in fifteen minutes more were fairly afloat in the sea-like chapparal, and galloping stormily against the wind. Soon we were riding south and southwest, along narrow paths through the woods, across a broad and superbly picturesque table-land of red volcanic soil, corrugated into low ridges on which pines and redwoods grew. Of perfect and satisfying blueness was the glorious sky overhead; deepest purple were the remote ranges north of Pope, west of Napa, south of Conn, east of Berryessa-an unbroken circle of purple and violet walls rising out of dark emerald woods, and brown cliffs, and ripe harvest fields of checkered silver and gold, lying deep in the valleys, or outstretched upon sun-lit slopes.

Fifteen minutes of this impetuous gallop, and we rein up our horses; we let them walk slowly through the forest, and again the careless sybarite of our party, the Santa Barbara Bohemian, who has no love to spare for any land where oranges are not, begins the con

versation :

"I call that good fun.” he said. 'Any horse worth the name enjoys a stampede in such a breeze, and on this height. But it's one thing to gallop for the pleasure of the thing, and it's another to ride on a life and death errand--as men have done so often." "Yes!" quoth the tule-islander. "The thought carries one back to the elder world of song and story, of kings' courier and true knights' haste. In the world of which we are now a part, the telegraph and railroad take messages, and only on the Gran Chaco, or across the African Vledt, or in the Central Asian waste, do men ride as Captain Burnaby rode."

"It was ten years ago. I was eighteen years old, and had been away from home for months. I came back to the dull farm in the upper San Joaquin, near the foothills, and my mother came crying to the door to meet me. My little brother was very ill. He was only five years old, my pet and delight, and my mother was a widow. An elder sister was in Tuolumne, teaching school; my elder brother, who managed the small farm, had gone to Stanislaus to buy sheep, and mother and Walter were all alone. It was four miles to the nearest village and stage station, from which place I had walked, reaching the house at dark. I went in and found little Walter unconscious; my mother could not tell what was the matter with him. I ran down to the pasture and called my colt, Major, the best horse I ever owned. He came at once, and I saddled him and rode off at a gallop.

"It was early winter, and rain had made the road heavy; cloudy all day, a drizzle began before I had been five minutes in the saddle. I had neither whip nor spur. Now and then I spoke to Major, and he knew the work before him. Two miles we went without a pause, the road dead level, and so slippery that I could feel Majors lide like a boy on a frosted side-walk, but he would keep his feet and resume his wild pace. He took the bit in his teeth and ran, snorting with excitement; for a year he had not been ridden by living creature, and his muscles were steel, his lungs like a steam engine. I let him walk for a few moments, then he did the remaining two miles at a tearing gallop. We reached the village, and I rode to the doctor's door.

"""Not here. Gone ten miles into the foothills to the old Bemont place.'

"That was east, in a direct line, and three miles south was another village, where perhaps a doctor could be found. If not, it was but a few minutes lost, for another road could be taken to Bemont's.

thin coating of mud that spattered me from head to foot, and the wind blew sharply in my face. I lived over in memory every scene of our lives, every word said to my brother, every act done in the past—his arms about my neck in thanks for some little gift; long days behind the plow, with his toddling feet in the furrow; a child asleep in the summer grass, a bunch of wild poppies in his chubby hand, the calico sunbonnet tossed back from the curly hair. Then I remembered that when I went away mother wrote that every day little Walter asked: "Won't brother Tom come home to-night? I want to see brother Tom." Suddenly the speaker's voice failed. He caught a quick breath, and paused a moment.

"Well, I reached the other village, and found that the doctor who lived there was sick himself, and worthless at best. Nothing to do but to start for Bemont's, and find a man I could trust. Again the gallop, no longer on level roads, but through rolling hills, and under a darkness that was Egyptian. Major began to falter, but he kept on with noble courage. A horse of that sort one might trust with the bearing of a kingdom's ransom, a man's honor, a woman's love, or a mother's protection.

