THE WIND IN THE EVER GREENS. When the drifted snow has hidden Roads and fences from the sight, And the moon floats through the heav ens Like a frozen thing, at night, Flooding all the frigid stretches with a ghostly, bluish light, I like to lie and conjure Up old half forgotten scenes, As the savage wind goes howling Through the sighing evergreens. There's a cottage I remember, With an orchard in the rear; There's a winding pathway leading To a spring that bubbles near — Ah, the dipper that I drank from bears the rust of many a year! There's a peach tree near the window * Of the room where oft I, lay In the long ago, and listened To the wild wind howl away. When a range of snowy mountains Stretch along the winding lane; When the gently sloping meadow Has become an icy plain, What a joy it is to snuggle under quilts and counterpane, And hear the peach tree creaking, j At the corner where it leans, While the wind goes badly shrieking Through the mourning evergreens. I When the ruminating cattle Stands in bedding to their knees; When the sheep are warmly sheltered, When the horses are at ease. And the kittens in the kitchen are as happy as you please- When father's work is ended, And mother sits and sews, There's a wondrous mystic music In the angry wind that blows. Ah, the rambling little sheepfold's Weatherbeaten, so they say; The horses are no longer Munching at the fragrant hay- Beneath the old-style kitchen stove no happy kittens play And, out behind the village church, ; A mossy gravestone leans Above two mounds o'er which the wind Sighs through the evergreens. — E. S. Kiser. TRIALJX FIRE (The Life Story of an Army Belle.) There are colonels and majors and generals and some old captains who hold that Isabel Hampden was the most attractive woman who ever graced the frontier; and in their time most women seemed attractive because of their scarcity. She was handsome, and accomplished, and clever, and something more than all these which was inexplicable but very potent. She had been brought up in garrisons and large cities, and by the time she was two-and-twenty she knew the world rather well. Moreover, she knew men —not girls and women, but men. Because she had been allowed to live in posts during most of what should have been her boarding-school days, and because she was pleasant to look upon and to converse with at an age when most girls are impossible, men had fallen in love with her pretty much ever since she could remember. It was said that she had refused all the bachelors in all the frontier regi ments. This was not far from the truth. A woman who had married one of the rejected ones said that refusing was a habit Miss Hampden had form ed, and that it began to look as if she might never break herself of it. In the nature of things, this was repeated to the girl. Her good temper was one of her charms "It is so much better a habit than accepting them all," she argued, sweetly. Nevertheless, she wounded if there were not some truth mingled with the malice. But Lieutenant Loring wa3 the last victim of her practice. He proposed to her, unfortunately for himself, just after she had met young Ardsley. "I thought this morning that maybe I would marry you," said Miss Hamp den. "But I've changed my mind, someway." Loring was oceustomed to a great 1 deal of frankness from her, but it i clashed with his notions of feminine modesty for a woman to have enter tained thoughts of marriage before the offer thereof. "Weren't you just a trifle prompt in determining my Intentions?" he asked. "Has the event proved me wrong?" she returned. He lost his temper. "You are spoil-: ed," he said. "If you knew how often I have heard j that! Yet Ido not think I am. I am l simply sincere, and you are a little too j vain, all of you, to grasp the difference. I like you awfully well —no, now, don't misunderstand me. I don't love you. And you are too nice a fellow to be married to a girl who only likes you. No," she repeated, "I do not think I'm spoiled. lam not agitated and tearful as I ought to be. perhaps, under the circumstances. I used to be. but I've passed that. I have been so placed that men were making love to me at an age when other girls were playing dolls. It's partly because I am pretty and partly, largely, because there are so few women out here. When I have been In the East, I haven't made much of a sensation. I've grown a bit hard-. ened, perhaps. Custom has dulled the edge—which was fearfully keen and cutting, at first —of being told that 1 am breaking a