard
glance on his, "because I knew you was alone. I wouldn't come here
w