chester into the neutral grounds, news having promptly reached them at their retreat near Greenwich, that most of the King's body had been withdrawn westward about the Hudson.

Finding that the tavern did contai 1 their friends, our scouts came back, and forthwith we were brought as prisoners into the tap-room.

Neither our persons nor our names were known to any of the group of gentlemanly officers whom we found seated in landlord Bray's best pa lor howbeit, many of the common soldiery in the bar without instantly recognized me and pronounced my name.

We were most courteously received by the lieutenant to whom the rest deferred as chief in the command, and in the half hour that we passed under Bray's roof, the exceeding kindness was extended me, of suffering Miss Broadbent to lie down and rest in an adjoining bed-room.

The officer, whose name I many years thereafter learned was Kimberly, bore at the time the odious commission to apprehend and carry off the persons of suspected Tories to an imprisonment in some abandoned copper mines at Simsbury in the adjoining State, the which for cruelty. and barbarous disregard of the dictates of civilized, not to say Christian, manhood, hath never been surpassed.

The half hour passed in an irregular examination of ourselves. We had long been suspected; we had been taken in secret and proscribed nocturnal meeting, in company of others who had escaped.

We stoutly and persistently refused. to say who those same others were, or what our reasons were for such refusal. True all known gentlemen and men of unimpeachable and stainless honor, as he believed us, we had all vowed that we had neither indirectly nor directly, done, countenanced, abetted, or been privy to anything whatever to freedom's prejudice; but, much as it did grieve him, he could not answer for his own commission,

were he to take our bald, mysterious and unsupported negatives for truth.

My heart sank deeper within me at thought of Simsbury's mines, the horrors of which prison had reached us all.

I plead my daughter's delicate condition, and I delight so late to say, the officer almost relented. But duty hath no tenderness for long.

Accordingly I went into the next apartment where my child lay resting to break to her the dismal news that we must be again upon the march in a few minutes. She was asleep, but scarcely in sweet sleep, for that I did observe her fingers twitching nervously, and all the muscles of her face con

tract.

I had not heart to awake her. Turning to go and beg a respite of an hour, I was attracted by the rattle of a blind and saw a row of finger tips protruding through the slats of a green blind at the sole window the apartment boasted.

A moment's hesitation hesitation over, I neared the window, and saw two gleaming, eager eye-balls peering in at me, and one of the long fingers bending as beckoning me.

To my no little comfort, it was the voice of Bray that whispered through the shutters when I drew near.

He must have crept upon the roof of a pent-house making against our room, and so got word with me.

"Squire! Squire!" he began; "there be a thousand red-coats not two miles off sleeping like tops filled with my oldest claret-four casks of it; ye mind it well Squire!-four casks of it, the cut-throats drank. Well, they be now not two miles off, and would be back here in a wink, did but your honor wish it."

Hope flashed upon me. A word to this good fellow and he would raise the alarm, and without doubt bring a large force of English to our rescue. But, then, my oath was gone from me; nor could I hope to extricate myself at such a pass from the entang

ling evidence against me. To summon British aid were to avow a guilt I had not--and something in my soul at that same moment, filled me with grave forebodings for Weston and my child, should I appeal for help.

"No, Bray, my best of men, it is too late."

"Nay, not too late by any means, saving your honor's presence. Look at the dear young leddy yonder, Squire, and let me do that, Squire, that shall prevent her sleeping in Little Hell."

So had the common folk named the much dreaded mines. Waiting for no reply, Bray dropped the twenty feet which measured the distance of his precarious perch from the hard ground, and, along bypaths and often through the woods, he took the shortest way to the small valley where were encamped the forces of the King, eight hundred strong.

When I returned to the next room I found the officers and all their men making the necessary preparations for an immediate departure, and having with much difficulty and more regret aroused Miss Broadbent, we soon were mounted all upon the animals which need, no less than Mr. Kimberly's consideration, provided for us.

Nor were we anywise too soon set forth, for we had not yet left the tavern court-yard, when who but Sergeant Darlington should gallop up all wrath and incoherence.

He had chased the fugitives he cried, and had tracked them into an open stretch of road where he had recognized them both, Weston the traitor, and Colonel Saunderson the red-coat liar; they had then waved a roll (of maps, he dare be sworn) and bade him come to them. He fired and missed, and then before he could reload, there sprang from back of them two score and more of red-coats,

and he had turned and fled, and here he was! "Aye, and the bloodhounds will be upon us here in fifteen minutes. To horse! To horse!"

Kimberly asks him then: "You say that Major Weston was with this Colonel Saunderson, and hath sought refuge in the British lines?"

"I do."

"That is a lie!" screams out my daughter, startling us all.

Kimberly turns to me forthwith: "What have you, sir, to say to this? I would believe ill of my own mother sir, as soon as of my school-mate, friend and fellow-soldier, Victor Weston."

"It is a lie! It is an arrant lie!" Chatters my wretched child, trying to check the mocking, nervous laugh which had so frightened me before.

"Nay, sir, I cannot say," was all that I found power to utter. Mackenzie, with his arm about my daughter, had for the time forgot his other charge, and that sound Tory, piqued and harassed by all this evening's work, ing, "Depend upon it, Broadbent, and found opportunity, therefore, of sayyou, Sir Officer, that Major Weston hath once more found his wits and hath in sooth returned to the King's service from which he only "

Mackenzie saved the reverend doctor's greater rashness, by interrupting him with a remark which banished every thought save that of safety, from the soldiers' mind.

"Hark! heard you not?" saith honest Tom, "I think the British be upon us, sir!"

At this, sharp orders being passed, our cavalcade swung into line, and we set off at a smart pace toward the frontier, which reached, meant safety for the rest, but for ourselves all of the lingering tortures of the worst of prisons.

