reels or cotillons on the grass. How merry and happy they all
were! How freely and unembarrassedly they moved and talked! By

and by all became involved in the dance, and Jacob, left alone and
unnoticed, drew nearer and nearer to the gay and beautiful life

from which he was expelled.
With a long-drawn scream of the fiddle the dance came to an end,

and the dancers, laughing, chattering, panting, and fanning
themselves, broke into groups and scattered over the enclosure

before the house. Jacob was surrounded before he could escape.
Becky, with two lively girls in her wake, came up to him and said:

"Oh Mr. Flint, why don't you dance?"
If he had stopped to consider, he would no doubt have replied very

differently. But a hundred questions, stirred by what he had seen,
were clamoring for light, and they threw the desperateimpulse to

his lips.
"If I COULD dance, would you dance with me?"

The two lively girls heard the words, and looked at Becky with
roguish faces.

"Oh yes, take him for your next partner!" cried one.
"I will," said Becky, "after he comes back from his journey."

Then all three laughed. Jacob leaned against the tree, his eyes
fixed on the ground.

"Is it a bargain?" asked one of the girls.
"No," said he, and walked rapidly away.

He went to the house, and, finding that Robert had arrived, took
his hat, and left by the rear door. There was a grassy alley

between the orchard and garden, from which it was divided by a high
hawthorn hedge. He had scarcely taken three paces on his way to

the meadow, when the sound of the voice he had last heard, on the
other side of the hedge, arrested his feet.

"Becky, I think you rather hurt Jake Flint," said the girl.
"Hardly," answered Becky; "he's used to that."

"Not if he likes you; and you might go further and fare worse."
"Well, I MUST say!" Becky exclaimed, with a laugh; "you'd like

to see me stuck in that hollow, out of your way!"
"It's a good farm, I've heard," said the other.

"Yes, and covered with as much as it'll bear!"
Here the girls were called away to the dance. Jacob slowly walked

up the dewy meadow, the sounds of fiddling, singing, and laughter
growing fainter behind him.

"My journey!" he repeated to himself,--" my journey! why shouldn't
I start on it now? Start off, and never come back?"

It was a very little thing, after all, which annoyed him, but the
mention of it always touched a sore nerve of his nature. A dozen

years before, when a boy at school, he had made a temporary
friendship with another boy of his age, and had one day said

to the latter, in the warmth of his first generous confidence:
"When I am a little older, I shall make a great journey, and come

back rich, and buy Whitney's place!"
Now, Whitney's place, with its stately old brick mansion, its

avenue of silver firs, and its two hundred acres of clean, warm-
lying land, was the finest, the most aristocratic property in all

the neighborhood, and the boy-friend could not resist the
temptation of repeating Jacob's grand design, for the endless

amusement of the school. The betrayal hurt Jacob more keenly than
the ridicule. It left a wound that never ceased to rankle; yet,

with the inconceivable perversity of unthinking natures, precisely
this joke (as the people supposed it to be) had been perpetuated,

until "Jake Flint's Journey" was a synonyme for any absurd or
extravagant expectation. Perhaps no one imagined how much pain he

was keeping alive; for almost any other man than Jacob would have
joined in the laugh against himself and thus good-naturedly buried

the joke in time. "He's used to that," the people said, like Becky
Morton, and they really supposed there was nothing unkind in the

remark!
After Jacob had passed the thickets and entered the lonely hollow

in which his father's house lay, his pace became slower and slower.
He looked at the shabby old building, just touched by the moonlight

behind the swaying shadows of the weeping-willow, stopped, looked
again, and finally seated himself on a stump beside the path.

"If I knew what to do!" he said to himself, rocking backwards
and forwards, with his hands clasped over his knees,--"if I knew

what to do!"
The spiritualtension of the evening reached its climax: he could

bear no more. With a strong bodilyshudder his tears burst forth,
and the passion of his weeping filled him from head to foot. How

long he wept he knew not; it seemed as if the hot fountains would
never run dry. Suddenly and startlingly a hand fell upon his

shoulder.
"Boy, what does this mean?"

It was his father who stood before him.
Jacob looked up like some shy animal brought to bay, his eyes full

of a feeling mixed of fierceness and terror; but he said nothing.
His father seated himself on one of the roots of the old stump,

laid one hand upon Jacob's knee, and said with an unusual
gentleness of manner, "I'd like to know what it is that troubles

you so much."
After a pause, Jacob suddenly burst forth with: "Is there any

reason why I should tell you? Do you care any more for me than the
rest of 'em?"

"I didn't know as you wanted me to care for you particularly," said
the father, almost deprecatingly. "I always thought you had

friends of your own age."
"Friends? Devils!" exclaimed Jacob. "Oh, what have I done--what

is there so dreadful about me that I should always be laughed at,
and despised, and trampled upon? You are a great deal older than

I am, father: what do you see in me? Tell me what it is, and how
to get over it!"

The eyes of the two men met. Jacob saw his father's face grow pale
in the moonlight, while he pressed his hand involuntarily upon his

heart, as if struggling with some physical pain. At last he spoke,
but his words were strange and incoherent.

"I couldn't sleep," he said; "I got up again and came out o' doors.
The white ox had broken down the fence at the corner, and would

soon have been in the cornfield. I thought it was that, maybe, but
still your--your mother would come into my head. I was coming down

the edge of the wood when I saw you, and I don't know why it was
that you seemed so different, all at once--"

Here he paused, and was silent for a minute. Then he said, in a
grave, commanding tone: "Just let me know the whole story. I have

that much right yet."
Jacob related the history of the evening, somewhat awkwardly and

confusedly, it is true; but his father's brief, pointed questions
kept him to the narrative, and forced him to explain the full

significance of the expressions he repeated. At the mention of
"Whitney's place," a singular expression of malice touched the old

man's face.
"Do you love Becky Morton?" he asked bluntly, when all had been

told.
"I don't know," Jacob stammered; "I think not; because when I seem

to like her most, I feel afraid of her."
"It's lucky that you're not sure of it!" exclaimed the old man with

energy; "because you should never have her."
"No," said Jacob, with a mournful acquiescence, "I can never have

her, or any other one."
"But you shall--and will I when I help you. It's true I've not