"Ah, it was all so beautiful to-day-so perfect, and the scent of her hair is still upon my cheek."

But there came a day in late October when he labored for breath and could not move from the couch. I guessed that the end was not far away, and when the attending physician came he did not leave again. Toward evening Hugh could not speak above a whisper. I said:

"Is there any one I can bring to you, or send for?"

He looked at me meaningly.

"No," he said, "you cannot bring her. But she will be here. Afterward you will understand."

He died without speaking again, a little before sunrise. I lay down then, and exhaustion overcame me. When I awoke some one had laid a note on the table by my bed. It was written in Hugh's feeble hand, and dated the evening of the day we had walked across the fields. It only said:

"It is ended now; you may climb the marble stair."

It was bright and still as I came out into the field of cedars and bay, and passed through the wall and looked down upon the white cascade of steps that led from the sunken garden through the wild tangle to the fringed hilltop beyond. The goldenrod and aster were faded, the sumac had taken on a duller red, but the marble flight gleamed in the morning sunlight,

and my pulse grew quicker in the thought of what I was about to learn.

I could discover no path leading from the stone seat down to the landing-stair, but perhaps Hugh had another way of approach. I noticed too as I came near that the stairs had an unused look. Dust and leaves that had drifted into the steps did not seem to have been recently disturbed. I climbed slowly, though I confess with an eager heart. At the top of the last flight a marble footway wound into a group of cedars, and in the midst of these I came upon a marble arch, and a gate. I thought at first that it was ivory -its carving was so delicate-its tint so mellow. It was rich beyond words-its design Oriental. It was like a gate to the Taj Mahal.

I hesitated, not knowing whether to push or knock. I tapped lightly at last and waited, but there came no response. I pushed gently and the beautiful gate opened. I pushed wider, and looked through.

A stretch of meadow-a tapering cedar here and there-birds dipping down as they swung across it, under the blue sky. Nothing more than that. No vision of the Orient, no court of fountains and slender colonnades; no marble balconies full of light and love and music. With Estabrook had vanished the airy architecture of his dream. It had been only his, as he said-the palace of his soul.

II

WENT down the gangway at Liverpool about six paces behind Jane. I did not catch up with her permanently during our travels. Indeed, I doubt if I shall ever walk abreast of Jane for long in this life. The prow calls to her, but my disposition is toward the rudder end of things. We meet amidships a great deal and consult freely, but when it is a matter of getting under way, Jane's decisions are apt to be prompter than mine and her firm steps, toeing out, almost always precede my more deliberate ones.

There was a special train. The stewards brought along our impediments and piled them in a suitable heap in the station under our letter. But our trunk from the hold did not join them. I had to go back on board and take advice about it and then locate it among the custom-house officials, and then catch a porter, and reassure Jane, who had also run it down. We got seats, but I had to hurry, which is undesirable; and I had to think, which was what I did not want to do. I had furnished myself with plenty of assorted silver pieces, and aspired just to let things happen without haste or thought, and be gently conducted to London. When you come to a country which has a going civilization, why not sit down and ride in it? I was for having the British civilization carry me all it would, and willing enough to drop in the necessary coins and have it do it in its own time and fashion.

For the truth was, though I did not recognize it, that I was still tired. I had pictured to myself getting completely rested aboard ship from all my eons of toil in about five days, and springing ashore

refreshed and eager like a patent-medicine hero "after taking." But it was not so. I was still tired. Possibly I had exerted myself too much to make acquaintances, but I had to have them and I could not get them without exertion. Neither could I abandon all at once the general habit of exertion. While I was making the acquaintances, Jane rested, and so kept fresher than I and better able to converse with them when provided, and she gave me comfort after we had landed by assurance that it was the general sentiment of our friends of experience in seagoing that we had had rather a languid voyage, warmer than usual and less stimulating. That was consoling, though I had not known before that anything ailed the voyage. It had finished being warm. We had no further trouble about that in all our travels. And so the porter put us in the London train.

I never had much fault to find with the British porter-and-sixpence system for baggage. You have nothing to show for your trunk when you give it up but the British constitution, and that is not written, but you have to take things as you find them, and under the British system we usually found all the things we took, even our umbrellas. And the British railway porter is a lovely institution. He is the real father of his country. I was in a perfect frame to appreciate his fatherliness. I wanted him to do all the work, including the necessary thinking, and he did it. I loved to have him hustle in and find us proper seats in trains. In that particular of service I am seldom able to realize Jane's reasonable expectations, but the British porter did and I honored him for it with admiration and shillings.

