Again, Westley Keyts could read how to cut up meats. He knew already, but this chapter, illustrated with neat carcasses marked off into numbered squares, convinced him that the book was not so light as some of its other chapters indicated, and determined him to its purchase.

And there were letters for every conceivable emergency. "To a Young Man who has quarrelled with his Master," "Dismissing a Teacher," "Inquiry for Lost Baggage," "With a Basket of Fruit to an Invalid," and "To a Gentleman elected to Congress." Rare indeed, in our earth life, would be the crisis unmet by this treasury of knowledge. Not only was there an elevation of tone in our correspondence that winter, resulting from the persuasive activities of Mrs. Potts, but our writing became decorative with flourishes in "the muscular" and "whole-arm" movements. We learned to draw flying birds and bounding deer and floating swans with scrolls in their beaks, all without lifting pen from paper. Some of us learned to do it almost as well as the accomplished Mr. Gaskell himself, and almost all of us showed marked improvement in penmanship. Doubtless Truman Baird did not, he being engrossed with oratory, striving to reproduce, "Hate—the right foot advanced, the face turned to the sky, the gaze directed upward with a fierce expression, the eyes full of a baleful light," or other phases of passion duly set down. Not for Truman was the ornate full-arm flourish; he had observed that all Congressmen write very badly.

But my namesake may be said to have laid the foundations that winter for an excellent running chirography, under the combined stimuli of Mr. Gaskell's curves and a hopeless passion for his school-teacher.

As my own teacher had been my own first love, I knew all that he suffered in voiceless longing for his fair one, throned afar in his languishing gaze. I knew that he plucked flowers meant to be given to her, only to lay them carelessly on the floor beside his seat when school "took in," lacking the courage to bestow them brazenly upon his idol as others did. I knew, too, his thrill when she came straight down the aisle, took up the flowers with a glance of sweet reproof for him, and nested them in the largest vase on her desk. But my poor affair had been in an earlier day, and my namesake wove novelty into the woof of his. For in that wonder-book of the fertile-minded Gaskell was a form of letter which Calvin Blake Denney began to copy early in December, and which by the following spring he could write in a style that already put my own poor penning to the blush. Did he write it a hundred times or five hundred, moved anew each time by its sweet potencies, its rarest of suggestions? I know not, but it must have been very many times, for I would find the copies in his school books, growing in beauty of flourish day by day. As well as if he had confessed it I knew that this letter was intended for the father of his love—for old Sam Murdock, to be literal, who uncouthly performed for us the offices of drayman; but who, in my namesake's eyes, shone pure and splendid for his relationship. Doubtless the letter was never sent, but I am sure it was written each time with an iron resolve to send it. Its title in the excellent book was "From a Lover to a Father on his Attachment to the Daughter," and it ran:—

DEAR SIR: As I scorn to act in any manner that may bring reproach upon myself and family, and hold clandestine proceedings unbecoming in any man of character, I take the liberty of distinctly avowing my love for your daughter and humbly request your permission to pay her my addresses, as I flatter myself my family and expectancies will be found not unworthy of your notice. I have some reason to imagine that I am not altogether disagreeable to your daughter, but I assure you that I have not as yet endeavored to win her affections, for fear it might be repugnant to a father's will. I am, etc.

Under this was provided "A Favorable Answer," in which Sam Murdock might have said that he had long perceived this thing and applauded it, and would the young man "dine with us to-morrow at six if you are not engaged, and you will then have an opportunity to plead your own cause." But chillingly after this graceful assent followed an "Unfavorable Answer," which Sam Murdock would also see when he opened the book at page 251; and still more portentously on the same page was a letter which Miss Selina Murdock herself might choose to write him, a sickening and dreadful thing entitled, "Unfavorable Reply on the Ground of Poverty."

"To say that I do not feel pleased and flattered at your proposal would be to tell a useless untruth," the thing began speciously. "But how are we situated, what hope of happiness with our unsettled prospects and worse than small means? Industry has doubtless never been and never will be wanting on your part, but—" and so to its dreadful end. It was almost base in its coldness and mercenary calculation. That phrase about the "useless untruth" implied even a dubious and considering morality; and the conclusion, "we must not entail misery upon others as well as ourselves by a too hasty step," argued a nature cautious in the extreme.

Yet Mr. Gaskell was too evidently a man of the world, knowing in his ripe experience that there existed a sufficient number of such cold natures to warrant the obtrusion of this heart-rending formula; and I doubt not that these negative specimens of the possible alone restrained my namesake from going beyond mere copies of that first letter.