heart. But, though I am only twenty-two, I've lived to see dozens of your marry and be happy. You'll do the same." "Oh! no. I shall not," moaned Lor ing "Oh! yus, you will, Jack. And I sha'n'l mind. Now I've promised to danc«| this with the new Mr. Ardsley, and II j we stay out here any longer every one I wi!: surply guess wl.ai has happened." Others were hilled and tlieir bodies 'They'll know, when they see mo." were recoveied anrl buried, but Ard- will surely guess wl.ai has happened." "They'll know, when they see me." I "Jhm't be a goose, Jack. It's only '.he Heart that is trying to take itself seTiously that exhibits the pain." "Don't discuss a subject you know nothing about.. You have no heart." He left her, with an exaggerated bow, as young Ardsley came up. | As Miss Hampden waltzed off with ; Ardsley, she knew that Loring was | wrong; that this tall boy, fresh from West Point, as new in experience of the world as the brass buttons on his blouse, was the man she was going to love. He would love her, of course. It Is to be feared that it did not enter her head that he might not. She liked his stron, rough-cut face, and his jolly, stone-gray eyes, and his drawling, heavy voice, and his waltzing, and the v way he held her. After the dance she determined that she liked his hands, | and when she looked at she saw a ring. "Is that your class ring?" she said. I "Yes," he told her. "May I see it?" He gave it to her, and while she ex amined it lie sat and admired her. On 1 his part, he liked the women who car- , ried themselves haughtily, he liked tall j women, he liked straight, black hair ! i and olive skin and dark eyes and large j ! features and a neck of statuesque pro- ; . portions. Iu short, he liked exactly ; ! the things he had never fancied up to | I then. Miss Hampden raised her eyes and met his. She smiled, but it was like no smile she had ever bestowed on a man before. He looked at her very gravely, and her hand closed tightly over the ring. In a moment she was studying it again. "I like this. It's unusual," she said. "I am glad you think so, as I con ceived the design." lie expected to be told that he was clever. "Indeed!" was all she said, and that Indifferently. "How cool! I rather thought you'd express surprise and give me some | credit. You are not addicted to llat i tery, it would seem." "I am not. But I don't think it [ j would have been flattering to be sur prised that you have done it. It struck me as being quite the thing you would I naturally do." "That is very pretty." "It is perfectly true." It happened, oddly enough, that Ard sley chanced not to have heard of Miss j Hampden's reputation by the next night. He was rudely awakened to a knowledge of it. There wore private theatricals in the hop-room, and Miss Hampden was the leading lady. Now the suitor was quite recovered, and he ; meant to play a joke on those in the ! audience who were not—and these i were some eight or ten, three of them j married. He proposed to the heroine in nicely read lines, and was rejected by her with a perfection that spoke her practice. So the audience thought; ! and it laughed. When the laugh had subsided, the hero arose from his j knees. He walked to the footlights j and sighed. "Ah! well," he said, "I have one crumb of comfort. I am not the only man in this place who is in the same { fix." The astounded Ardsley looked about j him, and he picked out the entire num- j ber by their faces. Miss Hampden drop : ped her head in her hands and laughed with the rest. Between the acts, Ardsley made in- ' quiries and learned the truth. He was j bitten with a desire to obtain the un attainable, and he was not one to dally. He went behind the scenes. "Whom are you going home with Miss Hampden?" he asked. "I fear no one will take me after the light Mr. Graves has put me in." "May I do so?" She nodded, and Ardsley went back to his seat. "So you have refused the entire army?" he asked, as they walked home. "Not quite." "The entire department?" "Well, a fair percentage of it," she admitted. "Are you going to refuse me?" "I can't say until you are offered." | "I offer myself now." "And I accept yon now." "Good enough! Will you announce our engagement to-night at supper?" "At the risk of being adjudged in sane—yes." "Put on this ring until I can get you j another. Your hands are not small. It will fit your middle finger. Now lam | in earnest." j "So am I," she said. They were very much in earnest, the , event proved; and the garrison derived ! unmixed pleasure from the total, un