Mr. Brandreth went on: "I didn't examine the reports very attentively myself, but I think they were favorable, on the whole. There were several changes suggested; I don't recall just what. But you can see them all on Monday. We let Miss Hughes go after lunch on Saturdays, and she generally takes some work home with her, and I gave them to her to put in shape for you. I thought it would be rather instructive for you to see the different opinions in the right form. I believe you can't have too much method in these things."

"Of course," said Ray, in an anguish of hope and fear. The street seemed to go round; he hardly knew where he was. He bungled on inarticulately before he could say: "I believe in method, too. But I'm sorry I couldn't have had the reports to-day, because I might have had Sunday to think the suggestions over, and see what I could do with them."

"Well, I'm sorry, too. She hadn't been gone half an hour when you came in. If I'd thought of your happening in! Well, it isn't very long till Monday! She'll have them ready by that time. I make it a rule myself to put all business out of my mind from 2 P.M. on Saturday till Monday 9 A.M., and I think you'll find it an advantage, too. I won't do business, and I won't talk business, and I won't think business after 2 o'clock on Saturday. I believe in making Sunday a day of rest and family enjoyment. We have an early dinner; and then I like to have my wife read or play to me, and now we have in the baby and that amuses us."

Ray forced himself to say that as a rule he did not believe in working on Sunday either; he usually wrote letters. He abruptly asked Mr. Brandreth how he thought it would do for him to go and ask Miss Hughes for a sight of the readers' reports in the rough.

Mr. Brandreth laughed. "You are anxious! Do you know where she lives?"

"Oh, yes; I stopped there last Sunday with Mr. Kane on our way to the Park. I saw Mr. Chapley there."

"Oh!" said Mr. Brandreth, with the effect of being arrested by the last fact in something he might otherwise have said. It seemed to make him rather unhappy. "Then you saw Miss Hughes's father?"

VOL. LXXXV.-No. 505.-5

"Yes; and all his friends," Ray answered, in a way that evidently encouraged Mr. Brandreth to go on.

"Yes? What did you think of them?" "I thought they were mostly harmless; but one or two of them ought to have been in the violent wards."

"Did Mr. Chapley meet them?"

"Oh, no; he went away before any of them came in. As Mr. Kane took me, I had to stay with him."

Mr. Brandreth got back a good deal of his smiling complacency, which had left him at Ray's mention of Mr. Chapley in connection with Hughes. "Mr. Chapley and Mr. Hughes are old friends."

"Yes; I understood something of that kind."

"They date back to the Brook Farm days together."

"Mr. Hughes is rather too much of the Hollingsworth type for my use," said Ray. He wished Mr. Brandreth to understand that he had no sympathy with Hughes's wild-cat philosophy, both because he had none, and because he believed it would be to his interest with Mr. Brandreth to have none.

"I've never seen him," said Mr. Brandreth. "I like Mr. Chapley's loyalty to his friends-it's one of his fine traits; but I don't see any necessity for my taking them up. He goes there every Sunday morning to see Mr. Hughes, and they talk-political economy together. You know Mr. Chapley has been a good deal interested in this altruistic agitation.” "No, I didn't," said Ray.

Mr.

"Yes. You can't very well keep clear of it altogether. I was mixed up in it myself at one time: our summer place is on the outskirts of a manufacturing town in Massachusetts, and we had our Romeo and Juliet for the benefit of a social union for the work - people; we made over two hundred dollars for them. Chapley was a George man in '86. Not that he agreed with the George men exactly; but he thought there ought to be some expression against the way things are going. You know a good many of the nicest kind of people went the same way at that time. I don't object to that kind of thing as long as it isn't carried too far. Mr. Chapley used to see a good deal of an odd stick of a minister at our summer place that had got a good some of the new ideas in a pretty crooked kind of shape; and then he's read Tolstoï a good

deal, and he's been influenced by him. I think Hughes is a sort of safety-valve for Mr. Chapley, and that's what I tell the family. Mr. Chapley isn't a fool, and he's always had as good an eye for the main chance as anybody. That's all."

Ray divined that Mr. Brandreth would not have entered into this explanation of his senior partner and father-in-law, except to guard against the injurious inferences which he might draw from having met Mr. Chapley at Hughes's, but he did not let his guess appear in his words. "I don't wonder he likes Mr. Hughes," he said. "He's fine, and he seems a light of sanity and reason, among the jack-alanterns he gathers round him. He isn't at all Tolstoïan.