It will be seen that the influence of Mrs. Potts pervaded our utmost social and commercial limits. And when the "Compendium" had become a centre-table ornament in the homes of the rich, and a bulky object of awe in humbler abodes, she went over the ground again with other volumes calculated to serve her double purpose, from "Dr. Chase's Receipt Book" to "Picturesque Italy, profusely Illustrated." She also purveyed a line of "art-pieces," including "Wide Awake and Fast Asleep," "The Monarch of the Glen," "Woman Gathering Fagots," and "Retreat from Moscow." Also, little Roscoe, out of school hours, took subscriptions for the Youth's Companion.

Yet the town long bore it with a gentle fortitude. I believe it was not until the following spring that murmurs were really noticeable. Naturally they were directed against Solon Denney. By that time Westley Keyts was greeting Solon morosely, though without open cavil; but Asa Bundy no longer hesitated to speak out. He quoted Scripture to Solon about the house that was swept and garnished, and the seven other wicked spirits that entered it, making its last state worse than its first.

And of course Solon was much troubled by this, though he never failed to rally to the support of the lady thus maligned, dwelling upon the advantage her mere presence must always be to the town.

"If she'd only let it go at that—'her mere presence'—" rejoined Bundy. But Solon protested, defending the lady's activities. He became sensitive to any mention of her name, and fell to brooding. He believed her to be a model woman, and little Roscoe to be a model boy.

"Why don't you try to be more like Roscoe Potts?" I heard him ask his son in a moment of reproof.

My namesake took it meekly; but to me, privately, he said:—

"Hunh! I can lick Ginger Potts with one hand tied behind me!"

"How do you know?" I asked sternly.

He wriggled somewhat at this, but at length confided in me.

"Well, there's a sell, you know, Uncle Maje. You say, 'They're goin' to tear the schoolhouse down,' or something like that, and the other boy says, 'What fur?' and then you say, quick as you can, 'Cat-fur to make kitten britches of,' and then we all laugh and yell, and I caught Ginger Potts on it, and he got mad when we yelled and come at me, and they pushed him against me and they pushed me against him, and they said he dassent, and they said I dassent, and then it happened, only when I got him down, he begun to say, 'Oh, it's wrong to fight! I promised my mother I would never fight!' but I wouldn't 'a' stopped for that, because teacher says he's by far the brightest boy in school—only just then Eustace Eubanks come along, and he laid down the meat he was taking home to dinner and jumped into the crowd and says: 'Boys, boys, shame on you to act so like the brutes! That isn't any way to act!' and he pulled me off'n Ginger, and—and that's all, but I had him licked fair."

"I shall not tell your father of this," I said sternly.

"He has enough to worry him," said my namesake.

"Exactly," I said. "But I advise you to cultivate a friendly feeling for Roscoe Potts. Boys should not fight."

"Well—now—I would—but he's a regular teacher's pet."

And remembering the letter that was not sent to Sam Murdock,—that the teacher was my namesake's love,—I perceived that this breach was not to be healed.



CHAPTER XII

TROUBLED WATERS ARE STILLED

It was spring again, a Sunday in early May, warm, humid, scented with blossoms that were bodied souls of the laughing air. They starred the bank that fell away from my porch to the clear-watered river, and they sang of the young spirit that lives in this old earth so deceptively, defacing it with false scars of age, and craftily permitting us to count years by the thousand, yet remaining always as fresh in itself as on the primal morning when the world was found good by that ill-fated but joyous first pair of lovers. I marvel that so many are fooled by the trick; how so few of us detect that the soul of it all is ageless—has never even wearied. The blossoms told this secret now in quiet triumph over the denials of ancient oaks that towered above them and murmured solemn falsities in their tops about the incredible oldness of things.

There was the star-shaped bloodroot, with its ten or a dozen petals of waxen white set with jewel-like precision about a centre of dead gold. There was the less formal phlox of a pinkish purple; deer's-tongue, white and yellow; frail anemones, both pink and white; small but stately violets, and the wake-robin with its wine-red centre among long green leaves. There was a dogwood in the act of unfolding its little green tents that would presently be snow-white, and a plum tree ruffled with tiny flowers of a honied fragrance.

With a fine Japanese restraint, Clem had placed a single bough of these in a dull-colored vase on my out-of-doors breakfast table.

All these were to say that the soul of the world is ageless, and that time is but a cheap device to measure our infirmities. Above, the trees were hinting that life might still be lived acceptably, as in Eden days; though they seemed to suspect that the stage of it to which they were amazedly awakening must be at least the autumn, and timidly clothed themselves accordingly. The elm, the first big tree to stir in its sleep, showed tiny, curled leaflets of a doubting, yellowish green; and the later moving oaks were frankly sceptical, one glowing faintly brown and crimson, another silvery gray and pink. They would need at least ten more days to convince them into downright summer greenery, even though slender-throated doves already mated in their tops with a perfect confidence.

