hers forever; she had learned the abidingness of what is real. When she closed the door behind her, she touched the casing as if she loved it, and, crossing the orchard, she felt as if all the trees could say: "We know, you and we!"

As she entered the Pike farmyard, Eli was just going to milking, with clusters of shining pails.

"You're up early," said he. "Well, there's nothin' like the mornin'!"

"No," answered Dilly, smiling at him with the radiance of one who carried good news, "except night time! There's a good deal in that!" And while Eli went gravely on, pondering according to his wont, she ran up to smooth her tumbled bed.

After breakfast, while Mrs. Pike was carrying away the dishes, Dilly called Jethro softly to one side.

"You come out in the orchard. I want to speak to you."

Her voice thrilled with something like the gladness of confidence, and Jethro's own face brightened into vivid anticipation. Dilly saw it, and caught her breath. Though she knew it now, the old charm would never be quite gone. She took his hand and drew him forward. She seemed like a child, unaffected and not afraid. Out in the path, under the oldest tree of all, she dropped his hand and faced him.

"Jethro," she said, "we can't do it. We can't get married."

He looked at her amazed. She seemed to be telling good news instead of bad. She gazed up at him smilingly. He could not understand.

"Don't you care about me?" he asked at length, haltingly; and again Dilly smiled at him in the same warm confidence.

"Oh, yes," she said, eagerly. "I do care, ever and ever so much. But it's your folks I care about. It ain't you. I've found it all out, Jethro. Things don't always belong to us. Sometimes they belong to them that have gone before; an' half the time we don't know it."

Jethro laid a gentle hand upon her arm. "You're all tired out," he said soothingly. "Now you give up picking over things, and let me hire somebody. I'll be glad to."

But Dilly withdrew a little from his touch. "You're real good, Jethro," she answered, steadily. She had put aside her exaltation, and was her old self, full of common sense and kindly strength. "But I don't feel tired, an' I ain't a mite crazed. All you can do is to ride over to town with Eli, he's goin' after he feeds the pigs-an' take the cars from there. It's all over, Jethro. It is, truly! I ain't so sorry as I might be, for it's borne in on me you won't care this way long. An' you needn't, dear; for nothin' between us is changed a mite. The only trouble is, it ain't the kind of thing we thought."

She looked in his eyes with a long, bright farewell glance, and turned away. She had left something which was very fine and beautiful behind her; but she could not mourn. And all that morning she sang little snatches of song about the house, and was content. The Joyces had done their work, and she was doing hers.

A1

T Nantucket, the schoolmaster

took us to "The Captains' Room;" and the hour spent with the Captains was the most interesting hour spent in our two days on the island. The official name for the place is the Pacific Club; which does not mean that its members are pacific above all that dwell at Nantucket, but that they all once had much to do with the Pacific Ocean. The club is half a century old, no doubt; and when it was founded, in Nantucket's golden age, when the town, now of three thousand people, had ten thousand, and stood only behind Boston and Salem among Massachusetts ports, these men commanded whalers in the Pacific, going on three or four year voyages, and sometimes clearing ten thousand dollars on a voyage, in the income from which I suppose some of them still feel secure and comfortable as they sit and smoke in the Captains' Room. It was a large club once, the Pacific Club, and the Captains were a hale and hearty lot; but there are but few of them left now not a dozen and the snow is on all their heads. Hale and hearty they are indeed in their winter, but pensive, and live chiefly in the past. I suppose that they talk mostly of the past as they sit there together in the Captains' Room, - where many of them do sit together almost all of almost every day, going home to dinner and to supper, but then coming back. And it is of the past that you will want to have them talk if you are privileged to be taken to the Captains' Room, and taken into good fellowship, as we were.

It was a time when all America was a Pacific Club, as it never was before, a most assertive and belligerent Pacific Club; and all the talk which

did not run upon Pacific whaling ran on Pacific politics. What was to most of us a thing of maps was to these men as real as Nantucket. They knew Samoa well before Stevenson was born, and had firm opinions on its land system. This one, who had sailed round the world eight times, had made New Zealand his headquarters before there was an Englishman there, and had visited Auckland when its English population was over sixty thousand. The people of the Pacific, to the Captains, were not figures in the last census, but men of flesh and blood, men and brothers, that was

the thing we felt the most,- the poorest of them, men and brothers. They had been, some of them, in the Philippines. They had been in the Hawaiian Islands a dozen times, and knew them better than we knew Nantucket. And now the Hawaiian Islands were annexed to the United States; the vote had just been passed. What did they think of it? "Well," said Captain Grant, "I think it's a good thing for 'em; but I'm afraid we didn't have a square deal with 'em."

