Some one had wheeled out the blue wagon and rolled it under the locust tree. The parson was pushed upon the cart. As the leader of the gang stooped to help the hoarse man fling the rope over the burned bare limb of the tree and to adjust the noose about the man's neck, a mask dropped. It was the face of the chief himself, no other than the face of"You! Deacon Memminger!" cried the old minister. The leader restored his mask to his downcast face, with evident embarrassment, and fell back a step or two.

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"I would like," said the doomed man, gently, a moment to commend my soul to God." This was granted him, and he stood with his gray head bowed. His hands were tied behind him. They heard him murmur, "Hallowed be Thy name." Then they ranged themselves to swing him off. There were fourteen of them-and Memminger, the chief. Beside him stood an idle fellow, masked like the rest. Every man of them lay down his arms and clinched the rope with both hands. "We're ready. Give the the signal, Cap'n.

Hurry up."

The light of their lanterns and torches revealed the old man clearly. Death was no paler, and his lips still moved in silent prayer. The long arm of the locust stretched above his head-the stormy sky above. The men bent to the rope. Then the powerful figure of the leader straightened. His mask fell, and two muscular arms shot out from his body. Each held a revolver sprung at full cock and aimed.

"Boys," he cried, in an awful voice. "I am an officer of the United States! And the first man of you who lets go that rope DROPS! " His negro servant at his side sprang

to his aid.

The first man of you who stirs a muscle on that rope dies! I am a deputy marshal, authorized by the national government to investigate the Ku Klux Klan, and in the name of the Stars and Stripes and law and order, I arrest you, every man!"

The negro servant, whose person bulged with hidden handcuffs, bound the men one at a time, fourteen of them, while his master's experienced weapons covered the gang. The whole posse was marched to the nearest sheriff and delivered intact to the power of the law, which the great mass of Kennessee citizens were ready to respect and glad to see defended.

"How is it, parson," said Deacon Memminger, as he cut the old man down and helped him to dismount the shaky

cart. "You'll excuse me sir, but I'd go back and see my wife now, if I were you."

She came to herself, lying upon the floor beside the lounge. But the first thing she heard was:

"Deborah! Deborah! Don't be scared, my dear. They have not hurt me and I'm coming back to you—."

The Little Girl of Gettysburg

BY HENRY TYRRELL.

[An actual incident related by General Hancock.]

"Twas Gettysburg's last day,

The dead and wounded lay
On trampled fields and ridges battle-torn.
Among the outer posts,

Among the guarded hosts,

Rode Hancock, watchful, on the fated morn.

And lo! a little child

With eyes and tresses wild,

Close to the lines had strayed and met him there,
And tightly to her breast

A heavy load she pressed

A musket!-all her slender strength could bear.

"My brave and pretty dear,
Tell me, how came you here

Upon the field, before the fight is done?"
Then, at her lisped reply,

Tears dimmed the General's eye;

"My papa's dead, but here's my papa's gun."

The Death of Ivan Ilyvitch

T

BY COUNT LEO TOLSTOY.

(An Extract.)

HAT very night there was a change for the worse in Ivan Ilyitch. Praskovya Feodorovna found him on the same sofa, though in a different position. He was lying on his face, groaning and staring straight before him fixedly.

She began to talk of remedies. He turned his staring eyes upon her. She did not finish what she had begun to say, so definite a hatred of her was expressed in his look.

"For the love of Christ, let me die in peace," said he.

She would have gone away, but just then their daughter came in and approached him to say good morning to him. He looked at her just as he had looked at his wife, and to her questions as to how he was, he answered dryly that they would all soon be rid of him. Both were silent. They sat there a little while, and then went out.

"As

"How are we to blame?' said Lisa to her mother. though we had done it! I'm sorry for papa, but why should. he punish us?"

Ivan Ilyitch

At the regular hour the doctor came. answered him "Yes" or "No," never ceasing from his irritated stare. At last he said: "You know that you can do nothing, so let me alone."

"We can relieve your suffering," said the doctor. "Even that you can't do. Let me alone."