It was an early morning hour, when it was easy to believe in the perfect fitness of Little Arcady's name; an hour in a time when the Potts-troubled waters had been mercifully stilled by the hand of God; an hour when the spirit of each Little Arcadian might share to its own fulness in the large serenity of the ageless world-soul.

I recalled Mrs. Potts's paper on "The Lesson of Greek Art," which had enriched two columns of the Argus after its reading to the ladies of the Literary and Home Study Club. It seemed to me that the Greeks must have divined this important secret of the vegetable world—the secret of ageless time—and that therein lay the charm of them; that spirit of ever freshening joy which they chiselled and sang into tangible grace for us of a later and heavier age.

At the moment I was on the porch, waiting for my coffee, and my thought seemed to be shared by Jim, my bony young setter, who, being but a scant year old, had not yet forgotten the lesson of Greek art. Over the grassy stretch before the porch he chased robins tirelessly, though with indifferent success. His was a spirit truly Greek. I knew it by reason of his inexhaustible enthusiasm for this present sport after a year's proving that chased birds will rise strangely but expertly into air that no dog can climb by any device of whining, leaping, or straining.

Living on into the Renaissance, I saw that Jim would be taught the grievous thing called wisdom—would learn his limitations and to form habits tamely contrary to his natural Greek likings. Then would he honorably neglect rabbits and all fur, cease pointing droves of pigs, and quit the silly chase of robins. Under check-cord and spike-collar he would become a fast and stylish dog, clean-cut in his bird work, perhaps a field-trial winner. He would learn to take reproof amiably, to "heel" at a word, to respect the whistle at any distance, to be steady to shot and wing, to retrieve promptly from land or water, and never to bolt or range beyond control or be guilty of false pointing.

I knew that coercion, steadily and tactfully applied, would thus educate him, for was he not of champion ancestry, wearing his pedigree in his looks, with the narrow shoulders so desirable and so rarely found, with just the right number of hairs at the end of his tail, the forelegs properly feathered, the feet and ankles strong, the right amount of leather in his ear to the fraction of an inch,—a dog, in short, of beauty, style, speed, nose, and brains?

But in this full moment of a glad morning I resolved that Jim should never know the Renaissance; he should never emerge from what Mrs. Potts had gracefully described as "the golden age of Pericles."

To the end of his days he should be blithely, naively Greek; a dog of wretched field manners, pointing cattle and quail impartially, shamefully gun-shy, inconsequent, volatile, ignorant, forever paganly joyous without due cause. For him I should do what no one had been able to do for me—detain him in that "world of fine fabling" where everything is true that ought to be; where the earth is a running course, fascinating in its surprises of open road and tangled hedgerow; where mere indiscriminate smelling is keenest ecstasy; and where the fact that robins have eluded one's fleetest rush to-day, by an amazing and unfair trick of levitation, is not the slightest promise that they can escape our interested mouthing on the morrow.

Doubtless he would be a remarkably foolish dog in his old age; but I, growing old beside him, would learn wisely foolish things from his excellent folly. I knew we should both be happier for it; knew it was best for us both to prove that my thin white friend had been born chiefly to display the acute elegance of his bones and the beauty of hopeful effort.

It was this last that kept him thin. When I took to the road, he travelled five miles to my every one, circling me widely, ranging far over the hills in mad dashes, or running straight and swiftly on the road, vanishing in a white fog of dust. Walking slowly to avoid this, I would only meet him emerging from a fresh cloud of it with a glad tongue thrown out to the breeze. Again, there were desperate plunges into wayside underbrush or down steep ravines, whence I would hear rapid splashing through a hidden stream and short, plaintive cries to tell that that wonderful, unseen wood-presence of a thousand provoking scents had once more cunningly evaded him.

Also did he love to swim stoutly across a field of growing wheat, his head alone showing above the green waves. And if the wheat were tall, he still braved it—lost to sight at the bottom. Then one might observe the mystery of a furrow ploughing itself swiftly across the billows without visible agency.

When I do not walk, to give countenance to his running, he has a game of his own. He plays it with an ancient fur cap that he keeps conveniently stored. The cap represents a prey of considerable dignity which must be sprung upon and shaken again and again until it is finally disabled. Then it is to be seized by implacable jaws and swiftly run with about the yard in a feverish pretence that enemies wish to ravish it from its captor. Any chance observer is implored to humor this pretence, and upon his compliance he is fled from madly, or perhaps turned upon and growled at most directly, if he show signs of losing interest in the game.