"We were descending into a hollow between high hills. The road was narrow, dark, slippery, and the soft sound of falling rain drowned the noise of wheels. Through a break in the eastern clouds, the stars shone out above the hill-crest. Suddenly, instantly, without a stroke of warning, there loomed up before me, black, dreadful, appalling as De Quincey's "Vision of Sudden Death," a vast moving pile, six mules, a Carson wagon, ore-laden to the brim, a sleepy driver, nodding on his seat-and tearing into that mass of wood, iron, stone, and wild animal life, was a tired horse, a heart-sick, wearied rider. Simultaneously came the discovery upon us all. The driver awoke with a loud cry, the mules sprang back and snorted; I saw and heard a neck-yoke snap, and a flash of light ning lit up the dark hollow to the very feet of the frightened animals. Of myself I could do nothing, so narrow was the space between,

so brief the time left for thought. But instinct helps in such cases. On one side of the road was a shallow ditch, on the other a wall of rock. Major gathered himself up, and made a leap sidewise, crying out in mortal terror as he sprang, and we landed safely below, clearing by a few inches the tangled leaders and the great wheel of the wagon. Wild with terror still, and screaming with fright, Major ran as he had not run before. He climbed the bank again and resumed his tearing pace along the roadway. That night in the nearest village the teamster told his cronies at the tavern that a ferocious-looking highwayman had ridden down upon him, frightened his mules, and fired several shots as he galloped past; but excited imagination, and stones rolling down the hills may be held responsible for the pistol-firing item.

"I reached Bemont's in safety, but only to find that the doctor had returned to the valley by another road, and was already far past my overtaking-for the condition of my horse warned me that I must slack my pace. I hired a boy on a fresh horse, and sent him after the doctor, while I took the shortest way home."

Again a long pause.

"And when I reached home Walter had been dead an hour. No human power could have prolonged his life. He revived a little once, and asked whether brother Tom had come home."

"Poor child," said the sybarite, after a moment, making a pretence of wiping the dust from his face; then a pause, and he spoke again, very quietly, and in a tone we had never heard him use:

"I knew a man once, who owned a farm in San Luis Obispo County, fifteen miles north of Cambria, on the coast. He was young, happy, and ambitious; not a lazy fellow, such as I am. And he was romantic,

IF ANY lover of unique theories should propound one to the effect that night, not day, is the mother of us all, no dash between two clauses of life, a swoon, a temporary death of earth, but the very source of existence, instinct through all its darkness with unfolding wings of life, pierced through and through with roots of life—he could make a very fair showing for his theory. Unanswerable science could crush him with the relation of the sun to animal and vegetable life; but he could go back of unanswerable science to that region of eternal night where science is unanswering, but into which the imagination gropes with blindly reaching fingers, and feels-half feels, strains to its utmost and hardly touches, and misses again —not death, not uncreative blackness, but the very life of life, stirring in the void before ever it was said "Let there be light." Whither but into night and darkness-says our theorist, warming into conviction of what he at first propounded as a mere whimsical paradox-whither but into night and darkness can you trace back any thread of life? Put your hand on the tiny fraction of it that stretches in the sunshine, and feel back, back -the life of the plant, the life of the animal, the life of the race, the life of all being-and into night and darkness they all take you. Down into the dark go the roots of the plant: and if the seed that started there came from the sunshine, bringing with it the germinating power stored up in the light, to use at its leisure in the quiet dark, it is only that individual vessel for the holding of life, that little seed-package of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen, whose genesis we found in the light; the life poured into it, and through it for the new plant, came through how many myriads of such little vessels, shaped in the light and stirring into power in the dark for how many myriads of ages, from-where? Where but from the primal, potent, all-creative night? Down into the

dark go the roots of the tree Ygdrasil, and though the leaves come and go in the sunlight above, no one finds the seed that was shaped in the light for the making of that tree. "The Books teach Darkness was at first of all,

And Brahm, sole meditating in that Night." The all-creative, all-inspiring Life dwelleth in darkness; out of the eternal dark it flows into the visible forms that we call lives. What if day be the cheerful, noisy, warmed and lighted workshop in which lives are made, and night the recurrent glimpse of that all-embracing darkness wherein life broods?

Something of a consciousness of this life and potency in the wide darkness stirs in the human soul of a summer night. Winter night has less of this power: it means fireside, and lamp, and book—a miniature reproduction of the narrow day-workshop. The tides of life in human veins run low. But out under the summer night the soul expands, and seems aware of the breathing of an infinite life through the surrounding space, the stirring of the great earth's pulse, the mighty marchings of the cosmic bodies, and the streams of force, drawing and repelling, and filling every inch of all space. Life runs deeper and stronger; the tide pours into all the shallow places and dry creeks and marshes of feeling: the old dead love of years ago stirs in its grave; the living love of today cries and yearns across land and sea to the distant beloved one.

"In the dark and in the dew,

All my soul goes out to you." At night, too, religious awe and religious ecstasy mount to their height: then comes the vision to the mystic, the passion of adoration to the devotee, the sense of the divine actually present and in conscious communion with the human soul. The envelope of life seems too narrow to hold the feeling that dwells within it, strains and aches against its sides, searches for place to overflow.