yard, whistled like a veritable demon. The two were too much for the old horse, who had been a thoroughbred in his time and had never known the touch of a whip. He reared on his hind feet, and then with a mad plunge went tearing down the road which was hemmed in on one side by the hills, and whose outer edge lay on the rocky bluffs of the river.

Miss Eliza held to the reins until they cut into the flesh. Bracing herself against the dash board, she kept Old Prince to the middle of the road. Just as she felt sure that she could manage him, the rein on the hillside snapped. The tension on the other side turned the animal toward the edge of the bank. Eliza dropped the useless rein, seized the child in her arms and held it close to her breast, hoping by her own body to protect it from the fall. It was all the work of a second. She shut her eyes even as she did this.

CHAPTER II.

Eliza never could tell how long it was before she opened her eyes again. She was conscious at first of the sun beating down upon her face. Bewildered she opened her eyes only to close them again quickly against the unbearable light of the sky at midday. She tried to move, but her muscles were bound. A delicious sense of languor was again stealing over her, when she moved her hand slightly and felt water running over it. This aroused her again, and set her thoughts in motion. Little by little it all came back to her; her drive, the woman and child and the run-away horse. She knew now where she was. She need not open her eyes to see. She was lying at the foot of the stone wall at Paddy’s Run hill. She could hear the noise of running water. She thought of these things in a dreamy, far-off fashion as though it were something she might have read sometime. The child! Then she realized the awfulness of what had happened. Had she killed them both! She did not dare think of anything so horrible. She lay quite still, straining every nerve to listen for some sound of life. She heard it at last. It was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard in all her life. A low gurgly coo and then the touch of baby fingers on her face.

“Pitty ady—det up. Pitty ady, don’t seep so long.” The laughing dimpled face of the child looked down at her. It had escaped then. It was with a delicious feeling of thankfulness that she closed her eyes, not to open them again for several hours.

She was back in her own home then, lying on the old mahogany davenport with all the neighbors for miles about bending over her. She could hear Sam Houston holding forth in the kitchen. She 

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