j conditional, obvious surrender of Miss : Hampden. She was as open in her in fatuation as she had always been in everything else. And Ardsley was equally infatuated. He took back the , class ring and gave her a diamond j which cost him three months' pay. ; ! They were altogether happy. So, just j a fortnight before the day arranged for 1 their wedding, the Gods demanded the I : first payment on their loan. Ardsley was ordered off on a scout. : Miss Hampden was the sort of a girl who might have been expected to take this reasonably. But she did not She clung to Ardsley, and cried like any 1 j little girl, and did not behave in the least like a woman who had seen i countless scouts. And she let him go ! to the wars remembering her standing ; with her arm against the wall and her j head upon her arm, sobbing as if hei | heart were utterly broken. He himself; was moved and stern. Loring would I have liked to remind her that hearts which were really wrung did not show ' their pain. He had not yet recovered I Ardsley did not come back from the scout. lie was in ft fight on whai should have been his wedding day. Others were uitlnd and their bodies I were recovered and buried, but Ard aley's body was never found. There was ti tale that a lire had been seen ou the battle-field the night after the , encounter, and in the midst of the tire a tree with a form which might have been that of a man against it. There were Indians grouped around It. Miss Hampden never heard the story. She never even guessed at what had hap pened until twenty years afterward. She was the superb and spiritless wife of a mighty general, and she was accompanying her husband on a tour of Inspection in the West. They were at an agency, one day, and were visit ing the tepees. It was the agency of the Indians that young Ardsley had fought two decades before; and the general's wife was nerving herself not to show that she remembered this. The general was examining the trinkets that hung on a string around the neck of a half-blind squaw. "Here is a West Point class-ring!" he exclaimed. His wife repeated her words of twenty years a-past. "May I see it?" she asked, coolly. She took it in her hands and turned it about. She could make out the de sign, though it seemed to have passed I through some heat that had melted it. | There was no doubt In her mind. Nevertheless, she looked inside. The heit had not affected it there, and the initials were quite plain even yet. "D. A.," she said, "it was David Ard sley's ring. The lire did not touch the letters. I understand now why they never could tell me which was his grave." The general broke the string and picked up the class-ring from among the scattered baubles. The squaw was chattering and whining and clawing around on the earth. The general held the ring out to his wife. She raised the dark eyes that had been so bright and happy the last time it had been held out to her. "Can I have It?" she asked. The general put it in her hand, and the hand closed over it. "Thank you," f'ie said. —GWEN- DOLEN OVERTON, In The Argonant. SnuiKffliiiK Hie Ma rig nanv In southern Arizona the jail and prison officials have their hands full In trying to prevent the smuggling into their Institutions of the seductive mar iguana. This is a kind of "loco" weed more powerful than opium. It grows from seed by cultivation in southern Arizona and in Mexico. It is a dan gerous thing for the uninitiated to han dle, but those v/lio know its uses say I it produces more ravishing dreams I than opium. The Mexicans mix it with | tobacco nnd smoke it In cigarettes, in ; haling the smoke. When used in this way, it produces a hilarious spirit in i the smoker than cannot be equalled by any other form of dissipation. When I smuggled inside the prison walls Its devotees readily pay 54 an ounce for It. | but free men can buy it on the outside j for 50 cents an ounce. Gen. Shriver of ■ the prison force at Yuma has just un earthed a large quantity of the weed i that had been cached within reach ol i the convicts who work in the outside j chain gangs. Athletic flcorije of (Greece. King George, ol' Greece, in the ear ller years of his reign, often particlpa ' ted in the feats of running and leaping : of which his countrymen are so fond In order to conceal his identity, he en tered the contests under the name of George Papadopoulos. In a certain am ateur contest which he won he was ac cused of being a professional. As ' "George Papai-opoi los" naturaly could not give a satisfactory account of his