The little grey print hung on the wall so much above one's height that it might easily have escaped observation were it not that the white robes of the Mother and Child massed against the grey setting and ebony frame held the attention, and presently the details of the picture emerged from the surrounding greyness and the face of the Madonna looked down. Not a Madonna of the Masters, but the creation of a painter of our own day, a woman artist whose soul speaks in her work, moving all hearts in subtle. sympathy while ever subordinating art to the expression of spiritual power.

In the summer of 1894 an oil painting hung in the Art Museum of Boston, and daily there paused before it some who knew art, and many more to whom art was unknown except in those vague stirrings of heart and soul, silent tributes to beauty and truth.

The painting told its own story; there was no need of catalogued description. The modest inscription in the corner revealed the painter of the new Madonna, and public opinion of her work was voiced in the prediction:

"Miss Macomber is able to attain the greatest end which the greatest master ever reached; for she moves the hearts of those who study her pictures, and especially does she accomplish this by the face of the Madonna. This art is not learned in any school; it can be imparted by no master; it is her own God-given nature which has enabled her to illume the face of her Madonna, sad though it be, with the unutterable, tender, passionate, unselfish and immortal maternal love."

Some years later a print from this painting looked down from a murky

corner in a photographer's salon and told again the beautiful allegory of mother love and faith conflicting in the heart of Mary.

In her Madonna Miss Macomber has given form to a noble conception inspired by the words of Simeon, "and thy own soul a sword shall pierce."

We see the Mother, her love stronger than human love yet controlled by sublime resignation; the Infant on whom the shadow of Calvary has fallen; the Angel of the Passion holding up the crown of thorns; and the Angel of Sorrow bowed in grief, its wings folded, every line of the drooping figure telling of profound sadness; in the background the lily rears its blossoms, one open chalice inclined towards the Mother and the Victim, who by draining to the dregs the chalice of suffering shall redeem the world.

And such a victim! The artist rends our hearts with the humanness of the babe she has given into the mother's arms. It is so small, and clinging and helpless, inert in slumber; its face so snuggled into the mother's neck that the little nose is turned upward, pressed into her flesh, her hand supporting the tiny head from falling back in the abandon of repose. We can feel the warmth of the swaddled form, the fragrant breath exhaling on the mother's cheek, and our undisciplined human impulse is to tear the crown of thorns from the angel's grasp, putting forth our frail human strength in a puerile effort to avert the consummation of the prophecy. But presently the holy calm of the Madonna encompasses us; the majesty of her grief rebukes our resentful spirit; and our heritage. of faith lifts our soul to hers, following it humbly beyond Golgotha to the realization of Christian hope.

Not alone in depicting holy sorrow, nor in expressing divine resignation does the artist employ her skill in painting religious subjects. Her refined, devotional conception of solemn reverent joy is shown in the interpretation of Gabriel's message, "Hail, thou art highly favored;" and in strong contrast to this vision of virginal purity rejoicing in the favor of her Lord, "A Magdalene" depicts a later social outcast crying out to Him for pity and pardon. She has heard the story of the Magdalen, and, overwhelmed with shame and remorse, sinks down in her costly robes:

"She hath done what she could; Lo, the flame that hath driven her

Downward is quenched! and her grief like a flood

In the strength of a rain-swollen torrent hath shriven her;

Much hath she loved and much is forgiven her;

Love in the longing fulfils what it would

"She hath done what she could;

The broad lesson of charity that knows not class nor creed is taught in "A Cup of Cold Water." The road of life is bestrewn with stones and sharp with thorns for the wayfarer's feet, and one has succumbed and fallen by the way, weighed down by the burden of misery. She is richly dressed; the cares of poverty were never hers, yet she reaches out eager grasping hands for the proffered cup of cold water symbolic of the sympathy and kindly thought we all crave to refresh us on life's journey.

Perhaps the most powerful exposition of Miss Macomber's genius is "Care at the Gates of Sleep," suggested by lines from the Faerie Queen telling of the sprite's errand to the house of Morpheus:

"Whose double gates he findeth locked fast;

The one faire fram'd of burnisht yvory,
The other all with silver overcast:
And wakeful dogges before them farre

doe lye,

Watching to banish Care, their enimy,

Who oft is wont to trouble gentle Sleepe."

Accepting the suggestion Miss Macomber imparted to it a significance all her own. "I was troubled by care myself at the time," she said, in her gentle serious way, "so troubled! The lines appealed to me, but I did not follow the description in the least. I painted her as our modern Medusa."

The classic reference may be lost to many, but no classic lore is needed to grasp the meaning of the huddled form crouching against the gates of Sleep, the haggard face turned outward, the affrighted eyes wide open, the trembling fingers vainly striving to unlock the massive bars.

The artist makes us feel the heartthrobs of this embodied Care with rent garments and snake-wreathed head, vainly striving to escape pursuing thoughts, baffled in her purpose, denied admittance by the opposing doors beyond which rest the favored ones "All drowned in deadly sleep."

In happier spirit is the simple allegory "Spring opening the gates to Love." Spring has ventured forth from the abode of Time where dwell the seasons, and meeting Love, a gracious maiden, draws back the gate that she may enter in to beguile Time with her gentle presence. There is no airy gladness in the rendering of the subject, no frivolous interpretation of the mission of youth and love. Such delineation is impossible to this painter who invests her work with the dignity of reverence.

"Hope" is interpreted by Miss Macomber as Hope on the verge of despair, blind, bound in chains, and only one string of her harp unbroken. The others have snapped one by one under severe tension; the remaining string is strained to its utmost, but still she plays upon it kneeling at the feet of that Life which is the source of all Christian hope and the solace of all human cares.

of

Miss Macomber possesses in a remarkable degree, the power expressing loneliness. The expres