Joe Hale's home was in Western New York, in the beautiful Genesee valley. His father had been one of the pioneer settlers in that region, and the log-cabin in which Joe's oldest brothers and sisters had been born was still standing, and did good duty as a wheat barn. The farm was a large and productive one; and the Hales had always taken their position among the well-to-do and influential people of the county. But a strange fatality of death seemed to pursue the family. Joe's father was killed by falling from a beam in his own barn; and Joe's eldest brother was crushed to death by a favorite bull of his. It was never known whether the animal did it in play or in rage. Joe's eldest sister had married young and gone to Iowa to live; the other had died when Joe was a little boy, and Joe and his mother lived alone on the farm for many years. Mrs. Hale was a singularly strong, vigorous woman, but she was cut down in a single week by a sharp attack of pneumonia the very spring before the war broke out. This left Joe all alone in the world, and when he found the men in his town holding back from enlisting, and buying substitutes, he said, half sadly, half cheerily, "I'm one of the men to go, that's certain. There's nobody needs me."

And now after one short year's fighting, he had come home a crippled man, to take up the old life alone. It was not a cheering outlook; and as he drew near the homestead, and saw again the grand stretches of old woods in which he had so often made his ax ring on the hickory-trees, Joe thought to himself:

"I don't know what a one-armed man is good for, anyhow."

The cordiality with which his neighbors welcomed him back, the eager interest with which they all listened to his accounts of the battles he had been in, lessened this sense of loneliness for a short time. But the town was a small, thinly settled one; in a few weeks everybody had heard all Joe

had to tell; nobody said any longer, “ Have you seen poor Joe Hale with his one arm ?" The novelty had all worn off, the town went its way as before, and Joe found himself more solitary than ever.

When he went to the war he left the farm in charge of a faithful laborer who had worked on it for years; this man had married, and he and his wife and children now occupied the house in which Joe had lived so long with his mother. The house was large, and there was room enough and to spare for Joe; but it seemed sadly unlike home; yet any other place seemed still more unlike home. Poor Joe did not know what to do.

"You'll have to get married, Joe, now, and settle down," the neighbors said to him continually.

"Married!" Joe would answer, and point to his empty coat-sleeve. "That looks like it, doesn't it!" And an almost bitter sense of deprivation took root in his heart.

He

One night, when he felt especially lonely, he went upstairs to his room early. sat on the edge of the bed and looked about the room. It had been his mother's room. All the furniture stood as she had left it; and yet an indefinable air of neglect and disorder had crept into the room.

"I can't live this way," thought Joe; "that's certain. But I don't suppose any woman would marry a fellow with only one

arm.

I'll have to get a housekeeper;" and Joe ran over in his mind the names of all the possible candidates he could think of for that office; not one seemed endurable to him, and, with a sigh, he tried to dismiss the subject from his mind. As he undressed, his big wallet fell to the floor, and out of it fell Tilly's little pink letter. He picked it up carelessly, not seeing, at first, what it was. As he recognized it, he felt a thrill of pleasure. There seemed one link at least between himself and some human being.

"I declare I'll write to that child to-morrow," he thought. "I wonder if she wouldn't like to come up here and stay a spell this fall,-she and her mother, and get away from those rocks. It would be a real change for them," thought kind-hearted Joe. "I guess I'll ask them. I reckon they're plain people that wouldn't be put out by the way things go here."

And somewhat cheered by this thought, Joe fell asleep. In the morning he wrote his letter and sent it off. It was not quite

66

Ye-es," replied Captain 'Lisha, slowly, as if he were not sure whether he intended to say yes or no. "Ye-es, it's a very handsome invitation, certain; nobody can dispute that; but it seems queer he should want to invite folks he don't know anything about. It's bounden queer, I think. Let me see the letter." Captain 'Lisha straight ened his spectacles on his nose, and read the letter through very slowly. Then he folded it and laid it on the table, and brought down his hand hard on it, and said again: "It's bounden queer."

Tilly said nothing.

"What's the matter with you?" said her mother, a little sharply. "What's your notion about it."

Tilly laughed an odd little laugh.

66

He's got the idea I'm a little girl," she said. "I see it just as plain as anything. That's what makes him write 's he does."

"No such a thing, Tilly," said Mrs. Bennet, in an excited tone. "What makes you think so? I'm sure I don't see it.”

It was an instinct rather than a specific interpretation of any one sentence which had made Tilly so sure; she could hardly justify it to her mother, though it was clear enough to herself; so she replied, meekly: "I don't know."

Mrs. Bennet snatched the letter, and exclaimed: "I'll read it again! It's the silliest notion I ever heard of. I don't see what put it into your head, Matilda Bennet!"

Tilly said nothing. On a second reading of the letter, Mrs. Bennet was more vehement than ever.

