latest limit of progress. Electric cars in its streets, electric
lights in its beautiful homes, the roar of railway trains coming
and going in all directions, bicycles whirling hither and thither,
the most fashionable styles of equipages, from brougham to pony-
phaeton, make the days of flint-lock guns and buckskin trousers
seem ages down the past; and yet we are looking back over but a
little more than a hundred and twenty years to see Alice
Roussillon standing under the cherry tree and holding high a
tempting cluster of fruit, while a very short, hump-backed youth
looks up with longing eyes and vainly reaches for it. The tableau
is not merely rustic, it is primitive. "Jump!" the girl is saying
in French, "jump, Jean; jump high!"

Yes, that was very long ago, in the days when women lightly braved
what the strongest men would shrink from now.

Alice Roussillon was tall, lithe, strongly knit, with an almost
perfect figure, judging by what the master sculptors carved for
the form of Venus, and her face was comely and winning, if not
absolutely beautiful; but the time and the place were vigorously
indicated by her dress, which was of coarse stuff and simply
designed. Plainly she was a child of the American wilderness, a
daughter of old Vincennes on the Wabash in the time that tried
men's souls.

"Jump, Jean!" she cried, her face laughing with a show of cheek-
dimples, an arching of finely sketched brows and the twinkling of
large blue-gray eyes.

"Jump high and get them!"