they met, below the clerk's bench, there stood a table, upon which, in summer, was placed a bucket of water with a shining dipper. Thitherward the children turned their little pattering steps from all quarters of the building during every part of the service. My desire to join that throng was intense, and the number of fruitless journeys and pantomimic entreaties I made from my end of the pew to my mother at hers for permission to do so I cannot sum up. My life would have had a ruddier glow through all its history, I am sure, had I but once enjoyed the privilege of having old Davy Buck, the sexton, hand me some water out of that cool bucket.

By the bye, he was an institution in the church. I don't think he was ever young. He seemed to have been born old, and never to have grown any older. He made the fires in the huge ten-plate stoves on either side of the pulpit, with which the attempt was made to warm the church. They were insufficient, of course; but Davy was equal to the emergency. Before the hour of worship he would pack bricks within and on top of them, which, when thoroughly heated, he, with a long pair of tongs, would capture and distribute through the pews as the services proceeded. He was a very black man, bent nearly double, and as his large feet turned straight out, his step was slow and heavy, and this scene enacted every Sunday in the winter must have been strangely ludicrous.

Speaking of him recalls another one of his race conspicuous in her zeal for church decorum. There were no negro churches in those days, and the Presbyterian colored people came and occupied the right-hand gallery of that in which their masters worshiped. Colonel Ried's Winnie, a solemn old woman scowling under a big bonnet, sat just above the preacher at the end of a long bench full of children, armed with a switch of great length and most venomous look. Woe betide the little urchin who grew restless or yawned under the long sermon! At the least noise she would rise, and with a precision of aim truly wonderful,

bring down her rod upon the offender with such effect as to restore order immediately.

These were primitive customs, sure enough; but no subsequent times have produced better preachers than those who, standing under that grotesque soundingboard, held fast the attention of the people for a full hour, in spite of old Buck with his peripatetic warming apparatus and old Winnie with her public castigations.

I cannot but feel kindly to the old sexton-not sexton of the church only, but the grave-digger for the town. His quaint figure and reverent air, as he stood leaning on his spade at the head of the grave, asserts its place in my memory, while the preachers and pall-bearers and other conspicuous attendants have entirely faded from it. long ago he died I do not know; but he buried generations of the people before a younger hand performed that last service for him.

How

It must be forty years since the old church was abandoned for a handsome new one in the middle of the town, and very many since it was torn down and its site cut up into burial plots.

As I move among the graves, my mind summons back the friends who lie within them. There are the Blains, and Baxters, and Alexanders, brothers and more distant relatives of Dr. Archibald Alexander of Princeton Theological Seminary; the Grahams also, in whom are blended the Alexander with the blood of the learned and patriotic Rev. William Graham of Liberty Hall memory. Here are the Moores too— Andrew Moore, Sr., who long represented the State in the Senate, as his son, Samuel McDowell Moore, did in the House of Representatives; the Barclays and Davidsons and Cummingses, strong names in the town and country; Dr. Jordan, an excellent physician, and old Colonel Jordan, so energetic in the State's internal improvements; the families of William C. Lewis, and Chapin, and Smith, and Fuller, and Paine-this last lineally descended from John Knox; the Paxtons-Frank Paxton, who fell at the head of the Stonewall brigade at Chancellorsville,

Park Custis" gives at a stroke two or three biographies), and that he had had the honor of being the first to announce to Queen Anne that the battle of Blenheim had been "a glorious victory." I wish I could write out the name and all the honorary distinctions of this august individual, but I much fear that they have faded out of the memory even of his descendants. But if they have, what matter? The Queen remembered the deed, and, as queens are not apt to do, rewarded it. On the mantel stood a pair of tall, very handsome, solid silver candlesticks, one of the dozen pair which the grateful queen had bestowed upon this "one of the Parks" with her own fair hand. How much better the royal gratitude would have appeared in one coronet than in a dozen candlesticks! A gentle tap of her Majesty's finger upon the shoulder of the kneeling Park, as he told his errand, would have sent his name down the ages in the glory of knighthood. She didn't look at it in that light; but, apparently with great good will, gave the dozen pair of candlesticks; and being very much pleased about Blenheim and the Great Duke, and doubtless having an eye to the pleasure of her dear friend "Mrs. Johnson," the Great Duke's wife, she went farther, and added silver urns and bowls with gracious open-handedness. When to these sovereign favors we add the fact that Sir Godfrey Kneller immortalized him on the very canvas before me, we must all admit that Mr. Park received abundant recognition for the agreeable service he rendered.