"It's no such thing!" she exclaimed. "Do you think so, 'Lisha? Do you see anything in it?"

"I don't know," answered Captain 'Lisha, slowly as before. "It's bounden it's queer; a handsome invitation, but it's bounden queer;" and that was all that could be got out of Captain 'Lisha.

"Well, I'm goin' to answer this letter myself," said Mrs. Bennet resolutely. "I aint no hand to letter-write; but I'm goin' to write this time myself."

"Oh, mother, will you?" exclaimed Tilly, with great animation. "That's good. I was dreading it so."

66

"Humph!" said Mrs. Bennet. "When I was your age, I'd ha' jumped at the chance of getting letters from most anybody, ef I'd ha' been cooped up 's you are on a narrow strip o' what's neither land nor water. But you needn't answer Mr. Hale's letter if you don't want to. I can make out to write something that 'll pass muster for a letter, I reckon; and I think the man's real friendly."

"All right, mother," said Tilly. "I'm real glad you're going to write the letter. You might tell him that I was twenty-six years old last August, and see what he says to that when he writes. You'll find I was right. I know he thinks I'm a little girl,” and Tilly laughed out a merry and mischievous laugh.

What Mrs. Bennet wrote they never knew ; to neither Captain 'Lisha nor Tilly would she read her letter.

"Seems to me this is a mighty thick letter, wife," said Captain 'Lisha when he took it from her hands to carry it to the office. "What you been sayin'?"

"Oh, not much," replied Mrs. Bennet. "It's on that thick paper o' yours; I just thanked him for his invitation and told him how much we'd like to come; but we couldn't think on't-and a few more things."

66

The few more things" were the gist of the letter. After the opening generalities of courtesy, which Mrs. Bennet managed much better than Tilly had in her little note, came the following extraordinary paragraph:

66

Tilly, we always call her Tilly for short, but her name is Matilda, same as she signed your letter,she's got it into her head that you thought she was words about this; I don't see anything in your a little girl, from her letter. Now, we've had some letter to make it out of, and if you wouldn't think it too much trouble, I'd take it very kindly of you if you'd write and say what's the truth about it. 'Taint often I care which end of a quarrel I come out of, so long's I know I'm right; but there aint any knowing who is right in this one, unless by what you say; and Tilly and me we've had a good many words about it, first and last. Tilly's twentysix, going on twenty-seven; birthday was last August; so she and me are more like sisters than anything else. She's a good girl, if I am her mother; and I'd have liked first-rate to bring her

When Joe first read Mrs. Bennet's letter, he said "Whew!" then he read the letter over, and said again louder than before,

"Whew! Didn't I put my foot in it that time. I don't wonder the girl got her mother to write for her! She must have thought me monstrous impudent to write her to come out here visiting,-a woman-as old as I am, pretty nearly. By jingoes, I don't know what to do now.- -I'd like to see what sort of a girl she is, anyhow. I don't care!-that letter of hers did sound just like a child's letter! I expect she's a real innocent kind of a woman, and that's the kind I like." At last out of the honesty of his nature came the solution of the dilemma; he told the exact truth, and it had a gracious and civil sound even in Joe's unvarnished speech. "I did wonder if it wasn't a little girl," he wrote, "because she spoke so honest about the red yarn and about the light-house, and most of the grown up women I know aint quite so honest spoken. But the lady at the hospital who wrote for me first-Miss Larned-said she didn't think it was a little girl; and of course she could tell better than I could, being a woman herself.”

Then Joe said that he should like to come to Provincetown, but his business never took him that way, and then he re-iterated his invitation to them to come to see him.

"Since I made so bold as to ask you the first time, you'll forgive my asking you over again. I do really wish you could see your way to come," he said. "It's very pretty here in the fall, our apples are just beginning to be ripe, and there aint any such apples anywhere ever I've been as in the Genesee valley.'

Then Joe added his "best respects" to Mrs. Bennet's daughter, and closed his

letter.

"I vow, I believe I'd rather be there than here," he thought to himself again and again. If there had been in the circle of Joe's acquaintance now one even moderately attractive marriageable woman, Joe would have drifted into falling in love with her, as inevitably as an apple falls off its stem when its days of ripening are numbered; but there

was not. Joe's own set of boys and girls were heads of households now, and for the next younger set, Joe was too old. Young girls did not please him; partly, perhaps, because he saw, or fancied, that they shrank a little from his armless sleeve. By imperceptifloat in Joe's mind, akin to thoughts which ble degrees,vague thoughts began to form and

