Doctor Keil is at the same time the religious head and the unlimited secular ruler of the colony of Aurora, and can ordain, with the consent of the elders (who very naturally uphold his authority), what he pleases.  A life free from care and responsibility, such as the members of the community (who, for the most part, belong to the lower and uncultivated class) lead—­a life in regard to which no one but the doctor has the trouble of thinking—­is the main ground of the undisturbed continuance of the colony.  The pre-eminent talent for organization, combined with the unlimited powers of command, which the doctor—­justly named “king of Aurora”—­possesses, together with the inborn industry peculiar to Germans, is the cause of the prosperity of the settlement, which calls itself communistic, but is certainly nothing more than a vast farm belonging to its talented founder.  It has its schools, its churches, newspapers and books—­the selection and tendency of which the doctor sees to—­and no lack of social pleasures, music and singing.  Taken together with an easily-procured livelihood, all this satisfies the desires of the colonists entirely, and the good doctor takes care of everything else.

ELIZABETH SILL.

GRAY EYES.

I have always counted it among the larger blessings of Providence that a woman can bear up year after year under a weight of dullness which would drive a man of the same mental calibre to desperation in a month.

I had no idea what a heavy burden mine had been until one day my brother asked me to go to sea with him on his next voyage.  He and his wife were at the farm on their wedding-tour, and only the happiness of a bridegroom could have led him to hold out to me this way of escape.  Christian’s heart when he dropped his pack was not lighter than mine.  Butter and cheese are good things in their way—­the world would miss them if all the farmers’ daughters went suddenly down to the sea in ships—­but it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and such had been my feeling for some years.

So suddenly and completely did my threadbare endurance give way that if Frank had revoked his words the next minute, I must have gone away at once to some crowded place and drawn a few deep breaths of excitement before I could have joined again the broken ends of my patience.

No bride-elect poor in this world’s goods ever went about the preparations for her wedding with more delicious awe than I felt in turning one old gown upside down, and another inside out, for seafaring use.  There was excitement enough in the departure, the inevitable sea-changes, and finally the memory of it all, to keep my mind busy for a few weeks, but when we settled into the grooves of a tropical voyage, wafted along as easily by the trade winds as if some gigantic hand, unseen and steady, had us in its grasp, my life was wholly changed, and yet it bore an odd family resemblance to the days at the farm.  It was a pleasant dullness, because, in the nature of things, it must soon have an end.