ONE DUCK. 
245 
husky tremor in his voice. “ Let him 
alone, I tell thee. He might leave us in 
peace now. He has driven us from hearth 
and home.” Then, with indignant energy, 
“ He shall not touch thee, child. By the 
heavens, he shall not.” 
Maurice smiled, and with the same sense 
of serene benignity, wholly unlover-like, 
clasped her in his arms. 
A wild look flashed in the father’s eyes ; 
a hoarse groan broke from his chest. Then, 
with a swift rekindling of energy, he darted 
forward, and his broad hands fell with a 
tiger-like grip on Maurice’s shoulders. 
But hark ! The voices of the skies and 
the mountains echo the groan. The air, 
surcharged with terror, whirls in wild eddies, 
then holds its breath and trembles. All 
eyes are turned toward the glacier. The 
huge white ridge, gleaming here and there 
through a cloud of smoke, is pushing down 
over the mountain-side, a black bulwark 
of earth rising totteringly before it, and a 
chaos of bowlders and blocks of ice fol- 
lowing, with dull crunching and grinding 
noises, in its train. The barns and the 
store-house of the Ormgrass farm are seen 
slowly climbing the moving earth-wall, then 
follows the mansion — rising — rising — and 
with a tremendous, deafening crash the 
whole huge avalanche sweeps downward 
into the fjord. The water is lashed into 
foam; an enormous wave bearing on its 
crest the shattered wrecks of human homes, 
rolls onward ; the good ship Qiteeji An?ie is 
tossed skyward, her cable snaps and springs 
upward against the mast-head, shrieks of 
terror fill the air, and the sea flings its 
strong, foam-wreathed arms against the fur- 
ther shore. 
A dead silence follows. The smoke 
scatters, breaks into drifting fragments, 
showing the black, naked mountain-side. 
The next morning, as the first glimmer- 
ings of the dawn pierced the cloud-veil in 
the east, the brig Queai Anne shot before 
a steady breeze out toward the western 
ocean. In the prow stood Maurice Fern, 
in a happy reverie ; on a coil of rope at 
his feet sat Tharald Ormgrass, staring va- 
cantly before him. His face was cold and 
hard ; it had scarcely stirred from its reck- 
less apathy since the hour of the calamity. 
Then there was a patter of light footsteps on 
the deck, and Elsie, still with something of 
the child-like wonder of sleep in her eyes, 
emerged from behind the broad white sail. 
Tharald saw her and the hardness died 
out of his face. He strove to speak once 
— twice, but could not. 
God pity me,” he broke out, with an 
emotion deeper than his words suggested. 
“ I was wrong. I had no faith in you. 
She has. Take her, that the old wrong 
may at last be righted.” 
And there, under God’s free sky, their 
hands were joined together, and the father 
whispered a blessing. 
ONE DUCK. 
A POTOMAC SKETCH. 
While on a visit to Washington in Jan- 
uary, 1878, 1 went on an expedition down the 
Potomac with a couple of friends. Peck and 
Eldridge, to shoot ducks. We left on the 
morning boat that makes daily trips to and 
from Mount Vernon. The weather was 
chilly and the sky threatening. I have sel- 
dom seen such clouds as those fail to bring 
rain. They were boat-shaped, with well 
defined keels, but they turned out to be 
only the fleet of yEolus, for they gradually 
dispersed or faded out, and before noon 
the sun was shining. 
We saw numerous flocks of ducks on the 
passage down, and saw a gun (the man was 
concealed) shoot some from a “blind” near 
Port Washington. Opposite Mount Ver- 
non, on the flats, there was a large “bed” 
of ducks. I thought the word a good one 
to describe a long strip of water thickly 
planted with them. One of my friends was 
a member of the Washington and Mount 
Vernon Ducking Club, which has its camp 
and fixtures just below the Mount Vernon 
landing; he was an old ducker. For my 
part, I had never killed a duck — except 
with an ax — nor have I yet. 
We made our way along the beach from 
the landing over piles of drift-wood and 
soon reached the quarters, a substantial 
building, fitted up with a stove, bunks, 
chairs, a table, culinary utensils, crockery, 