The doctor went into the drawing-room and told Praskovya Feodorovna that the case was very serious, and that the only resource left to them was opium to relieve his sufferings, which must be dreadful. The doctor declared that his physical suffering was dreadful, and that was true; yet still more dreadful than his physical suffering were his mental sufferings, and in them lay his greatest anguish.

His moral sufferings were due to the fact that through the night, as he looked at the sleepy, good-natured, broad-cheeked face of his attendant, Gerasim, the thought had suddenly come into his head: "What if in reality my life, my con

scious life has all been wrong?" The thought came to him that what he had regarded before as an utter impossibility, that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might very well be true. It occurred to him that those half-detected impulses within him of revolt against what was viewed as right by persons of high position-those half-detcted impulses which he had ignored-might possibly be right, and all else might be wrong. His official work, too, his regulation of his daily life and of his household, and his social and official interests-all these might all be wrong. He tried to defend them to himself. But suddenly he felt all the weakness and futility of his defense.

"Yet, if it's so," he said to himself, " and if I am leaving life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me, and there's no help for it-then what?

He lay on his back and began going over his whole life entirely anew. When he saw the attendant in the morning, and after that his wife and then his daughter, and then the doctor, every move they made, every word they spoke, confirmed the appalling truth that had been revealed to him in the night. In them he saw his own self, the environment in which he had lived, and then he saw distinctly that it was all quite wrong. It was a horrible, abysmal deception that ignored both life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical sufferings and multiplied them tenfold. He groaned, rolling from side to side and pulling at the bed-covering. It seemed to him as though it was stifling him and weighing him down. And so he hated it.

They gave him a powerful dose of opium. He sank into unconsciousness; but at dinner-time the same thing began again. He drove every one away, and kept tossing from side to side.

His wife came to him and said, "Ivan, dear, do this for my sake. It can do no harm, and often it does good. Why, it is nothing. Often when in health people

He opened his eyes wide.

"What?

sides

دو

Take the sacrament? What for? No! Be

She began to cry.

"Yes, dear. I'll send for our priest. He's so agreeable." "Very well, very well," he said.

When the priest came and heard his confession he was softened, and felt, as it were, a relief from his doubts and, consequently, from his sufferings. There came a moment of

hope. He began once more thinking of his disease of the appendix, and of the chance of curing it. He took the sacrament with tears in his eyes.

When they laid him down again after the sacrament, for a while he felt comfortable, and again the hope of life revived. He began to think about the operation which had been suggested to him. "Life! I want to live!" he said to himself. His wife came to congratulate him. She uttered the customary words, and added:

"It's quite true, isn't it, that you're better?" Without looking at her, he said "Yes.”

Her dress, her figure, the expression of her face, the tone of her voice-all told him the same thing: "It's wrong. All that amid which you lived and are now living is lying and deceit, hiding from yourselves both life and death." And as soon as he had formulated the thought, hatred sprang up in him, and with that hatred agonizing sufferings, and with those sufferings a sense of inevitable destruction approaching him. Something new was happening. There were twisting, shooting pains, besides a tightness in his breathing.

The expression of his face as he pronounced that "yes was frightful. After uttering it, looking her straight in the face, he turned face down, with a rapidity remarkable in his state of weakness, and shrieked out:

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Go away! Go away! Leave me alone!"

From that moment there began the scream that never ceased for three whole days, and which was so awful that through two closed doors no one could hear it without horror. At the moment when he answered his wife he had recognized the fact that he was lost, that there was no return, that the end had come, the real end, while doubt, though still unsolved, remained.

"O! O-o! O-o!" he screamed, in varying tones. He had begun screaming, "I don't want to!" and so had gone on screaming with the same vowel sound-"O-o!"

Through those three days, during which time did not exist for him, he was struggling in that sable sack into which he was being thrust by an unseen, resistless force. He struggled as the man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner, knowing that he cannot save himself. And every moment he felt that, in spite of all his efforts to fight against it, he was drawing nearer and nearer to what horrified him. He felt that his agony came both from his being thrust into this black pit, and still more to his inability