"He's a gentleman, born and bred," said Mr. Brandreth, "and he was a rich man for the days before he began his communistic career. And Miss Hughes is a perfect lady. She's a cultivated girl too, and she reads a great deal. I'd rather have her opinion about a new book than half the critics' I know of, because I know I could get it honest, and I know it would be intelligent. Well, if you're going up there, you'll want to be getting across to the avenue, to take the elevated." He added, "I don't mean to give you the impression that we've made up our minds about your book, yet. We haven't. I've only glanced over the opinions of our readers, and I merely know that they're favorable to it in some respects from a literary point of view. But a book is a commercial venture as well as a literary venture, and we've got to have a pow wow about that side of it before we come to any sort of conclusion. You understand?"

"Oh, yes, I understand that," said Ray, "and I'll try not to be unreasonably hopeful," but at the same moment his heart leaped with hope.

be convenient-at such a time-for Mrs. Brandreth—”

"Oh, yes it would," said Mr. Brandreth in the same desperate note. "Come along. I don't know that Mrs. Brandreth will be able to see you, but I want you to see my boy; and we can have a bachelor bite together, anyway."

Ray yielded, and the stories of the baby began again when he moved on with Mr. Brandreth. It was agony for him to wrench his mind from his story, which he kept turning over and over in it, trying to imagine what the readers had differed about, and listen to Mr. Brandreth saying, "Yes, sir, I believe that child knows his grandmother and his nurse apart, as well as he knows his mother and me. He's got his likes and dislikes already: he cries whenever his grandmother takes him. By-the-way, you'll see Mrs. Chapley at dinner, I hope. She's spending the day with us."

"Oh, I'm very glad," said Ray, wondering if the readers objected to his introduction of hypnotism.

"She's a woman of the greatest character," said Mr. Brandreth, "but she has some old-fashioned notions about children. I want my boy to be trained as a boy from the very start. I think there's nothing like a manly man, unless it's a womanly woman. I hate anything masculine about a girl; a girl ought to be yielding and gentle; but I want my boy to be self-reliant from the word Go. I believe in a man's being master in his own house; his will ought to be law, and that's the way I shall bring up my boy. Mrs. Chapley thinks there ought always to be a light in the nurse's room, but I don't. I want my boy to get used to the dark, and not be afraid of it, and I shall begin just as soon as I can, without seeming arbitrary. Mrs. Chapley is the best soul in the world, and of course I don't like to differ with her."

"Of course," said Ray. The mention of relationship made him think of the cousin in his story; if he had not had the cousin killed, he thought it would have been better; there was too much bloodshed in the story.

They turned into a cross-street from Lexington Avenue, where they had been walking, and stopped at a pretty little apartment-house, which had its door painted black and a wide brass plate enclosing its key-hole, and wore that air of

standing aloof from its neighbors peculiar to private houses with black doors and brass plates.

Mr. Brandreth let himself in with a key. "There are only three families in our house, and it's like having a house of our own. It's so much easier living in a flat for your wife that I put my foot down, and wouldn't hear of a separate house."

They mounted the carpeted stairs through the twilight that prevails in such entries, and a sound of flying steps was heard within the door where Mr. Brandreth applied his latch-key again, and as he flung it open a long wail burst upon the ear.

"Hear that?" he asked, with a rapturous smile, as he turned to Ray for sympathy; and then he called gayly out in the direction that the wail came from: "Oh, hello, hello, hello! What's the matter, what's the matter? You sit down here," he said to Ray, leading the way forward into a pretty drawing room. "Confound that nurse! She's always coming in here in spite of everything. I'll be with you in a moment. Heigh! What ails the little man?" he called out, and disappeared down the long narrow corridor, and he was gone a good while.

At moments Ray caught the sound of voices in hushed, but vehement dispute; a door slammed violently; there were murmurs of expostulation. At last Mr. Brandreth reappeared with his baby in his arms, and its nurse at his heels, twitching the infant's long robe into place.

"What do you think of that?" demanded the father, and Ray got to his feet and came near, so as to be able to see if he could think anything.

By an inspiration he was able to say, "Well, he is a great fellow!" and this apparently gave Mr. Brandreth perfect satisfaction. His son's downy little oblong skull wagged feebly on his weak neck; his arms waved vaguely before his face.

"Now give him your finger, and see if he won't do the infant Hercules act."

Ray promptly assumed the part of the serpent, but the infant Hercules would not open his tightly clinched, wandering fist.