i identity and antecedents, the crowd be | came convinced that he really was v professional, lu order to escape rough ; treatment he confessed his identity, not to the crowd, hut to a police officer who managed to get him away to t place of safety without permitting the j crowd to discover that they had beei threatening their sovereign. Shot a Deer on Their Way to School. Two pupils in a Monticello, (Me.; school, aged 13 and 15 years, star.et out to shoot a deer before school a fev mornings since. They discovered thi deer and both fired, and both killed thi deer, one putting three buckshot ant the other a bullet through the vital! of the beast. They got their prlzi home and dressed and were at schoo in t'.me for all their lessons. Thej didn't shoot a human being by mistake It's not the way of Aroostook lads Great grown men, with less sense ant experience, do that. A Clerical Alderman. Dr. Forrest llrowne, the new Bishoj of Bristol, was the first clerical alder man elected in England, and for manj years did excellent work as a Justice o the Peace at Cambridge. In his flrs' sermon before the Judges at St. Paul's he excited some astonishment bj speaking pointedly of "our duties ant difficulties as magistrates." The latest hnglish Luxury. A glass house under water is the lat est luxury. A rich man, who has i , large lake upon his estate, recentlj! caused it to be drained, and In tht deepest part he has had a house bulll which contains three rooms—a smok ing-room, a dining-room, and a ser vants' waiting room. A Curious Fact. It la an inexplicable fact that mec burled in an avalanche of snow heat distinctly every word uttered by thos lii** tin licit*. . 1 "Ye 3," admitted the tj!g traveling j man, as a number oi the craft were having an evening seance in the cafe, "I was one of the victims in that train robbery. And I want to tell you fel lows right here that there's no other experience In the world so well calcu lated to take the conceit out of a man. I had expressed a desire frequently that I might encounter some of these modern bandits I'd show them what it was togo up against a good, game man, and I'd put at least two or three of them out of business. "But I didn't. Three miles out from Duck Center they held us up in a deep cut. Before I suspected trouble there was a big fellow with lons hair and a 16-inch levolve, (ortii.i d.wu thi aisle. 1-I.a eyes were like live coals of Are, and thero seemed to be more of them than are credited to Argus. When he thundered 'hands up,' I came pretty near dislocating my shoulders because 112 the suddenness and vigor with which I obeyed the order. Two men following the chap with the gun took up the 'collection,' and when they came to me I surrendered everything, even to my elegant self-acting revolver that I had bought with a special view to wiping out train robbers. I never entered a protest. "Right behind me was a little old maid, not bigger than a pint of cider, with corkscrew curls and shary feat ures. They took the pocketbook from her lap, but when they went to appro priate a jewel case, she flew up like a hen defending her chickens. That watch was for her niece that was going to be married. She had raked and scraped and skimped to buy it, and no robbers were going to get it. With an unexpected movement she had knock ed the revolver against the roof of the car and was clawing at the other two men like a wild cat. They forced her ; to her seat, and when the big fellow had recovered his gun he stood laugh ing. 'Keep your watch, ole girl,' he ! said, 'an' here's a little trinket to put with it,' as he tossed her a handsome | pin. 'Ef any of these men had your sand we'd never got away with this job after you disarmed me.' And he was right aboirth. "I Don't Need it." That is il'ejreply often made r by niei vell-io-do v\ hen asked to insure their l'\ ei ! Sonii'times ii is true, but how olten Ims i ixppeneil that when disease or death liii •nine suddenly the supposed fortune uude lie dwindling, dwaiflinjr process ol breed settlement lias melted away '■ i loihihg, atid how often it has hnppene> •vhen death occurs the life policy liii 'ei'ii * the onlv financial resource !eIV ! I'lie great benefits which ready cash pro iile against the uncertainties ol tortuin ; -rn forced while an estate is being settle' I nakes it as compulsory upon the wealth.