But she had never been angry, and was now only too thankful that Jim and his friends had escaped safely.

“Ah!” said Jim in telling his adventures, “we hed a clus run on ’t, Sairy, but thee’d better believe that air British navy’s a fust-rate place fur larnin’ a feller ter know when he’s well off.  An’ Sairy, when I longed so fur thee an’ mother, an’ thought o’ what a wretch I was to speak so ter the dearest little woman in the world, I c’u’d see that I hadn’t knowed when I was well off.”

Jim’s was not an unselfish kind of repentance, but it was the best it was in his nature to offer, and Sarah had long ago learned that her Jim was not the saint and hero she had once dreamed, but only a weak and common-place man; and she asked for nothing higher from him.  To his best she had a right, and with that she was content, smiling on her husband with eyes full of a love as tender and true as when in the old days she had gazed down upon her lover from the cliff-head, while the mother laid her hand softly on his scanty hair, and said solemnly, “May God keep thee thus, my son!” adding, after a moment’s pause, “But I wish thy fayther was here to see.”  And a tender silence for the memory of the rough but kindly-natured old man fell over them all; while the baby, reconciled to the stranger, poked her little fingers in the marks on his face, and cried because she could not get them off.

ETHEL C. GALE.

AT THE OLD PLANTATION.

TWO PAPERS.—­II.

The eastern sky is just beginning to assume that strange neutral tint which tells of the approaching dawn when we open the heavy hall door and step out into the crisp, frosty air.  No moonlight hunting for me, with the cold, deceitful light making phantom pools of every white sand-patch in the road, and ghostly logs and boulders of every wavering shadow.  You are always gathering up your reins for leaps over imaginary fence-panels, which your horse goes through like a nightmare, and always unprepared for the real ones, which he clears when you are least expecting it.  If the cry bears down on you, and you rein up for a view, the fox is sure to dodge by invisibly under cover of some dark little bay, and you get home too late for a morning nap and too early for the breakfast, which you have been longing after for the last two hours.  Then, too, your horse has lost his night’s rest, and will be jaded for two days in consequence.  No:  the time to throw the dogs off for a fox-hunt is that weird hour which the negroes significantly call “gray-day:”  it is the surest time to strike a trail, and by the time Reynard begins to dodge and double there will be plenty of light to ride by and to get a good view.  If the fox gets away or the cover is drawn without a find, you are always sure of having your spirits raised by the cheerful sunrise:  by the time you get home, tired and spattered, the ladies are down stairs ready to make pretty exclamations over the brush or to chaff you pleasantly for your want of success; and then there is just time to get your hair brushed and your clothes changed before the mingled aromas of fried sausage and old Java put the keen edge on your already whetted appetite.