"Try the other one," said his father; and Ray tried the other one with no more effect. "Well, he isn't in the humor; he'll do it for you some time. All right, little man!" He gave the baby, which had acquitted itself with so much distinc

tion, back into the arms of its nurse, and it was taken away.

"Sit down, sit down!" he said, cheerily. "Mrs. Chapley will be in directly. It's astonishing," he said, with a twist of his head in the direction the baby had been taken, "but I believe those little things have their moods just like any of us. That fellow knows as well as you do, when he's wanted to show off, and if he isn't quite in the key for it, he won't do it. I wish I had tried him with my hat, and let you see how he notices."

Mr. Brandreth went on with anecdotes, theories, and moral reflections relating to the baby, and Ray answered with praiseful murmurs and perfunctory cries of wonder. He was rescued from a situation which he found more and more difficult by the advent of Mrs. Chapley, and not of Mrs. Chapley alone, but of Mrs. Brandreth. She greeted Ray with a certain severity, which he instinctively divined was not so much for him as for her husband. A like quality imparted itself, but not so authoritatively, from her mother; if Mr. Brandreth was not master in his house, at least his mother-in-law was not. Mrs. Brandreth went about the room and made some housekeeperly rearrangements of its furniture, which had the result of reducing it, as it were, to discipline. Then she sat down, and Ray, whom she waited to have speak first, had a feeling that she was sitting in judgment on him, and the wish, if possible, to justify himself. He began to praise the baby, its beauty, and great size, and the likeness he professed to find in it to its father.

Mrs. Brandreth relented slightly. She said, with magnanimous impartiality, "It's a very healthy child."

Her mother made the reservation, "But even healthy children are a great care,” and sighed.

The daughter must have found this intrusive. "Oh, I don't know that Percy is any great care as yet, mamma.'

"He pays his way," Mr. Brandreth suggested, with a radiant smile. "At least," he corrected himself, "we shouldn't know what to do without him."

His wife said, dryly, as if the remark were in bad taste, "It's hardly a question of that, I think. Have you been long in New York, Mr. Ray?" she asked, with an abrupt turn to him.

"Only a few weeks," Ray answered, inwardly wondering how he could render

"Everything is

the fact propitiatory. very curious and interesting to me as a country person," he added, deciding to make this sacrifice of himself.

It evidently availed somewhat. "But you don't mean that you are really from the country?" Mrs. Brandreth asked.

"I'm from Midland; and I suppose that's the country, compared with New York."

Mrs. Chapley asked him if he knew the Mayquays there. He tried to think of some people of that name; in the mean time she recollected that the Mayquays were from Gitcheegumee, Michigan. They talked some irrelevancies, and then she said, "Mr. Brandreth tells me you have met my husband," as if they had been talking of him.

"Quite the contrary, I should say."

Mrs. Chapley laughed more easily. "I didn't know but he made shoes that nobody could wear. I couldn't imagine what other attraction he could have for my husband. I believe he would really like to go into the country and work in the fields.” Mrs. Chapley laughed away a latent anxiety, apparently, in making this joke about her husband, and seemed to feel much better acquainted with Ray. "How are they living over there? What sort of family has Mr. Hughes? I mean, besides the daughter we know of?"

Ray told, as well as he could, and he said they were living in an apartment. "Oh!" said Mrs. Chapley, "I fancied a sort of tenement.”

"By-the-way," said Mr. Brandreth,

I met Mr. Brandreth,” said Ray.

66

'And you know Mr. Kane?" "Oh, yes.

He was the first acquaintance I made in New York."

"Mr. Brandreth told me." Mrs. Chapley made a show of laughing at the notion of Kane, as a harmless eccentric, and she had the effect of extending her kindly derision to Hughes in saying, "And you've been taken to sit at the feet of his prophet already, Mr. Brandreth tells me that strange Mr. Hughes."

"I shouldn't have said he was Mr. Kane's prophet exactly," said Ray with a smile of sympathy. "Mr. Kane doesn't seem to need a prophet; but I've certainly seen Mr. Hughes. And heard him, for that matter." He smiled, recollecting his dismay when he heard Hughes calling upon him in meeting. He had a notion to describe his experience, and she gave him the chance.

Mr. Ray"-his wife quelled him with a glance, and he added-“some time?"

Ray said he should, very much. Mrs. Brandreth, like her mother, had been growing more and more clement, and now she said, "Won't you stay and take a family dinner with us, Mr. Ray?"