He

floated in Mrs. Bennet's before she wrote her letter; not tangible enough to be stated, or to be matter of distinct consciousness, never going farther in words than "who knows;" but all the while drawing Joe slowly, surely toward Provincetown. He had thought that he would take a journey to Iowa before the winter set in, and see his aunt and his cousins and his married sister there; but gradually he fell into the way of thinking about a journey to the east first. Now, to suppose from all this that Joe had a romantic sentiment toward the unknown Matilda Bennet would be quite wrong. had nothing of the kind. He had merely a vague but growing impulse to go and see, as he phrased it, "what she was like." As week after week passed and he received no reply to his letter, this impulse increased. He had thought Mrs. Bennet would write again; she seemed to Joe to wield rather a glib pen; he had promised he should have an active correspondence "with the old lady," as he always called her in his own mind; but no letter came. Mrs. Bennet builded better than she knew, when she left Joe to himself so many weeks. His letter had given her great satisfaction. She read it aloud to Tilly and to her husband, and consoled herself by her partial defeat in her argument with Tilly by saying: "Well, he only says he wondered; and the lady told him it wasn't a child, and he knew she knew best; that aint really making up his mind; I don't call it so by a long shot;" and there the quarrel rested. Tilly was content, and if the whole truth were known, a little more than content, that "the soldier," as she always called their unknown correspondent, knew now that she was "grown up." Tilly had built no air-castles. She often thought she wished she could see "the soldier,” but she had no more expectation of seeing him than of seeing General McClellan. Tilly was, as her mother had said, a good girl. She loved her melodeon; and she still spent two hours a day at her practicing. She had for several weeks now played in church, and that gave her a new stimulus to practice. For the rest, she helped her mother, she sewed for the soldiers, and still knitted at

twilight on the rocks, stockings-of gray yarn, now-to be sent to hospitals.

One night, late in October, when the stage drove up to the Provincetown Hotel, the loungers on the piazza were surprised to see alighting from it, a one-armed man, in a heavy army overcoat. His speech was not that of a military man, and his reticence as to his plans and purposes was baffling. "Been in the war, eh?" said one, nodding toward the empty sleeve. "Yes," said Joe, curtly. "Discharged, I suppose."

"Yes," said Joe. "They don't have much use for men in my fix."

"Got leisure to look round ye, a little, now, then," said the first speaker.

"Yes," said Joe.

They could not make anything out of him, and the street speculated no little before it went to sleep that night, as to what that "army feller" was after. If anybody had said that the "army feller" had come all the way to Provincetown solely to see what "Tilly Bennet was like," the town would have given utterance to one ejaculation of astonishment, and wondered what on earth there was in Tilly Bennet, to bring a man all that distance.

But Joe did not think so the next morning, when, having hired a man to take him over to the light-house, he landed on the rocks at noon, just as Tilly was hanging out clothes. The clothes-line was fastened to iron stanchions in the light-house itself, and in high cliffs to the back of it; a gale was blowing; in fact, it had been so high, that the boatman had demurred at first about taking Joe across, as he was not used to the sea.

"Go ahead," said Joe. "If you can stand it, I can."

But, if the truth were told, Joe was pretty white about the lips, and not very steady on the legs when he stepped ashore.

"A half hour longer 'd have made you sicker 'n death," said the man, eying him. "That's so," said Joe, with a desperate qualm. "Dry land for me, thank you." "How long do ye want to stay?" said the boatman.

Joe looked up at the light-house-then at the tossing white-capped waves.

"Always," he said, laughing, "if it's going to heave like that—not more than an hour, or may be half an hour," he added, seriously; "it isn't going to blow any worse, is it?" "Oh no," said the man, "it'll quiet down before long," and he prepared to make his boat fast.

Tilly was hard at work trying to fasten her clothes on the line. They never waited for quiet weather before hanging out their clothes at the light-house. It was of no use. Tilly's back was toward the wharf where Joe had landed. Her sleeves were rolled up to her shoulders, and her arms shone white in the sun. She had twisted a red silk handkerchief of her father's tight round her head; a few straggling curls of dark hair blew out from under this; her cheeks were scarlet, and her brown eyes flashed in her contest with the wind. Nobody ever called Tilly pretty; but she had a healthy, honest face, and at this moment she was pretty; no-not pretty; picturesque, which is far better than pretty, though Joe did not know that, and in his simplicity only wondered how a woman could look so handsome, blowing about in such a gale.

Tilly saw a stranger walking up to the light-house door; but she did not pause in her work. Strangers came every day. Joe's left side was farthest away from Tilly. She did not see the loose, hanging sleeve; and the blue of the army coat did not attract her notice, so she went on with her clothes without giving a second thought to the man who had disappeared in the big door of the lighthouse. Somebody to see her father, no doubt, or to see the light!

When Tilly went into the kitchen and saw the stranger sitting by the table talking familiarly with her mother, she was somewhat surprised, but was passing through the room with her big clothes-basket, when her mother, with an air of unconcealable triumph, said:

"Tilly, you couldn't guess who this is." Tilly halted, basket in hand, and turned her scarlet cheeks and bright brown eyes full toward Joe.

