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pasted bright gilt and red prints, which no one knows how many years past had been torn from bales of Mexican bayeta. Above, carefully secured by little pegs, was a photograph of Colonel Stevenson, which the latter had given the Governor before leaving, and which the Indians had designed as my companion. On my return I was so cordially greeted that I could no longer doubt the good intentions of the Zuñis toward me.

My foster father and many other of the principal men of the tribe, now insisted that my ears be pierced. I steadily refused; but they persisted, until at last it occurred to me that there must be some meaning in their urgency, and I determined to yield

their request. They procured some raw Moqui cotton, which they twisted into rolls about as large as an ordinary lead-pencil. Then they brought a large bowl of clear cold water and placed it before a rug in the eastern part of the room. K'iawu presently came through the door-way, arrayed in her best dress, with a sacred cotton mantle thrown over her shoulders and abundant white shell beads on her neck. I was placed kneeling on the rug, my face toward the east. My old father, then solemnly removing his moccasins, approached me, needle and cotton in hand. He began a little shuffling dance around me, in time to a prayer chant to the sun. At the pauses in the chant he would reach out and grasp gently the lobe of my left ear. Each time he grasped, I braced up to endure the prick, until finally, when I least expected it, he ran the needle through. The chant was repeated. and the other ear grasped and pierced in the same way. As soon as the rolls of cotton had been drawn through, both the old man and K'iawu dipped their hands in the water, prayed over them, and, at the close of the prayer, sprinkled my head, and scattered the water about like rain-drops on the floor, after which they washed my hands and face, and dried them with the cotton mantle.

A BIVOUAC IN THE VALLEY OF THE PINES.

I could not understand the whole prayer; but it contained beautiful passages, recommending me to the gods as a "Child of the Sun," and a "Son of the Coru people of earth" (the sacred name for the priests of Zuñi). At its close, the old man said-" And thus become thou my son, Té-na-tsa-li," and the old woman followed him with, "This day thou art made my younger brother, Té-na-tsali." Various other members of the little group then came forward, repeating the ceremonial and prayer, and closing with one or the other of the above sentences, and the distinct pronunciation of my new name.

When all was over, my father took me to the window, and, looking down with a smile on his face, explained that I was "named after a magical plant which grew on a single mountain in the west, the flowers of which were the most beautiful in the world, and of many colors, and the roots and juices of which were a panacea for all injuries to the flesh of man. That by this name,- which only one man in a generation could bear,would I be known as long as the sun rose and set, and smiled on the Coru people of earth, as a Shi wi (Zuñi)."

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SADDE songe is out of season

When birdes and lovers mate,

When soule to soule must paye swete toll
And fate be joyned with fate;

Sadde songe and wofull thought controle
This constant heart of myne,

And make newe love a treason
Unto my Valentine.

How shall my wan lippes utter
Their summons to the dedde,-

Where nowe repeate the promise swete,
So farre my love hath fledd?

My onely love! What musicke fleet
Shall crosse the walle that barres?
To earthe the burthen mutter,

Or singe it to the starrs.

Perchance she dwelles a spirite
In beautye undestroyed

Where brightest starrs are closely sett
Farre out beyonde the voyd;

If Margaret be risen yet

Her looke will hither turne,

I knowe that she will heare it
And all my trewe heart learne.

But if no resurrection

Unseale her dwellinge low,

If one so fayre must bide her there
Until the trumpe shall blowe,
Nathlesse shall Love outvie Despaire,
(Whilst constant heart is myne)

And, robbed of her perfection,

Be faithfull to her shrine.

At this blythe season bending

Ile whisper to the clodde,

To the chill grasse where shadowes passe

And leaflesse branches nodde;

There keepe my watche, and crye-Alas

That Love may not forget,

That Joye must have swifte ending
And Life be laggard yet!

Edmund Clarence Stedman.

A WOMAN'S REASON.*

BY W. D. HOWELLS,

Author of "Venetian Life," "A Chance Acquaintance," "A Modern Instance," etc.

I.

THE day had been very oppressive, and at half-past five in the afternoon the heat had scarcely abated, to the perception of Mr. Joshua Harkness, as he walked heavily up the Park street mall in Boston Common. When he came opposite the Brewer Fountain, with its Four Seasons of severe drouth, he stopped short, and stared at the bronze group with its insufficient dribble, as if he had never seen it before. Then he felt infirmly about the ground with his stick, stepped aside, and sank tremulously into one of the seats at the edge of the path. The bench was already partly occupied by a young man and a young woman; the young man had his arm thrown along the back of the seat behind the young woman; their heads were each tilted toward the other, and they were making love almost as frankly in that public place as they might in the seclusion of a crowded railway train. They both glanced at the intruder, and exchanged smiles, apparently of pity for his indecency, and then went on with their lovemaking, while Mr. Harkness, unconscious of his offense, stared eagerly out over the Common, and from time to time made gestures or signals with his stick in that direction. It was that one day of the week when people are not shouted at by a multitude of surly sign-boards to keep off the grass, and the turf was everywhere dotted with lolling and lounging groups. Perhaps, to compensate for the absence of the sign-boards (which would reappear over night like a growth of disagreeable fungi), there was an unusual number of policemen sauntering about, and it was one of these whom Mr. Harkness was trying to attract with his cane. If any saw him, none heeded, and he had to wait till a policeman came down the mall in front of him. This could not have been so long a time as it seemed to Mr. Harkness, who was breathing thickly, and, now and then, pressing his hand against his forehead, like one who tries to stay a reeling brain.