A couple of portraits, darkened by age, of two or more of the Custis ancestors hang in the hall. In the corner of each were the cross-bones and skull, the sign-manual of Van Dyke. Near them a handsomely framed landscape filled a large space, and bore the legend of having been a target for the Lee boys at Arlington in their earliest attempts at archery. Although I put my mind to it, I left without deciding whether the lack of merit was in the picture or in the boys, that this should be its history.

I must not neglect to mention the little baptismal bowl of General Lee's children

as an object of very pleasant interest. A night or two before my visit General Lee had given a reception to the students, when the silver punch-bowl from Mount Vernon was brought into service, and a table laden with dainties was covered with a dam ask cloth bearing the letters "G. W."

As I lingered among my old haunts, the Washington and Lee Commencement approached; and, as in the olden time, all the hearty and handsome hospitalities of the town were brought into play for this gala season of the year. Young men and maidens were in the ascendant by universal concession. As I heard of their lawn parties and receptions, and yes, even in strict Scotch-Irish Lexington - germans, I wondered if our earlier merry-makings had altogether dropped out of fashion. Gay parties on horseback, in those quieter days, would file through the silent streets while it was yet dark, and, to the chorus of the birds, climb the steep sides of the rugged House Mountain, to catch the glory of a sunrise from

its top. But, splendid as was the view, the pleasure of the excursion could not compare with that of a picnic under the Natural Bridge, sixteen miles off. That furnished a red-letter day in one's history. A number of young ladies and gentlemen, after a very early breakfast, would set out in carriages and buggies and on horseback, to spend the day at the Bridge, a wagon following with the daintiest and most abundant lunch. The road in summer was good, and the scenery for the most part romantic; becoming, however, on nearing the bridge, unkempt and utterly wild. Dismounting at the top, the hilarious throng would wind a long way down the scraggy hill before they came in sight of the grand arch flung high above them, or caught a glimpse of the little stream, dashing and gurgling and eddying amid the big rocks of its narrow bed. A few minutes' walk from that opening view brought them directly under the immense span, where immediately they enter upon the struggle to discover the spread eagle imprinted upon it, with a lion's head under its wing-the American eagle, forsooth, with the overborne

British lion. The imaginative ones very soon saw them with entire distinctness; the others courageously asserted they were not there. But there were names cut by aspiring athletes, up a dizzy height, upon its damp, perpendicular sides. Many a decade back in the last century an expert climber reached a point and carved his nameGeorge Washington-so high that, in all the generations of ambitious contestants since, few have reached, and scarce one has gone above it.

Strolling around in the shade, mounting to the top and peering down into the vast depths of the chasm, and the merry attempts to spread the feast on the stones of the noisy creek, filled the sunny hours of the long day, which the coming home in the cool hours of the evening with an exquisite moon to light the way brought to a bewitching close. But this was long, long ago, before the locomotive had roused those old hills, or speculation had brought a landscape gardener to lay his unhallowed hand upon the picturesque surroundings of this great natural curiosity.

