ted his right hand authoritatively. "Wait!" he said. "Do not
say what thou wilt repent, Victor Dubois. Thy granddaughter hath
promised to be my wife."

So the new generation avenged the old; and Willan Blaycke, in the prime
of his cultured and fastidious manhood, fell victim to a spell less
coarsely woven but no less demoralizing than that which had imbittered
the last years of his father's life.

[Footnote: Note.--"The Inn of the Golden Pear" includes three chapters
of a longer story entitled "Elspeth Pynevor,"--a story of such
remarkable vigor and promise, and planned on such noble and powerful
lines as to deepen regret that its author's death left it but half
finished. A single sentence has been added by another hand to round the
episode of Willan Blaycke's infatuation to conclusion.]

The Mystery of Wilhelm Ruetter.

It was long past dusk of an August evening. Farmer Weitbreck stood
leaning on the big gate of his barnyard, looking first up and then down
the road. He was chewing a straw, and his face wore an expression of
deep perplexity. These were troublous times in Lancaster County. Never
before had the farmers been so put to it for farm service; harvest-time
had come, and instead of the stream of laborers seeking employment,
which usually at this season set in as regularly as river freshets in
spring, it was this year almost impossible to hire any one.

The explanation of this nobody knew or could divine; but the fact was
indisputable, and the farmers were in dismay,--nobody more so than
Farmer Weitbreck, who had miles of bottom-lands, in grain of one sort
and another, all yellow and nodding, and ready for the sickle, and
nobody but himself and his son John to swing scythe, sickle, or flail on
the place.

"Never I am caught this way anoder year," thought he, as he gazed
wearily up and down the dark, silent road; "but that does to me no goot
this time that is now."

Gustavus Weitbreck had lived so long on his Pennsylvania farm that he
even thought in English instead of in German, and, strangely enough, in
English much less broken and idiomatic than that which he spoke. But his
phraseology was the only thing about him that had changed. In modes of
feeling, habits of life, he was the same he had been forty years ago,
when he farmed a little plot of land, half wheat, half vineyard, in the
Mayence meadows in the fatherland,--slow, methodical, saving, stupid,
upright, obstinate. All these traits "Old