And time shall waste this apple-tree. 
    Oh, when its aged branches throw
    Thin shadows on the sward below,
    Shall fraud and force and iron will
    Oppress the weak and helpless still? 
      What shall the tasks of mercy be,
    Amid the toils, the strifes, the tears
    Of those who live when length of years
      Is wasting this apple-tree?

    “Who planted this old apple-tree?”
    The children of that distant day
    Thus to some aged man shall say;
    And, gazing on its mossy stem,
    The gray-haired man shall answer them: 
      “A poet of the land was he,
    Born in the rude, but good old times;
    ’Tis said he made some quaint old rhymes
      On planting the apple-tree.”

* * * * *

RAY.

So Beltran was a Rebel.

Vivia stood before the glass, brushing out black shadows from her long, fine hair.  There lay the letter as little Jane had left it, as she had let it lie till all the doors had clanged between, as she had laid it down again.  She paused, with the brush half lifted, to glance once more at the clear superscription, to turn it and touch with her finger-tips the firm seal.  Then she went on lengthening out the tresses that curled back again at the end like something instinct with life.

How long it had been in coming!—­gradual journeys up from those Southern shores, and slumber in some comrade’s care till a flag of truce could bear it across beneath the shelter of its white wing.  Months had passed.  And where was Beltran now?  Living,—­Vivia had a proud assurance in her heart of that!  Her heart that went swiftly gliding back into the past, and filling old scenes with fresh fire.  Thinking thus, she bent forward with dark, steady gaze, as if she sought for its pictures in the uncertain depths of the mirror, and there they rose as of old the crystal gave them back to the seeker.  It was no gracious woman bending there that she saw, but a scene where the very air infused with sunlight seemed to glow, the house with its wide veranda veiled in vines, and above it towering the rosy cloud of an oleander-tree, behind it the far azure strip of the bay, before it the long low line of sandy beach where the waters of the Gulf forever swung their silver tides with a sullen roar,—­for the place was one of those islands that make the perpetual fortifications of the Texan coast.  Vivia, a slender little maiden of eleven summers, rocks in a boat a rod from shore, and by her side, his length along the warm wave, his arm along the boat, a boy floats in his linen clothes, an amphibious child, so undersized as to seem but little more than a baby, and yet a year her senior.  He swims round and round the skiff in circling frolics, followed by the great dog who gambols with them, he dives under it and comes up far in advance, he treads water as he returns, and, seizing the painter, draws