This ceaseless motion, with its attendant nervous strains, has prevented any accumulation of flesh, and explains the name of Slim Jim affixed to him by my namesake.

Jim consented now to rest for a moment at my feet, though at a loss to know how I could be calm amid so many exciting smells. I promised him as he lay there that he should never be compelled to learn any but the fewest facts necessary to make him as harmless as he was happy; chiefly not to bark at old ladies and babies, no matter how threatening their aspect, as they passed our house. A few things he had already learned—to avoid fences of the barbed wire, to respect the big cat from across the way who sometimes called and treated him with watchful disdain, and not to chew a baby robin if by any chance he caught one. This last had been a hard lesson, his first contact with a problem only a few days younger than Eden itself. It came to his understanding, however, that if you mouth a helpless baby robin, a hand or a stick falls upon you hurtfully, even if you evade it for the moment and seclude yourself under a porch until it would seem that so trifling an occurrence must have been utterly forgotten. This was the one big sin—sin, to the best of our knowledge, being obedience to any natural desire, the satisfaction of which is unaccountably followed by pain.

I told him this would probably be all that he need ever know; and he looked up at me in a fashion he has, the silky brown ears falling either side of the white face. It is a look of languishing, melting adoration, and if I face him steadily, he must always turn away as if to avoid being overcome—as if the sight of beauty so great as mine could be borne full in the eyes only for the briefest of moments.

But Clem came now, ranging my breakfast dishes about the bowl of plum flowers, and I approached the table with all the ardor he could have wished at his softly spoken, "Yo' is suhved, Mahstah Majah."

The sight of Clem, however, inevitably suggests the person to whom I am indebted for his sustaining ministrations. Potts had been a necessary instrument in one of those complications which the gods devise among us human ephemera for their mild amusement on a day of ennui. And Potts, having served his purpose, had been neatly removed. I have said that the Potts-troubled waters of Little Arcady were for the moment stilled. By the hands of the gods had they been mercifully stilled so that not for a month had any citizen been asked to subscribe for any improving book or patented device of culture.

A month before, in a far-off place, J. Rodney Potts had suffered extinction through the apparently casual agency of a moving railway train, the intervention of the gods in all such matters being discreetly veiled so that the denser of us shall suspect nothing but that they were the merest of accidents.

One could only surmise that the widow viewed this happening with a kind of trustful resignation, sweetened perhaps by certain ancient memories attuned to a gentle melancholy. I know that she placed on view in her parlor for the first time a crayon portrait of Potts in his early manhood, one made ere life had broken so many of its promises to him, the portrait of one who might conceivably have enchained the fancy of even a superior woman. But the widow was not publicly anguished. She donned a gown and bonnet of black in testimony of her bereavement, but there was no unnecessary flaunt of crape in her decently symbolic garb. As Aunt Delia McCormick phrased it, she was not in "heavy mourning,"—merely "in light distress."

The town was content to let it go at that, especially after the adjustment of certain formalities which enabled the widow for a time to suspend her work of ministering to its higher wants.

The railway company had at first, it appeared, been disposed to view its removal of Potts very lightly indeed; not only because of his unimposing appearance, but by reason of his well-attested mental condition at the time of the occurrence—a condition clearly self-induced, and one that placed him beyond those measures of safety which a common carrier is obliged to exercise in behalf of its patrons.

But a package of letters had been discovered among the meagre belongings of the unfortunate man, and these had placed the matter in a very different light. They showed conclusively that the victim had been of importance, a citizen of rare values in any community that he might choose to favor with his presence.

Truman Baird settled the case and, after these letters had been appraised by the corporation's attorney, he succeeded in extorting the sum of eight hundred dollars from the railway as recompense to the widow for the loss of her husband's services. I considered that the company would have given up at least five hundred more to avoid being sued for the death of a man who had been able to evoke those letters; but I did not say so, for the case was Truman's and eight hundred dollars were many. Westley Keyts thought they were, indeed, a great many, and outrageously excessive as a cold money valuation of Potts. "She only got eight hundred dollars, but there's them that thinks she skinned the company at that!" said Westley.

But there was no disposition to begrudge the widow a single dollar of this modest sum. A jury of Little Arcadians would have multiplied it tenfold without a blush; for, while that little hoard endured, any citizen, however public spirited, could flavor with a certain grace his refusal to subscribe for a book.