"Please call a carriage," he panted, as the officer, whom he had thrust in the side with his cane, stopped and looked down at him; VOL. XXV.-48.

*

and then, as the man seemed to hesitate, he added: " My name is Harkness; I live at 9 Beacon Steps; I wish to go home at once; I've been taken faint."

Beacon Steps is not Beacon street, but it is of like blameless social tradition, and the name, together with a certain air of moneyed respectability in Mr. Harkness, had its effect with the policeman.

"Sick?" he asked. "Well, you are pale. You just hold on a minute. Heh, there! heh!" he shouted to a passing hackman, who promptly stopped, turned his horses, and drew up beside the curb next the Common. "Now you take my arm, Mr. Harkness, and I'll help you to the carriage." He raised the gentleman to his benumbed feet, and got him away through the gathering crowd; when he was gone, the crowd continued to hang about the place where he had been sitting, in such numbers that the young man first took his arm down from the back of the seat and the young woman tilted her head away from his, and then they both, with vexed and impatient looks, rose and walked away, seeking some other spot for the renewal of their courtship.

The policeman had not been able to refrain from driving home with Mr. Harkness, whom he patronized on the way with a sort of municipal kindness; and for whom, when he had got him indoors and comfortably stretched upon a lounge in the library, he wanted to go and call the doctor. But Mr. Harkness refused, saying that he had had these attacks before, and would soon be all right. He thanked the officer by his name, after asking him for it, and the officer went away, leaving Mr. Harkness to the care of the cook, who, in that mid-summer time, seemed to have sole charge of the house and its master. The policeman flipped the dust from the breast and collar of his coat, in walking back to his beat, with the right feeling of a man who would like to be better prepared if summoned a second time to befriend a gentleman of Mr. Harkness's standing, and to meet, in coming out of his house, a young lady of such beauty and elegance as he had just encountered. This young lady, as he closed the door behind

Copyright, 1882, by W. D. Howells. All rights reserved.

him, had run up the steps with the loop of her train in one hand, after the fashion of ten years ago, and in the other a pretty traveling-bag, carried with the fearlessness of a lady who knows that people are out of town. She glanced a little wonderingly, a little defiantly, at the policeman, who, seeing that she must drop one or other of her burdens to ring, politely rang for her.

"Thank you!" said the young lady, speaking a little more wonderingly, a little more defiantly than she had looked.

"Quite welcome, Miss," returned the policeman, and touched his hat in going down the steps, while the young lady turned and stared after him, leaning a little over the top step on which she stood, with her back to the door. She was very pretty indeed, with blue eyes at once tender and honest, and the fair hair, that goes with her beauty, hanging loosely upon her forehead. Her cheeks, in their young perfection of outline, had a flush beyond their usual delicate color; the heat, and her eager dash up the steps, had suffused them with a dewy bloom, that seemed momently to deepen and soften. Her loveliness was saved from the insipidity of faultless lines by a little downward curve, a quirk, or call it dimple, at one corner of her mouth, which, especially in repose, gave it a touch of humorous feeling and formed its final charm: it seemed less a trait of face than of character. That fine positive grace, which is called style, and which is so eminently the gift of exquisite nerves, had not cost her too much; she was slim, but not fragile, and her very motionlessness suggested a vivid, bird-like mobility; she stood as if she had alighted upon the edge of the step. At the opening of the door behind her she turned alertly from the perusal of the policeman's retreating back, and sprang within.

"How d' do, Margaret ?" She greeted the cook in a voice whose bright kindness seemed a translation of her girlish beauty into sound. "Surprised to see me?" She did not wait for the cook's answer, but put down her bag and began pulling off her gloves, after shaking out her skirt, and giving that penetrating sidelong downward look at it which women always give their drapery at moments of arrival or departure. She turned into the drawing-room from the hall, and went up to the long, oldfashioned mirror, and glanced at the face which it dimly showed her in the close-shuttered room. Her face had apparently not changed since she last saw it in that mirror, and one might have fancied that the young lady was somehow surprised at this.

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garet?" she demanded of the cook's image, which, further down in the mirror, hesitated at the doorway.

"He come home with your father, Miss Helen," answered the cook, and as Helen turned round and stared at her in the flesh, she continued: "He had one of his faint turns in the Common. He's laying down in the library now, Miss Helen."

"Oh, poor papa!" wailed the young lady, who knew that in spite of the cook's pronoun, it could not be the policeman who was then reposing from faintness in the library. She whirled away from the mirror, and swooped through the doorway into the hall, and back into the room where her father lay. "The heat has been too much for him," she moaned, in mixed self-reproach and compassion, as she flew; and she dropped upon her knees beside him, and fondly caressed his gray head, and cooed and lamented over him, with the irreverent tenderness he liked her to use with him.