*

* *

We are afraid so too. When all the sophisticated politicians and sophisticated missionaries have made all their fine distinctions, and the sugar folks have had their whole frankly selfish say, and others of us have registered our opinion that the Hawaiians will be "better off" annexed to the United States, the plain people, to whom men, even Pacific Ocean men, are still men and brothers, feel in the middle of their honest hearts that it wasn't "a square deal"; and so far, as mem

bers of the body politic, as they have been made privy to it, they have been made worse by it, more amenable to the next invitation to moral commodiousness and accommodation,as we are all made flabbier by every compromise or crookedness to which we are led or driven unprotesting. The plain people believe, almost all of them, we think, that the Hawaiians will be "better off" under our government and united to us; and they would probably say, if asked, that they would believe the same of the Mexicans and the Nicaraguans and the Cretans. But they feel that somehow the Mexicans and Cretans and Hawaiians should have the privilege of choice in such matters, even the privilege of foolish and short-sighted choice. They are troubled for, not being politicians nor in the sugar busi

But

nor missionary business, they are still capable of being "troubled" - with the misgiving that, in playing with the Hawaiians, we used loaded dice. They don't doubt the divine. right of revolution - they are too good Puritans for that. Cromwell was all right, and George Washington was all right; and it is altogether likely that Mr. Dole and his friends gave Hawaii a much better government than it had before - and that it sadly needed a better government. they think that if Cromwell had had the Dutch navy at the mouth of the Thames on the eve of Naseby, and a Dutch army landing in Norwich to look after the interests" of the Dutch Puritans there during the unpleasantness, and if, immediately after the King's head was off, he and his Ironsides had ceded England to Holland, without any appeal to the English people, for fear that Stuartism would else get the upper hands (and do we not all agree that Stuartism was a cursed thing, bad for England and bad for the world, and forced to Dutch treatment in the end?), the plain people, we say, would not think that was "a square deal." And they think that in Hawaii we simply traded with

ourselves that we helped get an American agency into control of the Hawaiian government, and then got our agents, in their role of "government," without any appeal to the people, to turn Hawaii over to America. They wish that the American gunboat hadn't been in the harbor when the revolution was going on, and that the American marines hadn't landed and kept themselves in evidence, and that the new "government" hadn't kept in such close and constant touch with Washington. They wish that "annexation" hadn't been rushed through at last just when the country was in a hot wave of "imperialism" and fair and sober consideration of the question had for the time become impossible. They think that this way of doing things does not become the great republic, they think it is not democratic, they are afraid it is dangerous, they are afraid that Cromwell would say it was "not common honesty."

some

They think, too, that we should carry on our "imperialism" of them call it stealing, but they are the uncultivated ones - on the same principles on which we discipline and educate the Democratic Party in the South. One man, one vote, is democracy, they say, and every man, one. The Hawaiians are certainly as voteworthy as the Black Belt; and if the foundations will be destroyed if every negro does not vote, why shall the Hawaiians not vote, at least on their own destiny? If government by the First Families is not good in Alabama, why is it good and necessary in Hawaii? Because the sum total of education and "solid sense" in the little group of Americans now running the government, you tell them, is greater than that of the Hawaiian people; but they answer you that that is the sort of thing the wicked Southerners used to say. Because then, you tell them, we could not otherwise have annexed Hawaii; - but that troubles them.

us

In truth, this is what ought to trouble every one of us; and this kind of trouble is the only trouble we need any of us have very much over this whole question of "imperialism" or "expansion," which is now the chief question with us. The annexation of Hawaii - although it can do us no particular good, can bestow nothing of any account upon us which under free and rational trade relations could not be secured just as well without annexation can do us no harm, saddle no responsibility upon beyond what every great nation ought to take for civilization, if we "deal squarely." The proper limits of "expansion" for any nation are hard to define; the sagacious practical statesmanship of each time has got to determine them for that time as best it can. Each push of our own to the Mississippi, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific, Alaska-has been through has been through controversy. Geographically there is no reason why we should taboo islands -why we should take in Alaska and refuse to take in Cuba and Hawaii; such reasons as there once were cease to exist. "Great empires commonly die of indigestion," Napoleon said, and said truly; and Gladstone has warned England of the indigestion which has already attacked her and is weakening her to-day. But great and small are relative terms. The French philosophers of the last century believed that republics must always be small, that large republics never could be strong and stable, because public spirit and opinion could. not make themselves felt freshly and unitedly over great areas; but this was because they could not foresee those means of communication and relation which have made our United States smaller for political purposes than the thirteen States along the Atlantic coast which elected George Washington president. North America will be smaller for such purposes a generation hence than the United States to-day; and we are of those who believe that this republic will in due time be co

extensive with North America. With the victory of Wolfe at Quebec, says Green, the English historian, with true discernment, began the history of the United States; and Quebec will by and by be a happy city in the United States, finding there its natural place. Until it does find its place there happily and naturally, of its own free will, we do not want it there at all. Until then- for we have no fears, either, of adjacent islands, archipelagoes of them, on the basis of a "square deal"-we do not want San Salvador, where Spain first stepped ashore, nor Cuba nor Porto Rico, where her flag last flew. "Expansion" for expansion's sake, the thirst for conquest by a nation suddenly made drunk and heady by startling and sensational military successes, national highway robbery, are things for every sober man to set the seal of his damnation on as the temptations to public sin and the sure ways to national disaster and doom. But the annexation to the United States, at a proper time, by proper means, of Cuba or Porto Rico is nothing to be afraid of, but doubtless a desirable thing, and, we think, ultimate and manifest destiny.

The annexation of the Philippine Islands is a very different questionleaving the morals of the matter entirely out of the account. No man of common sense can for a moment approve such annexation. It is not because a hundred million dollars put into the Philippines would not yield half the returns of the same millions put into Oregon or Texas, - although we have no doubt that is the truth. It is not because, as some are fond of saying, a republic has not wisdom or capacity, such as kings and kaisers have, for dealing with colonies and dependencies; we refuse to believe it. It is because we have no logical or natural affiliations with the Philippine people, no common history or traditions, no considerable rela