To Solon Denney the thing came as a deep and divine relief. In the satisfaction induced by it, he penned an obituary of Potts in which he employed the phrase "grim messenger of death" very cleverly indeed. For matters had been going from bad to worse. Murmurs at the demands of Mrs. Potts—likened by Asa Bundy to a daughter of the horse leech—had become passionately loud as our masses toiled expensively up that Potts-defined path of enlightenment. The old sneer at Solon's Boss-ship was again to be observed on every hand, that attitude of doubting ridicule, half-playful, half-contemptuous, which your public man finds more dangerous to his influence than downright hostility would be.

But the murmurs were again stilled, and Solon might breathe the peace of a golden age when as yet no Potts, male or female, had come unto us.

It was not felt at all that Solon's genius for the discretion of public affairs had availed him in this latest crisis. But the benefit was substantial, none the less, and the columns of the Argus were again buoyant as of yore. It was at this time, I remember, that the Argus first spoke of our town as "a gem at beauty's throat," and, touching the rare enterprise of our citizens, declared that, "If you put a Slocum County man astride a streak of lightning, he'd call for a pair of spurs."

For myself, I frankly mourned Potts. For I saw now that he had been truly and finely of that Greek spirit—one accepting gifts from the gods with a joyous young faith in their continuance. I felt that he had divined more of the lesson of Greek art than his one-time love could write down in papers unending. I should not have wished him back in Little Arcady, but I did breathe a prayer that he might in some early Greek elysium be indeed "Potts forever." Might it not be? Had not that other paper on "the message of Emerson" hinted of "compensation" in a jargon that sounded authoritative?

And now, as I breakfasted, my attention was invited anew to that fateful, never ending extension of the Potts-made ripples in our little pool. I was threatened with the loss of my domestic stay; again might I be forced to the City Hotel's refectory of a thousand blended smells and spotty table-linen; or even to irksome adventure at the board of the self-lauded Budd.

There was selfish wonder in my heart as I listened to Clem, who, now that my second cup of coffee competed with the May blossoms, stood by to tell me of his worldly advancement and the nearing of a time when Miss Caroline should come among us to be independent.

His stubborn industry had counted. The vegetable and melon crop of the year before had been abundant and well sold, despite sundry raids upon the latter by nameless boys, who, he assured me, "hain't had no raght raisin'." And he had further swelled that hoard of "reglah gole money" in Bundy's bank by his performances of house-cleaning, catering, and his work as janitor; not a little, too, by sales of the fish he caught. He was believed to possess a secret charm that made his fish-bait irresistible. Certainly his fortune in this matter was superior to that of any other frequenter of the bass nooks below the dam.

And now he had waxed so heavy of purse that a woman could come between us,—a selfish woman, I made no doubt, pampered survival of a pernicious and now happily destroyed system, who would not only unsettle my domestic tranquillity, but would, in all likelihood, fetch another alien ferment into our already sorely tried existence as a town needing elevation. It seemed, indeed, that we were never to be done with these consequences.

Separated from my house by a stretch of weedy lawn was a shambling structure built years before by one Azariah Prouse, who believed among other strange matters that the earth is flat and that houses are built higher than one story only at great peril, because of the earth's proneness to tip if overbalanced. Prouse had compromised with this belief, however, and made his house a story and a half high, in what I conceive to have been a dare-devil spirit. The reckless upper rooms were thus cut off untimely by ceilings of sudden slope, and might not be walked in uprightly save by persons of an inconsiderable stature.

In a fulness of years Azariah had died and been chested, like Joseph of old, his soul to be gathered, as he believed, to another horizontal plane, exalted far above this, as would befit an abode for spirits of the departed good.

His earthly home, now long vacant, had been rented by Clem for a monthly sum not particularly cheap in view of its surprising limitations above stairs. It was of this new home that he chiefly talked to me, of the persistence required to have it newly painted by the inheriting Prouse, and repairs made to doors, windows, and the blinds that hung awry from them.

"An' Ah been cleanin'—yes, seh, Mahstah Majah—fum celleh to gahet. Them floahs do shine an' them windows is jes' so clean they look lahk they ain't theah at all. Miss Cahline an' Little Miss, they reside on th' lowah floah, an' Ah tek mahse'f up to that theh gahet. Yes, seh, Ah haf to scrooge aw Ah git mah haid knocked off, but Ah reckon Ah sho' will luhn to remembeh in Gawd's own time. An' they's a tehible grand hen-house. Ah'm go'n' a' raise a hund'ed thousan' yellow-laiged pullets; an' theh's a staihway down to th' watah whah Ah kin tie up mah ole catfish boat, an' a monst'ous big gyahden whah Ah kin keep mah fie'ce look on them mush an' watah melons. Ah don' want t' git into any mo' alterations with them boys, but Ah suttinly will weah 'em out if they don't mind theah cautions. Yes, seh,—we all go'n' a' have a raght tolable homeplace."

Then my grievance prompted me.