"Poor old fellow," she murmured. "It's too bad! You're working yourself to death, and I'm going to stay with you now, and put a stop to your being brought home by policemen. Why, you ought to be ashamed, breaking down in this way, as soon as my back is turned? Has Margaret done everything for you? Wouldn't you like a little light?" She started briskly to her feet, flung up the long window, and raising and lowering the shade to get the right level for her father's eyes, stood silhouetted against the green space without: a grass plot between high brick walls, on one of which clambered a grapevine, and on the other a wistaria, while a bed of bright-leafed plants gave its color in the center of the yard. "There!" she said, with a glance at the succinct landscape. "That's the prettiest bit of nature I've seen since I left Boston." She came back and sat down on a low chair beside her father, who smiled fondly upon her, and took one of her hands to hold, while she pushed back his hair with the other.

"Are you awfully glad to see me?" "Awfully," said Mr. Harkness, falling in with her mood, and brightening with the light and her presence. "What brought you so suddenly ?"

"Oh, that's a long story. Are you feeling better now ?"

"Yes. I was merely faint. I shall be all right by morning. I've been a little worn out."

"Was it like the last time?" asked Helen. "Yes," said her father.

"A little more like ?"

"I don't think it was more severe," said Mr. Harkness, thoughtfully.

"What had you been doing? Honor walking through the burnt district, and seeing bright, now; was it accounts ? "

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how handsomely it had been rebuilt, she had a comforting sense that its losses had all been repaired.

"You look a little flushed and excited, my dear," said her father, in evasion of the commands laid upon him, and he touched her fair cheek. He was very fond of her beauty and of her style; in the earlier days of her young ladyhood he used to go about with her a great deal, and was angry when he thought she did not get all the notice she ought, and a little jealous when she did.

"Yes, I am flushed and excited, papa," she owned, throwing herself back in the low chair she had pulled up to his sofa, and beginning to pluck nervously at those little tufts of silk that roughened the cobwebby fabric of the gray summer stuff she wore. "Don't you think," she asked, lifting her downcast eyes, "that coming home and finding you in this state is enough to make me look flushed and excited?"

"Not quite," said her father quietly. "It's not a new thing."

Helen gave a sort of lamentable laugh. "I know I was humbugging, and I'm as selfish as I can be, to think more of myself even now than I do of you. But, oh, papa! I'm so unhappy!" She looked at him through a mist that gathered and fell in silent drops from her eyes without clearing them, so that she did not see him carry the hand she had abandoned to his heart, and check a gasp. "I suppose we all have our accounts, one way or other, and they get confused like yours. Mine with-with-a certain person had got so mixed up that there was nothing for it but just to throw them away."

Harkness smiled, as wearily as he had sighed. He knew that she was burlesquing somewhat her ignorance of affairs; and yet it was not much burlesqued, after all; for her life, like that of other American girls of prosperous parentage, had been almost as much set apart from the hard realities of bread-winning as the life of a princess, as entirely dedicated to society, to the studies that refine, and the accomplishments that grace society. The question of money had hardly entered into it. Since she was a little child, and used to climb upon her father's knee, and ask him, in order to fix his status in her fairy tales, whether he was rich or poor, she might be said never to have fairly thought of that matter. Of course, she understood that she was not so rich as some girls, but she had never found that the difference was against her in society; she could not help perceiving that in regard to certain of them it was in her favor, and that she might have patronized them if she had liked, and that they were glad of her friendship on any terms. Her father's great losses had come when she was too young to see the difference that they made in his way of living; ever since she could remember they had kept to the same scale of simple ease in the house where she was born, and she had known no wish that "I don't know whether you call it finally," there had not been money enough to gratify. said Helen, "but I told him it was no use Pleasures of every kind had always come to not just in those words-and that he ought her as freely and with as little wonder on her to forget me; and I was afraid I wasn't equal part as if they had been, like her youth, her to it; and that I couldn't see my way to it bounding health, her beauty, the direct gift clearly; and unless I could see my way of heaven. She knew that the money came clearly, I oughtn't to go on any longer. I from her father's business, but she had never wrote to him last week, and I thought—I really asked herself how it was earned. It is thought that perhaps he wouldn't answer it; doubtful if she could have told what his busi- perhaps he would come over to Rye Beach ness was; it was the India trade, whatever he could easily have run over from Portsthat was, and of late years he had seemed to mouth-to see me-about it. But he didn't, be more worried by it than he used to be, and he didn't,-he-wrote a very short letter she had vaguely taken this ill as an ungrate--oh, I didn't see how he could write such a ful return on the part of business. Once he had gone so far as to tell her that he had been hurt by the Great Fire somewhat. But the money for all her needs and luxuries (she was not extravagant, and really did not spend much upon herself) had come as before, and

"Do you mean that you have broken with him finally, Helen ?" asked her father gravely.

letter; I tried to spare him in every way; and yesterday he-he- -s-s-sailed!" Here the storm broke, and Helen bowed herself to the sobs with which her slimness shook, like a tall flower beaten in the wind. Then she suddenly stopped, and ran her

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