ELLIE’S HOLOCAUST.

perimental knowledge which alone is worth anything
in individual growth, that cost in the best sense
makes value, and that it is only our best that we
have any right to offer up, and hope to be helped
and strengthened in the offering.

Gravely and seriously Ellie went toward the funeral
pyre. She kissed each stubby book as she laid it on
the stone altar, and even Dick did
not laugh at the fast dropping tears.

Then Ellie sat down on the fallen
pine, and Dick drew a’ match and
touched the heap at the four cor-
ners, then came and sat beside El-
lie. First, a thin curl of smoke
struggled through the interstices,
then the pale blue grew darker
and denser, and ruddy tongues of
flame leaped from leaf to twig, the
pine cones glowed and crackled,
the fagots caught the blaze, and in
five minutes the altar of sacrifice
was like a fiery furnace seven times
heated.

The poor dumb things had a
dreadfully live way of curling up
and opening out, as leather will
under fire. They swelled visibly,
Dick said before their final collapse.
He didn’t say anything mocking to
Ellie then; her grief and penitence
were so deep that his boy-heart was
touched. He put his arm round
his little sister, and let her feel the
comfort of his sympathy while the

burning continued.
The squirrels and the birds were

doubtless surprised, and not espe-
cially pleased at the-black, unsavory
cloud of smoke; but the winds of
heaven soon bore it far away, and
Dick heaped on pine cones and fir-
tips full of odorous gum, till the
breeze was as spicy as though it blew soft o’er Cey-
lon’s isle.

The holocaust at last was over: nothing but a few
glowing coals remained to tell the tale. In a few
moments those were black and gray, and not to be

 

203

distinguished from the remains of picnic fires, so
numerous in the woods that one more or less would
never be noticed.

Ellie best knew what she had offered up on the
altar of her own heart there in that greenwood
temple ; but she never forgot it, nor the quiet, silent
walk home with Dick. It was one of the many,

THE HOLOCAUST.— “GRAVELY AND SERIOUSLY.”

many memories that knit so closely those two lives.

Ellie could not speak of it; but it is probable that
Dick told papa, for no one ever asked anything about
the fate of Zhe Scottish Chiefs, or betrayed any
knowledge of Ellie’s holocaust.