"Yes, and who's going to get my breakfast and dinner for me, then?" I asked with a dark look, but he beamed upon me placatingly.

"Oh, Ah's still go'n' a' do fo yo', Mahstah Majah. Ah steddied huh all out twell she's plumb systemous. Miss Cahline sh' ain't wantin' huh breakfus' twell yo's done, an' she'll tek huh dinneh uhliah. Ah manage, Mahstah Majah. Ah mek all mah reddiments, yes, seh—yo's go'n' a' be jes' lahk mah own folks."

I affected to be made more cheerful by this, but I knew that no man can serve two masters, especially when he is the "pussenal propity" of one; but I forbore to warn the deluded African of the tribulations ahead of him.



The Book of MISS CAROLINE



CHAPTER XIII

A CATASTROPHE IN FURNITURE

"Miss Cahline comin' this yeh time a' yeah so's 't'll seem mo' soft an' homelike. Ah gaiss she go'n' a' sprighten raght up when she see th' summeh time all pleasant."

Thus Clem said to me a few weeks later, and I praised his thoughtfulness. But I nursed misgivings both for Miss Caroline and for Little Arcady. How would they take each other? I conceived Miss Caroline to be a formidable person whom Little Miss resembled, Clem said, "as aigs look lahk aigs." No further detail could I elicit from him save that his Mistress was "not fleshily inclahned," and that Little Miss was "sweetah'n honey on a rag!"

They would find our summer acceptable, even after a Southern summer heavy-sweet with magnolia and jasmine, honeysuckle and mimosa; with spirea and bridal-wreath and white-blossomed sloe trees. And the house as put to rights by Clem would be found at least endurable. It had not the solid grace nor the columned front of the houses I had somewhat hurriedly admired in the Southland some years before, but its lower rooms were wide, its windows abundant, and outwardly it had escaped the blight of the scroll saw.

But the civilization of Little Arcady would be alien to the newcomers, and I was apprehensive that it would also be difficult.

Further, I suspected that J.R.C. Tuckerman, with all his genius for hard work, lacked the administrative gifts of a true financier. He said a hundred thousand pullets when he should have said twenty-five, and he seemed to consider his banked hoard of gold money to be inexhaustible when it was in fact merely a sum slightly greater than he was wont to juggle with in his darkened mind.

I was not surprised, therefore, when I found him rather dejectedly sunk in figures one afternoon about a week after Miss Caroline's "home-fixin's" had begun to arrive.

These were all about him at the front door, in the hall, and extending far into the rooms, a truly depressing chaos of packing boxes, swathed tables, chairs, bureaus, and barrels of china. Nor was this all; for even as I loitered up to the door the dray of Sam Murdock halted in front with another huge load.

Clem raised his head from a sheet of sprawled figures and regarded this fresh trouble with something like consternation. In one hand he fluttered a packet of receipted freight bills, and he spoke as one in an evil dream.

"Yes, seh, Mahstah Majah, it suttinly do seem lahk them railroad genamen would git monst'ous rich a-runnin' them freight trains about th' kentry th' way lahk they do. Ah allus think them ole freight cyahs look maghty cheap an' common a-rattlin' around, but Ah teks mah ole hat off to um yehafteh. Yes, seh, Ah lays Ah will! Them engineahs an' fiahmen an' them Cunnels with gole on they hats, Ah gaiss they go'n' a' have all th' money in th' world maghty shawtly. They looks highly awdinahy an' unpetentious, but they suttinly p'duces th' revenue. Ah sho'ly go'n' a' repoht mahse'f to um ve'y honably when they pass me by yehafteh. Yo' don't gaiss they made a errah, Mahstah Majah?"

He searched my face with a sudden hope:—

"Yo' don't reckon they git a idy them funichas an' home-fixin's ain't been paid foh in th' fust place?"

I took the packet from his hands and glanced over it.

"No, these seem to be all right, Clem—only freight is charged for. But you must remember Virginia is a long way off."

"Yes, seh—it ain't neveh raghtly come upon me befoh."

"And freights are high, of course?"

"Yes, seh, th' freight p'fession does look lahk it ort a' be maghty gainful. Ah gaiss them engineahs go'n' a' do raght well in it, with evabody movin' 'round considable."

"Well, how many more loads do you expect?"

"Well, seh, Ah don't raghtly know. Ah tell that drivah yestaday Ah already got a gret abundance to mek evabody comf'table, an' a little bit oveh, but he jes' sais, 'Oh, tha's all raght,' an' so fothe, an' he still is a-bringin' it. Lohks ve'y strongly lahk he ain't go'n' a' stop at mah implications. Mahstah Majah, maght happen lahk he'd ack mo' reasonin' ef yo' was t' have a good long talk with him."