But I have wandered away from the Commencement. It came on; and its exercises, continued through several days, were much

after the style of other Commencements reported at the same season all over the country. The young speaker utters his final words, and the weary usher hands in his only remaining basket of flowers; one more shy glance between the gallery and the platform quickly passes; the last note in the many rounds of applause dies out; the benediction is said; the curtain drops. The boy of to-day, with his careless merriment, is behind it; the man of the morrow, invested with the responsibilities of manhood, the glow of hope mingling with the first sense of the realities of life, stands before us. The old South with her scars is passing off the stage. New political complications, new party combinations, are just on the threshold; and it is but fit that old men should step aside and young ones come forward. And when I hear these youths on the platform expound modern chivalry as the highest moral principle in all the labors and relationships of life, expressed in delicate courtesy of speech and behavior, leading one to hope that integrity is to be the rallying cry of the present generation, then I feel sure that we who belong to the old South, and love her, may, without a fear, confide to this vigorous new South the destinies of the State.

S. P. McD. Miller.

Ada Langworthy Collier.

VII.

ANNETTA had been awakened by Mrs. McArdle's first shriek; but only to thick throbbings of undefined terror. At that second shriek she started up to the glorious sunshine of a new day and to a horror of sudden death.

She was clothing herself in whatever garments came first to her cold, trembling hands, when Mrs. McArdle, darting from Bartmore's room, took hers on a wild way through the house.

"O, wirra, wirra, Miss Annetta, dear!" she moaned, diligently crossing herself. "Tell me!" gasped Annetta. "Is anybody actually drowned?"

"John-ny Melody an' Dan Meagher"— heavily emphasizing those names. "I say no more. The wan o' top d'other. I seen the green pond smooth itsel' out where Dan's black topknot wint under-twict I seen it." And she shuffled hurriedly away, leaving her high-pitched voice lingering after in a long-drawn lamentation.

Simultaneous with this departure, a furious clash of the office window announced an irregular and impetuous exit thence.

A moment later, flying bare-headed through the hall-way, Annetta caught wildly at her broad garden-hat hanging by its ribbons on the hat-rack. The ribbons still dangled there as she ran, hat in hand, down the deep, rough descent past Mike Grady's house. Gaining the first cross-street, the scene of the tragedy spread itself before her horrified vision.

That pond had been a marsh until some recent and extensive grading had caused the water to rise in a narrowed basin. Green though its edges were, on sunshiny days such as this, its open sweep became a fleckless mirror, wherein a blue, mysterious hollow of summer sky had room and way gloriously to curve itself, and voluminous

fleeces to form and to fade with passionate fidelity to the forming and fading far above.

Yet no reflections, however bright, could rob the vicinage of an air of desolation. For a few houses, once standing on dry edges of the marsh, now lifted high on manifestly insecure props, yawned black and tenantless; while other houses, their ground-floors submerged, their walls damp and moldy, gave token of a wretched occupancy close under their roofs. Out of one of these, a mere shed, careened and blackened, and accessible only by a single plank and broken ladder, Johnny Meagher had been carried to his premature grave. A stone cast from the open doorway of this building might easily have fallen at the end of the dump, about which the whole neighborhood was now excitedly gathered.

Besides the swarm of men, women, and children, an irregular line of carts, deserted by their drivers, effectually forbade that Annetta should catch any glimpse of whatever efforts at rescue were making. But Tom was there. She heard his voice issuing peremptory directions, with colloquial disregard of orthoepy.

"Be sure of your holt, then haul stiddy. Stand back! Give us more elbow-room, will you?"

A woman whom Annetta did not remember ever to have seen, ran up to her. A poor creature in a bedraggled calico, her shawl fallen off her frowzy head.

"Howly saints protect us! an' isn't this a sad sight, Miss Bairtmore?" she cried; and went on, garrulous with agitation: "Twas Melody's cairt backed over. He jumped off to cut the horse loose, an' was thrampled under. Thin Dan Meagher, niver mindin' his fine clo'es, he pitches himsel' in to save poor Johnny- Glory to God! what's that?"

A sudden swaying from the bank's edge. The woman who had been talking with Annetta darted nervously forward. Annetta