Barney at this came in with a clothes-line Jack had prepared from the negroes' posts.

"I have come to this out-of-the-way suburb to end my miserable days, and not so much as one clothes-line have I seen yet.

Upon this impromptu clothes-line was crowded all the canvas, velvet, linen, and other dry-goods appertaining to the gallant captain and his self-sacrificing crew.

In yonder garden the priest's cassock and trousers are hanging sacrilegiously on a clothes-line, and you can just see a tiny graveyard away up on the hillside almost hidden in the trees.

Even sacred vestments must be laundered by earthly laundresses, yet somehow it gives one a shock to see sacred vestments out of the sanctuary, profanely displayed on a clothes-line.

A priest's trousers on a clothes-line might well be the beginning of atheism.

But, no doubt, it is to consider too curiously to consider so, and the good priest whose cassock and trousers have occasioned these reflections would smilingly prick my fancies, after the dialectic manner of his calling, and say that his trousers on the clothes-line were but a humble reminder to the faithful how near to the daily life of her children, how human at once as well as divine, is Mother Church.

Look at those thimble-berry bushes round the spring, and the blue camass along the brook, and the squaw bushes round the house, and the squaw grass and pussy paws back of the clothes-lines.

She sat in the very middle of a tipcart, with an old and truly picturesque man's hat on her head (quite in the fashion, feminine readers will notice), driving a one-horned ox with a pair of clothes-line reins.

"For a clothes-line," he said.

* * Unwarmed by any sunset light The gray day darkened into night, A night made hoary with the swarm And whirl-dance of the blinding storm, A zigzag wavering to and fro Crossed and recrossed the wingéd snow: And ere the early bed-time came The white drift piled the window-frame, And, through the glass, the clothes-line posts Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.

" A very rough-looking boy was standing at a third-story window, lowering a bandbox by a clothes-line.

"He's run into the clothes-line, that's what he's done," said Miss Augusta confidently, after she had peeped beneath the bandage.

I heard them come in to tea, and I thought Harold had gone till I heard uncle Jay-Jay address him: "Joe Archer told me you ran into a clothes-line on race-night, and ever since then mother has kept up a daddy of a fuss about ours.

She was for ever staring out in front of her with her lips parted, as if she saw something wonderful; but when I came behind her and looked the same way, I could see nothing but the sheep's trough or the midden, or father's breeches hanging on a clothes-line.

This was a long rope, like a clothes-line, with a short chain at the end and a great hook, which was baited with a large piece of fish.

The immaculate collar that spanned his muscular throat finds no Waller to sing it: A narrow compassand yet there Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair, and probably the smartest negligée shirt that ever sported with the summer winds on a clothes-line has never caused the smallest flutter in feminine bosoms.

But in the rawest Western settlement and the oldest Eastern city, in the midst of the shanties at Pike's Peak and stretching across the court-yards as you look into them from above the clay-plastered roofs of Damascus, wherever man lives with any of the decencies of civilization, you will find the clothes-line.

Got a length of clothes-line, Mrs. Perkins? Barlow.

Well, we were looking at them, mother and I, when a big Robin flew out of the pine trees and hopped along the clothes-line as if he wanted to speak to us.

At first the Robins chattered and talked for a while, looking squint-eyed at the berries, but then the bird that came on the clothes-line started down and began to eat.

I drove a nail into the cradle, tied to it the clothes-line, and went out of doors and began pulling at the cord.

"If he hasn't used my new clothes-line, and the old would have done every bit as well!

As soon as I could do it I got myself free from the clothes-line and staggered out on the grass.

In the back yard a clothes-line stretched between a damson and a peach tree, and on it hung forgotten some of Pansy's father's underclothes; but Nature did what she could to make the toiler's raiment look like diamonded banners, flung bravely to the breeze in honor of his new son-in-law.