* : tn upon any other class. How many es ates have been saved by the ready mone\ >fa life insurance policy? And how nanv splendid properties have been scut ered and wlisted and lost because then ■vas so much "properly" and '"so littl noney." Capitalists, business men, pro j essionnl men, the shrewdest and mosi -iiccessful ot them, recognize the uticer ainties of business and investment nur' ■airy large amounts of insurance. Is it iot wise to be upon the safe side am iceept their conclusions in this matter There are many life idsurance companie? md many plans of insurance. Do voi want the best for vou? If so I shall bt i ;'leased to tall; with you about it—or i vou will send your name and age at near st birthday on a postal card or in a lettei w ill tun).'the desired information. M. A. SCUREMAN, .Onshore, Pa. A Horrible Railroad Accident is a daily chronicle in our papers; alsi the death of some dear friend, who had died with Consumption, whereas, if he 01 she had taken Otto's Cure for Throat and , Lung diseases in time, life would havi been rendered happier and perhaps saved i Heed the warning ! If yon have a cougl jor any aflection of the Throat and Lung.- Call on T. J. Keeler,Laporte; W. I . Hoffman, Ilillsgrove; B. S I.ancastei, Forksville; C. B Jennings, Agt. Esiella: •Ino. \V. Buck, Jonestown, and get i. trial package free. Large size 50c and 25c fcJEGV.AIER'S LAGER BEER AND PORTER. are unexcelled in the realm of mall beverages, They are brewed by a I rewer and matured by nature in one of t ie most complete breweries in the country, and are guaranteed to be absolutely pure, wholesome am' iuvigorating. Insist upon getting them. MR BKI« COMPAW. WILKES-BARRE. Q. A. KLINE, TO WAND A, Is agent for this Beer in Laporte and vicinity. v " ~~ Reminds us of NEW HEATING STOVES. New Ranges, New Steve Pi P e » New Stove Repairs, Coal MM Sieves, Coal Buckets, Horse 1 fllfflj ji'l Blankets, New Bedroom Suits Apple-butter Crocks, Yardan '-~V 112 ' ers> Cuttcrs.Stone Jugs, HI hit | Easy Chairs, New Lamps. Jjilfeii,- ■ . this SOLID OAK ROCKER | ~ Cane seat, is the greatest fi We are giving it for $2 to our customers. Jeremiah Kelly, HUGHESVILLE. HAVING PURCHASED THE GRIST MILL Property Formerly Owned by O. W. Mathers at this place 1 am Now Prepared To Do All Kinds of Millirg on Veiy Short Notice With W. E. Starr at Miller. Please Give a Trial. : EED OF ALL KINDS ON HAND. W. E. MILLER, FORKSVILLE, PA. tf. B. All parties knowing themselves indebted to me will confer a greao favor by calling and paying the amount due, as I need money badly at once. Respectfully yours, W. E. MILLER. t January 1898! Will close all our winter goods and Ladies' Coats and Capes out it nearly half price, in fact, a good many articles at ! At Less Than Half Price. Our stcck is very large antl prices will be no object. We here ; lcntion a few prices exactly as we intend to sell. This is 110 bluff or ike, but a FACT, that \ou can save neatly 40 to 50 per cent, by buying tow: Men's uits at 50.23, regular price 81.5.50; Men's overcoats at >2.78, are worth 86.00; Hoys' suits, 3 pieces, at 82.75, are really worth 5 50; Children's suits at 750 and 81-00, are worth more than double; Jen's pants in all wool and all different styles SI.OO, are 82.00 and 3.00 values; 1 nee pants at big 1 argains; Men's undershirts at less than iff price; all wool socks 2 pair for 25c; heavy cotton seeks 4 ] air for 25c; the largest variety of boots and shoes in this section at prices to ! suit everybody. Rtibl.er boots and shoes we sell cheaper fhan any other ,ore ni me county. We will make you such low prices in Ladies' Coats and Capes S That you will surely be surprised. All we ask is to call and see hem. We will be glad to give you our best prices. Ladies' coats in lie latest styles at 82.75., regular price Si.oo, we only have aliout 15 of hese coats left in blue at d black, rot gh goods; Ladies plush capes at >5.00, regular price 89.C0; extra long plush ta;e at 87.oO; a Lig \«ii ioty >f Ladies 1 ceatsat 84.50 and 85.00; 1 adies' cloth capes at 82.25, less than half price, they are heavy and good let gb. \\ e ha\e about .5 Children's coats, age from 4 to 12years, in very fancy patterns and in the latest styles, at nearly half price. We cannot mention all of our joodsbut whatever you may need in our line we will sell accordingly. We will surely sell as we advertise as our stock is very large and we must sell. Prices Will be no Object. We have good attendance and arc always pleased to show onr stock whether you buy,i>r ifot. You can buy here now for 81-00 as much as other plac- for 82.00. We find this to bea fact. * i The Reliable Dealer in Clothing JflCOy iCf Boots and Shoes. W HUGHESVILLE, PA.