"Oh, he hasn't anything to do with it. He only brings what your Miss Caroline has shipped. She shouldn't have sent so much, that's all."

He took the troubling bills again.

"Yo' sounds raght, Mahstah Majah—you suttinly do sound raght! Ah gaiss Ah got a' raise ten hund'ed thousan' pulletts an mo'."

For three more days the juggernaut of Sam Murdock's dray hauled heavy furniture over the prostrate spirit of Clem. Faster than he could unpack the stuff was it unpiled at his door. And it was poor stuff, moreover, in the opinion of Little Arcady. Clem's history was known, of course, and during these busy days the town made it a point to pass his door in friendly curiosity about the belongings of his mistress. When these could not be satisfactorily appraised from the yard, they sauntered up to the porch and surveyed Clem in the front room at his work of unpacking and cleaning. Often, indeed, some kindly disposed observer with time to spare would lend a hand in freeing some heavy bit of mahogany from its crate or wrappings.

The public opinion, thus advantageously formed, was for once unanimous. The house overflowed with worthless and unbeautiful junk. To Little Arcady this was a grievous disappointment. It had expected elegance, for Clem had been wont to enlarge upon the splendors of his former home. When it was finally known that the long-vaunted furnishings were coming, the town had prepared to be dazzled by sets of black walnut, ornate with gilt lines, by patent rockers done in plush, by fashionable sofas, gay with upholstery of flowered ingrain, by bedroom sets of ash, stencilled adroitly with pink-and-blue flowers, or set with veneered panels of burl; by writing-desks of maple and music-stands of cherry with many spindles and frettings, by sideboards of finest new oak with brass handles and mirrors in the backs.

The town had anticipated, in short, up to its own high and difficult standards. And along had come a ruck of stuff that was dark and dingy and old-fashioned; awkward articles with a vast dull expanse of mahogany, ending in clumsy claw feet; spindle-legged tables inlaid with white wood; old-fashioned mirrors in scarred gilt frames; awkward-looking highboys and the plainest of sofas and lounges. The chief sideboard boasted not the tiniest bit of brass; even the handles were of cheap glass, and Clem had set candle-sticks upon it that were nothing but pewter.

Where Little Arcady had looked for the best Brussels carpets, there came only dull-colored rugs of a most aged and depressing lack of gayety. As for silver, we knew the worst when Aunt Delia McCormick declared, "They haven't even a swinging ice-pitcher—nothing but thin battered old stuff that was made in the year one!"

Aunt Delia had quite the newest and most fashionable furniture in town; her parlor was a feast of color for any eye, and her fine hardwood sideboard alone had cost twenty-two dollars, so she spoke as one having authority.

By the time that Clem's ancient treasures were all unpacked, Little Arcady felt a genuine if patronizing sympathy for his mistress. If that were the boasted elegance of the ante-bellum South, then Tradition had reported falsely. No plush rockers of the newest patent; no chenille curtains; no art chromos; no hat-racks, not even an imitation bronze mantle clock guarded by its mailed warrior. Such clocks as there were left only honest distress in the mind of the beholder,—tall, outlandish old things in wooden cases.

It was believed that Clem had wasted money in paying freight on this stuff. Certainly no one in Little Arcady would have paid those bills to possess the furniture. As to the folly of those who had originally purchased it, the town was likewise a unit.

If Clem was made aware of this public sentiment, he still did not waver in his loyalty to the old pieces. Day after day he unpacked and dusted and polished them with loving devotion. They spoke to him of other days, and when he was quite sure that the last freight bill had been paid, he seemed really to enjoy them. The unexpected drain had reduced his savings to a pittance, but were not the pullets which he could raise absolutely without number?

It was true that Miss Caroline would have to come alone now, leaving Little Miss still to teach in the school at Baltimore until a day of renewed surplus. This much Clem confided to me in sorrow. I sympathized with him, truly, but I felt it was a fortunate circumstance. I thought that one of the ladies at a time would be as much as Little Arcady could assimilate.

Slowly the house grew into a home awaiting its mistress, a home whose furnished rooms overflowed into others not furnished but merely crowded.

I foresaw, not without a certain wicked cheerfulness, that, even after the coming of Miss Caroline, Clem would be forced to pander to my breakfast appetites for the slight betterment it made in his fortunes, even must this be done surreptitiously. And at least one dinner was secured to me beyond the coming of this mistress; for Clem had conveyed to me, with appropriate ceremony, an invitation, which I promptly accepted, to dine with Mrs. Caroline Lansdale at six-thirty on the evening of her arrival, she having gleaned from his letters, it appeared, that I had been a rather friendly adviser of her servant.