And isn't a shilling a dear little talisman? I was so pleased with them. They do so much for you, and leave you with a cheerful glow and a sense of having parted with a true friend. You can get quite a lot of them for five dollars and they are

leave. I tried to keep always provided with shillings and their silver fractions, and duly also with pennies, which are is sued in England in large folio editions. I can remember when our honorable little cents were of a dignified amplitude like that. Did they buy more then, do you suppose? Certainly they were of more relative importance in the scheme of things than cents are now, and I'm not sure but that it would be an operation worth trying on the high cost of living to make them big again.

We went up to London and stayed there three days: seeing people that I aspired, or had agreed, to see, getting

VOL. LVI.-27

a little at London, but we did not count those days as travel at all, but merely as preparation, and when the morning was the fourth day we took a train for York.

Every traveller to his taste about railway vehicles. For my part, I like the British trains. They are like the British hotels in being more domestic than ours. My imagination is a better habitat for me when I can smoke a little; Jane doesn't mind tobacco smoke in moderation, so she and I in our travels up and down England usually got into a smoking-carriage. And when we didn't we were apt, if we went first-class, to have a carriage to ourselves with smoking privileges. That is real

luxury in travel, much more of it, it seems to me, than the Pullman Company, or any railroad company, gives us here at home. If a traveller would smoke on one of our trains he must detach himself from what is conceded to be the chief refining, uplifting, and improving influence of American life, and go off to the end of the train and smoke with a lot of overfumigated men. That makes smoking too important, also too troublesome. I dare say we ought not to smoke at all; but if one is ever to smoke it will be when he travels, and to insist and plan that he shall have tobacco only at cost of detachment from his great Antidote, is so mistaken as to be almost immoral.

I was very glad to sit by the window opposite my Antidote on our various stages of travel to Edinburgh and back, and smoke a cigarette from time to time or keep a pipe alight, without foregoing the solace of her companionship. Besides that, to my mind the seats of a good English railway carriage are more agreeably sustaining than Pullman seats are, and its windows that lower from the top are vastly better to look out of than ours that raise from the bottom and put a broad band of wood across the field of vision. The British railway windows beat ours; there is no doubt of it. In some of them a heavy pane of plate glass slides up and down in its slot, so wherever it stops there is nothing to obstruct the vision. Our car-windows are bad. The

great mass of our patient people don't know it, because they never see any other kind, but in the elimination of the blemishes on our civilization, now so fairly proceeding, the turn of the car-windows will come after a while and they will be made to let down like carriage-windows, instead of opening upward like portcullises.

At least, I think they will. Of course it is possible that a wheel may come off our chariot of progress before it gets to car-windows. Or the good English may conclude that our kind of railroading is better adapted to the needs of a democratic society than theirs is, and adopt it, car-windows and all. I hope they won't. We get enough of ours at home.

Jane kept pointing out to me the poppies in the wheat. The flowers that I have seen used at home for the embellishment of wheat-fields have usually been Canada thistles, field daisies, mustard, and wild carrot, which do well enough, but are not to be compared with poppies for purposes of agricultural decoration. I was charmed with the poppies; also with the churches, little and big; also with the harvest, which was proceeding everywhere as we went along. They seem to plant and reap in that country just as diligently as though there were no wheat-fields in Minnesota and Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and no daily assurance that England would starve immediately Britannia eased up the least mite in her historic employment of ruling the

wave. Once we saw cathedral towers in the distance. Now and then we passed a town with a tall, high-shouldered abbey church. There has not been much in our newspapers about the abbeys in the last twenty years, and I had pretty much forgotten about them. Of course they are our abbeys which we had to leave behind when we migrated, and I was gradually and increasingly interested in rediscovering them. One can't forget the cathedrals. They are too big and beautiful and well preserved, but the whole tale of civilization by abbeys and the final decline and collapse of that system had slipped out of my mind. It may be that our excellent country is at some disadvantage in not being littered up with any remnants of the middle ages. They make one think, those remnants do. We have some Indian mounds and those curious Aztec ruins in Central America and some cliff-dwellings and such things that may be middle-aged. But they are not our family properties. They are things that we have moved in on top of; but these British abbeys and cathedrals, and old parish

churches, and more in Normandy, and more and various other reminders in Germany and Italy and the rest of Europe, are the very mould in which we were cast. I did not do more on this journey than discover that the ruined abbeys existed. We missed the best of them, which are accessible from York, and saw only those that we stumbled over because they were in our way. But discovery is something, for, after all, the main fact about them is that they were, and lasted longer than anything of ours has lasted yet in North America, and are not.

Which of our cherished and heavily endowed institutions do you suppose will in due time fulfil their mission and go the way of the abbeys? We have nothing I can think of to compare with them except our apparatus of education, which runs so fast nowadays to brick, stone, marble, and cement. Is it conceivable that some day the soul of man will rise up against our cherished universities and declare that the shell of them has grown too heavy for the snail, that they have run too much to bricks and stone and not enough to spir