The Second Chance

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Wheeler

rly-to-rise Martha-the only one of his family that was really like his own people. If he could believe his sen

her small pink fist, he could not have been more surprised than he was now! He stared at her with all th

lent me. I would like to get it every month-it's-it's got lots of n

ins moisten

s never think how the money comes. Y

t twenty-five years, but she did not. Ready speech was not one of Martha's acc

things for the house, and didn't I get you an eighteen-dollar wallaby coa

eding the stock, and saving the wages of a hired man, while

ny of these magazines then, and I don't know as they do any good, anyway. Poor old Ann Winters sent away her good, hard-earned dollar to some place in the States, where they said: 'Send us a dollar, and we'll show you how to make fifty; light employment; will not have to leave home;

hat way, to get a trip home this Christmas," she said, locking and unlocking her fingers, the rough

her her own name to a note. She wasn't so slow either, for she purtended she doubted her own writin', and got near enough to make a grab for it, and tore her name off; but it gave me father such a turn he advertised her in the paper that he would not be responsible for her debts, and he never put his name to paper of any kind afterward

aid slowly. "I want the magazine,

yer just like my poor sister Lizzie that married a peddler against all our wishes. I mind well, the night before she ran away

is eyes with a red handkerchief,

the table, but instinctively she felt that the meetin

pride of Martha's heart, but to-night Martha's heart had nothing in it but a gr

encircling the words "I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty," while its companion, with a similar profusion of roses, made the correction: "I woke and knew that, life was Duty." Martha had not chosen the words,

s. It was a pleasant scene that lay before Martha's window-a long reach of stubble field, stretching away to the bank of the Souris, flanked by poplar bluffs. It was just a mile long, that field,

een many improvements in the house and out of it. She had better clothes than ever she had; the trees had been lovely this last summer, and the garden never better

ked older. Her shoulders were slightly bent, and would suggest to an accurate observer that they had become so by carrying heavy burdens. Her hair was hay-colou

small economies. She had not been able to get even two dollars when she wanted it. She sat up straight and looked sadly out into the velvet dusk, and the tears that had been long gathering in her heart

lamp, and washed away, all traces of her tears. Going to a cupboard that stood beh

d all begun the fall before, when, at a party at one of the neighbours', Arthur Wemyss, the young Englishman, had asked her to dance. He had been so different from the young men she had known, so courteous and gentle, and had spoken to her with such respect, that her heart was swept with a strange, new fe

as a dull, plain girl-and even when she sat at her embroidery and let the imagination

eighbours. Martha baked his bread for him, and seldom gave him his basket of newly made loaves that it did not con

new he was engaged to be married to a young lady in England, it was the one br

of the heart. In the gossip of the neighbourhood she had heard of girls making "a dead set for fellows who did not care a row of pins" for them, and she knew it w

its and snowy bread may be so called; and so, day by day, she went on baking, scrubbi