"No, I haven't the least idea," she said, and as she said it she looked so pretty, that Joe, absurd as it might seem, fell in love with her on the spot.

The words, "I haven't the least idea," had hardly left her lips, when her eyes fell on the empty sleeve; and, although in no letter had it ever been said that Joe had lost an arm, this sight suggested him to her mind.

"Why, it isn't Mr. Hale, is it?" she said, turning still redder.

"It is, though," said Joe, rising and coming toward her, offering her his one hand. "You and your mother wouldn't come to see me, and so I came to see you."

Tilly's hand having been all the morning in hot soap-suds, was red and swollen and

puckered, but it looked beautiful to Joe; so did Tilly's awkward little laugh, as she said, half drawing back her hand:

"I've been washing; that's what makes my hands look so."

There was something in the infantile and superfluous honesty of this remark which reminded Joe instantly of the sentence in Tilly's letter: "We had the red worsted in the house. That is the reason the stockings were that color," and he smiled at the memory. His smile was such a cordial one that Tilly did not misinterpret it, and his spontaneous reply, as he took her hand in his, was worthy of a courtier.

"I often saw my mother's hands look like this, Miss Bennet. She always did a great part of the washing."

Tilly stood still looking ill at ease; and Joe stood still, also looking ill at ease. There seemed to be nothing now to say. Mrs. Bennet cut the Gordian knot, as she had cut one or two already.

"Go along, Tilly," she said. "Get off your washing duds; it's near dinner time."

Tilly was glad to escape to her own room. Once safe in refuge she sank into a chair with a most bewildered face and tried to collect her thoughts. She seemed like one in a dream. "The soldier" had come. How her heart ached over the thought of that armless sleeve !

"He never said anything about his arm being gone," thought Tilly. "It's too bad. How blue his eyes are! I never saw such blue eyes!" in a laugh of innocent wonder and excitement. Her thoughts SO ran away with her that when her mother called her through the door, "Dinner's ready, Tilly," poor Tilly was not half dressed, and kept them waiting ten minutes or more, which drew down upon her from her father a rebuke that it hurt her sorely to have "the soldier" hear. But the soldier" was too happy to be disturbed by small things. Since his mother's death Joe had not seen anything so homelike, so familiar, as this dinner in Mrs. Bennet's little kitchen. He made friends with Captain 'Lisha at once; the old man could not ask questions enough about the war, and Joe answered them all with a patience which was perhaps more commendable than his accuracy. Tilly sat by, listening in eager silence; not a word escaped her; when her eyes met Joe's she colored and looked away.

"I don't care if she is twenty-six," thought Joe, "she is just like a child."

Mrs. Bennet, with hospitable fervor, had insisted that Joe should not go back to the town, but should stay with them; "that is," she added, "if you think you can sleep with the water swash, swash, swashing in your ears. 'Twas years before I ever could learn to sleep here; and there's times now when I don't sleep for whole nights together."

Joe thought he could sleep in spite of the water, and with the greatest alacrity sent his boatman back to town for his valise.

"After all," said the citizens, on hearing this," after all he was only some relation of the Bennets."

But when day after day passed, and he did not return, the town began again to speculate as to his purposes. Some fishermen going or coming, had seen him walking on the rocks with Tilly; and very soon a rumor took to itself wings and went up and down the town, that the one-armed soldier was "courting Tilly Bennet."

The seclusion of the light-house had its advantages now,-very little could the Provincetown gossips know of what went on among those distant rocks. Very safe were Joe and Tilly in the nooks which they explored in the long bright afternoons. How strangely changed seemed the lonely spot to Tilly! Each rod of the wave-washed beach was transformed as she paced it with Joe by her side. No word of love-making did Joe say-not because it was not warm and ready in his heart, but he was afraid.

"Of course she can't care anything about me, all of a sudden so," said sensible Joe. "She haint been a-longing and a-longing for somebody 's I have.”

So at the end of a week he went away,merely saying to Tilly and Mrs. Bennet as he bade them good-bye, that he would write very soon. But Tilly's heart had not been so idle as Joe thought, and she was not surprised one day, a few weeks later, when she read in a letter of Joe's that he didn't know whether she knew it or not but he had come to the conclusion that she was just about the nicest girl in all the country, and if she thought she could take up with a fellow that hadn't but one arm, he was hers to command for the rest of her life.

Tilly had a happy little cry over the letter before she showed it to her mother. "Do you think you can like him, Tilly?" asked Mrs. Bennet, anxiously.

"Yes," said Tilly, "I do like him; and he's real good."

And when they told Captain 'Lisha he said, vehemently, that nothing short of go