The Argosy — page 191: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE ARGOS Y. MARCH, 1889. THE VILLAGE BLACKSMITH. —+——— CHAPTER VII LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM. W#ILE Mark Brown was terrifying Janet by discharging the old horse-pistol at his worthless head, Vera was riding slowly up the steep lane in which the above little drama was being enacted. She was lost in thought, for in her pocket was a letter from Captain Raleigh to her father, which she had just fetched from the post-office. Judging from her face, which was beaming with joy, her thoughts were happy ones, and perhaps little short of the sudden report of the pistol which startled her mare would have brought her down to mundane considerations. A minute after the report of the pistol, Vera reached the spot from which it was fired, and seeing in the dusk a man lying in the hedge with a pistol at his feet, and Janet helpless and ready to faint leaning against a wall, she dismounted, and holding her mare, which was fidgety, with one hand, she put her other arm round Janet, who now began to sob hysterically. — ‘Janet! What is it? Are you hurt? Who is this man?” said Vera. For Mark’s face was hidden, a pair of legs sticking up in the air being the most striking parts of his visible person. “It is Mark, Miss Vera; he has killed himself, and I suppose it is all my fault. Ob! what shall I do? What shall I do?” and Janet wrung her hands in despair. Two thoughts flashed through Vera’s mind: the first that it was unlike Mark Brown to hurt himself deliberately in any way, the second that the legs of dead people did not usually stick up in the air in that fashion: and arguing from these two premises, she came to the conclusion that Mark was shamming. “ Get up this moment, Mark, or you'll get kicked; I can’t hold Firefly as well as Janet ” she said, sharply. VOL. XLVII. M GOGO SS (CO)