ed curtsey to the Judge, then held out her hand, as
though to reassert her democratic equality.

As the Judge looked at Madame Barbille, he was involuntarily, but none
the less industriously, noting her characteristics; and the sum of his
reflections, after a few moments' talk, was that dangers he had seen
ahead of Jean Jacques, would not be averted by his wife, indeed might
easily have their origin in her.

"I wonder it has gone on as long as it has," he said to himself; though
it seemed unreasonable that his few moments with her, and the story told
him by the Clerk of the Court, should enable him to come to any definite
conclusion. But at eighty-odd Judge Carcasson was a Solon and a Solomon
in one. He had seen life from all angles, and he was not prepared to
give any virtue or the possession of any virtue too much rope; while
nothing in life surprised him.

"How would you like to be a judge?" he asked of Zoe, suddenly taking
her hand in his. A kinship had been at once established between them,
so little has age, position, and intellect to do with the natural
gravitations of human nature.

She did not answer direct, and that pleased him. "If I were a judge
I should have no jails," she said. "What would you do with the bad
people?" he asked.

"I would put them alone on a desert island, or out at sea in a little
boat, or out on the prairies without a horse, so that they'd have to
work for their lives."

"Oh, I see! If M. Fille here set fire to a house, you would drop him on
the prairie far away from everything and everybody and let him 'root hog
or die'?"

"Don't you think it would kill him or cure him?" she asked whimsically.

The Judge laughed, his eyes twinkling. "That's what they did when the
world was young, dear ma'm'selle. There was no time to build jails.
Alone on the prairie--a separate prairie for every criminal--that would
take a lot of space; but the idea is all right. It mightn't provide the
proper degree of punishment, however. But that is being too particular.
Alone on the prairie for punishment--well, I should like to see it
tried."

He remembered that saying of his long after, while yet he was alive,
and a tale came to him from the prairies which made his eyes turn
more intently towards a land that is far off, where the miserable
miscalculations and mistakes of this world are readjusted. Now he was
only conscious of a primitive imagination looking out of a young girl's
face, and making a brid