Ray looked at her husband, and saw that he had not told her of the invitation he had already given. He did not do so now, and Ray rose and seized his opportunity. He thanked Mrs. Brandreth very earnestly, and said he was so sorry he had an appointment to keep, and he got himself away at once.

Mrs. Chapley hospitably claimed him for her Thursdays, at parting; and Mrs. Brandreth said he must let Mr. Brandreth bring him some other day; they would always be glad to see him.

Mr. Brandreth went down to the outer door with him, to make sure that he found the way, and said, "Then you will come some time?" and gratefully wrung his hand. "I saw how anxious you were about those opinions!"

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

bus cannot divest of its absorbing interest the romantic story of the founding of our first interior commonwealth.

Its very beginning was unique. The rise of a State and the establishment of the magnificent empire of the West were decreed when, on the 7th of June, 1769,

Daniel Boone looked out upon "the beautiful level of Kentucky," which so impressed him with the abundance and splendid development of its animal life, with the astonishing fertility of its virgin soil, and the lavishness of its natural gifts, still clothed with all the charms of primeval freshness, that he afterwards described it as "a second paradise."

Kentucky, in the manner of her founding, illustrated the new era that had just dawned upon the world. Unlike any of the States of the old Confederation, she had never actually experienced the dominion of a foreign power, nor felt the authority of a royal master. She was born free. Boone brought with him into the depths of the Western wild a coal of that sacred fire which burned so brightly upon the banks of the Yadkin, and in the same month of May, 1775, when the heroic North Carolinians adopted the immortal declaration of Mecklenburg, the pioneers of Kentucky gathered in solemn conclave under a mighty elm in the now famous blue-grass region, and they also virtually proclaimed their independence of Great Britain. For this alone could be the meaning of the attempted establishment of the colony of Transylvania upon no other authority than that of occupancy and of a deed from the Cherokees, and with the bold announcement specifically and deliberately made that "all power is originally in the people."

Such was the spirit of the men who laid the foundation of Kentucky, and built upon it under circumstances that seemed a defiance of the impossible itself. They did this in a land which they found devoid of every product of human art, and while cut off from civilization and from human aid by hundreds of miles and by ranks of mountains. It was one of the most remarkable feats of the Anglo-Saxon race, and in some respects is without a parallel. It opened the way for results the importance of which is already beyond all calculation.

But swallowed up as they were in this vast solitude, the pioneers were not too remote for savage vengeance, nor too far away to bear a glorious part in the war of the Revolution. Few minor events of American history are more thrilling or more widely known than the successes of "the Hunters of Kentucky" over the British and the Indians at the sieges of Boonsborough and of Bryant's Station,

their massacre at the deadly ambuscade of the Blue Licks, and the swift and wonderful campaigns of George Rogers Clark, the Stonewall Jackson of the early West.

It was in 1780, in the very midst of the harassments and distractions of this war, that Virginia, to her everlasting credit, took time to perfect a bill and make a donation for education in Kentucky that resulted in the founding of Transylvania University. Jefferson, whose broad culture was second only to his superb statesmanship, was then at the helm in the Old Dominion, and he had linked his enduring name with that of Kentucky long before he had penned "the Resolutions of '98."

To fully appreciate the situation of the Kentucky pioneers, it must be remembered that while the close of the Revolution meant peace to the seaboard States, it did not mean peace to them. Savage depredations and burnings and slaughters continued through all the years from the surrender of Yorktown until the British gave up the military posts in the Northwest, and to these aggravations, from which the old government could not protect them, must be added the trying vexations through which they went before they could secure the separation of the district from Virginia, and its admission into the Union. It was during these unsettled times that General Wilkinson, the soldier of fortune who afterwards became the commander-in-chief of the American army, cut such a figure; that the Spanish conspiracy and the question of the free navigation of the Mississippi so agitated the people; and that the jealousy of the North and the South over the balance of power had an early demonstration in the long-delayed reception of Kentucky with her slaves as a member of the Union.

The old Confederation had ample time to crumble leisurely to pieces, and Kentucky to consume years in holding separation conventions before the object she so patiently sought was gained. It was not until the 4th of February, 1791, that Congress passed the bill admitting her into the Union, but the event was put off for more than a year, for the bill stipulated that it was not to occur until the 1st of June, 1792. This act was the first of its kind ever adopted by the Congress of the United States, and was signed by Washington when New York city was the capital of the country, and when the present Federal government was only three years