es met in sudden hopeful animation. Had they solved even one
strand of the great tangle, that worse than Gordian knot which could not
be cut?

The door opened slowly; and there entered a middle-aged, rather grizzled
man, with shaggy eyebrows, sparse beard, and bent shoulders. He glanced
in hesitatingly, his eyes wandering down to Darcy.

"I declare to man!" and he stared hard, with the door-knob still in his
hand. "Jack Darcy! I heard you were home. How d'y do? How d'y do?" and
he wrung the hand warmly. "I'm powerful glad to see you," and he looked
him slowly over, from head to foot. "Why, you've grown, or something!
What a great giant you are!--Morning, doctor," nodding rather
incidentally to Maverick. "So you've had a long tramp, Jack? Your mother
brought some of the letters over to my old lady, who has been rather
poorly the last two months. Why, you could set up book-writing! Well,
what's the good word? Can't be like Yerbury all over."

"There are too many towns full of idle people, if that is what you mean.
But it was splendid, Cameron! I have one more dream,--to go up and down
the Western coast, and over the Rocky Mountains; but I want to digest
this first. I have no fancy for mental dyspepsia," and he gave a good,
wholesome laugh.

"The right way, Jack," nodded Maverick, with a shrewd twinkle in his
eye.

"Well, you've come back to a dull place,--a dull place," and Cameron
shook his head despondingly. "We used to be main proud of old Yerbury;
but--is the whole world to go on and starve to death, with such crops,
and such an abundance of every thing?"

"We are going to weather it through, Cameron," Jack answered with a
stubborn hopefulness. "There have been hard times before that have ended
in renewed prosperity."

"Yes. There was '57; hard enough, Heaven knows, with the banks going to
smash everywhere. It ruined my father. And way back in '37, when there
was such a wild-fire about real estate, and it came out just as this
has. Do people ever learn by experience, Maverick?" and the man gave a
short, unmirthful chuckle. "You could buy up half Yerbury to-day, for
taxes and mortgages. I can't, for the life of me, see how it all came
about. And that it has gone all over the world,--well, human nature in
England or Germany can't well laugh at human nature in this
country.--Are these things like cholera and fevers, doctor, taking a
clean sweep once in a while?" and Cameron gave a twist to the end of his
faded b