The Argosy — page 300: what you’re looking at

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

The Village Blacksmith. 281 ‘ate was the mill-pool in which he meant to drown theinfant. <A grim atisfaction that the child should meet its death so close to the home f its father filled the blacksmith’s mind as he came to the bottom ot he hill. A few hundred yards further he walked, and then he stood yy the mill-pool, on whose blue waters the moon was shining so rightly that the mill at the head of the pool was reflected in hem. A dark, stormy night, when the wind howls and uncanny noises fill he air, would have been better for such a crime as Reuben Foreman contemplated ; but nature refused to countenance so unnatural a deed, and the moon shone out in all her splendour till the night was almost as light as the day : and Reuben would have shrank from committing such a sin in the blaze of the noon-day sun. As he paused by the orink of the pool, he considered. Should he throw it into the water alive, or should he kill it first? Which was the more merciful ? Drowning was a painless death, people said; but the water was very cold, and the child he held was as warm as a toast. It would probably scream before it sank, whereas one grip of that iron arm which held it would be enough to squeeze the life out of it, and he would take care no sound escaped to betray him. When Reuben looked back on this scene of his life—as he did very often in after years—he always came to the conclusion that he must have been suffering from a fit of temporary insanity. No sane man, he thought, could have contemplated such an action in so cold- blooded a manner. Before he decided to give the child that cruel embrace, he stooped ‘to look at it. He opened the shawl and head-flannel in which it was muffled, and, when he did so, the little creature opened one of its tiny mists and clasped its soft, wee, tender baby fingers round the black- ssmith’s great hard iron thumb, and with its other hand grasped his jbeard, and nestled its little head lovingly against his fustian coat. \And the watching angels wept for joy, and the blacksmith’s heart was ‘softened, and he could not do that dreadful deed. | Just then he heard the click of a latch, and, looking up, he saw jcoming out of the Rectory gate, about fifty yards off, Vera Tempest, dressed in a long pale blue dressing-gown, her long hair rippling down yher shoulders, and stretching far below her waist. At first he thought jhe saw a vision; but a second glance told him it was Vera, and that she was asleep, and that a fearful death threatened her. A few more \steps, and, unless she changed her course, she would walk straight jinto the mill-pool, for which she seemed to be making. Quick as thought, Reuben, who-knew every inch of the ground, \darted to a hollow tree, about twenty yards from the pool, and there \he laid the baby gently down. It would be quite safe there till . he had taken Miss Tempest home, and then he would return for it. He tore off his coat and’ made a bed of it for the child, and then jhe sprang across the grass and planted himself like an iron bulwark | VOL, XLVII. S -_ COnniclooolkks (CO)