ily Chronicle," gesturing with it somewhat
jerkily as he spoke.

For a moment the hope that it is hard to make away with revived in
Lucyet's breast. Were they talking of the poem, she wondered, with a
certain weary interest. She dreaded a fresh disappointment so keenly
that it pained her to speculate much on the chance of it. It was not
impossible that they were saying such meaningless stuff ought never to
have been printed. As the pale girl drew near with the plodding, patient
step which so often proclaims that walking is not a pleasure, but a
necessity, of country life, the men did not lower their voices, which
she heard distinctly as she passed.

"Wal, I tell you, 't was that," said one of them. "He didn't live more'n
a little time after he took it."

"Mebbe he wouldn't have lived anyhow."

"Wal, mebbe he wouldn't. 'T ain't for me to say," responded the first
speaker, evincing a certain piety, which, however, was not to be
construed as at variance with his first statement.

"Wal, 't wa'n't this he took, was it?" demanded the man with the
"Chronicle," waving it wildly.

"Wal, no, 't wa'n't," responded the other, reasonably. The third member
of the party maintained an air of not being in a position to judge, and
regarded Lucyet stolidly as she approached.

"Do, Lucyet?" he observed, unnoticed of the other two.

"I tell you this'll cure him. It'll cure anybody. Just read them
testimonies,"--and he pressed the paper into the other's meagre hand.
"Read that one, 'Rheumatiz of thirty years' standin',--it'll interest
ye."

Lucyet went on up the hill, and turned into the weedy road. She had not
a keen sense of the ridiculous. It did not strike her as funny that they
should have been discussing a patent medicine instead of the verses on
"Spring;" but her shrinking sense of defeat was deepened, and she felt,
with an unconscious resentment, that most people cared very little about
poetry. She wondered, without bitterness, and with a saddened distrust
of her own power, if she could write an advertisement. Once within the
precincts of the tangled road, her disquieted soul rejoiced in the
freedom from observation. She felt as bruised and sore from the
unsympathetic contact of her world as if it had been a larger one; and
with the depression had come a startled sense of the irrevocableness of
what she had done. Those printed words seemed so swift, so tangible.
They would go so far, and afford such opportunity for the gra