In the days that followed I saw that Clem was regarding me with an embarrassed, troubled look. Something of weight lay upon his mind. Nor was it easy, to make him speak, but I achieved this at last.

"Well, seh, Mahstah Majah, yo'-all see, Ah ain't eveh told Miss Cahline that yo's a Majah in th' Nawthun ahmy."

"No?" I said.

"No, seh; Ah ain't even said yo's been a common soljah."

"Well?"

"'Cause Miss Cahline's tehible heahtfelt 'bout some mattehs. Th' Lansdales sho'ly kin ca'y a grudge powful long. An' so—seh—Ah ain't neveh tole on yo'."

"But she'll find it out."

"Yes, seh, an' she maght fuhgit it, but—Ah crave yo' pahdon, seh—theh's yo' ahm what's gone."

"It's too late to help that, Clem."

"Well, seh—now Ah was steddyin'—if yo' kin'ly grant yo' grace of pahdon, seh—lahkly 'twould compliment Miss Cahline ef yo' was to git yo'se'f fitted to one a' them unnatchel limbs, seh. Yo' sho'ly go'n' a' pesteh huh rec'lections with that theh saggin' sleeve, Mahstah Majah."

But this kindly meant proposal I felt compelled to reject.

"No, Clem, you'll have to fix it up with Miss Caroline the best you can."

"Ve'y well, seh, thank yo', seh—Ah do mah ve'y best fo' yo'."

But I saw that he had little hope of ever winning for me the favor of his captious owner.



CHAPTER XIV

THE COMING OF MISS CAROLINE

She came to us auspiciously on a day in the first week of June.

Mistress Caroline Lansdale, a one-time belle of the Old Dominion, relict of the late Colonel Jere Lansdale, C.S.A., legislator and duellist, whose devotion to her in the days of their courtship had been the talk of two states. Not less notable than his eloquence in the forum, his skill in the duello, had been the determined fervor with which he knelt at her feet. And I waited no more than a hundred seconds in her presence to applaud his discernment.

I had pictured an old woman—some aged trifle of an elder day, sad, withered, devitalized, intemperately reminiscent—steeped in traditions that would leave her formidable, and impracticable as a friend to me. I had fancied her thus, from Clem's fragmentary and chance descriptions and my own knowledge of what she should be by all laws of the probable; and she was not as I had evolved her.

The day she came was one of Little Arcady's best; quite all that her anxious servitor could have wished,—a day of summer's first abundance, when our green-bordered streets basked in a tempered sunlight, and our trim white cottages nestled coolly back of their flower gardens. Harried alien as she was, she would be welcomed with smiles, and I was glad for her sake and Clem's when I hurried home to dress for that first dinner with her.

On my way across the lawn at six-thirty I picked a bunch of the newly opened yellow roses as a peace offering, should one be needed. Clem, in his most formal dress, received me ceremoniously at the door, his look betraying only the faintest, formalest acknowledgment of having ever encountered mine before. With a superb bow toward the drawing-room and in tones stiffly magnificent, he announced, "Mistah Calvin Blake." It was excellently done, but I knew he had rehearsed the "Mistah."

Then a woman rose from one of the deep old chairs to offer me her hand, and a soft quick laugh came as she perceived my difficulty, for my one hand held the roses. These she gathered gracefully into her left hand, while her right fell into mine with a swift little pressure as she bade me welcome.

"Clem has told me of you, Mr. Blake. I feel that you are one of us. Let me thank you at once for the consideration you have shown him."

In the half light I hesitated awkwardly enough to speak her name, for I felt that this could not be the mother of Little Miss. Rather was it the daughter herself. I stammered words that must have revealed my uncertainty, for again she laughed, and then she ordered lights.

Clem came soft-footedly with a branching candelabra, which he placed on the round-topped old table by which she had been sitting. She moved a step to where the soft lights glowed up into her face, and with mock seriousness stood to be surveyed fairly.

"There, Mr. Blake! You see I confess all my years."

And I saw the truth, that she loitered gracefully among the vague and pleasant fifties. But then she did a thing which would have been injudicious in most women of her years. Her hand, still holding my roses, went up to her face, and her cheek glowed dusky and pink against the yellow petals. I saw that she rightly appraised her own daring and felt free to say:—

"You see! My confusion was inevitable. Not one of those candles can be spared if I am to believe you are Miss Caroline."

Again she laughed, revealing now a girlish freshness in the small mouth, that had somehow lingered to belie the deeper, graver lines about her dark eyes. As she still regarded me with that smiling, waiting lift of the short upper lip, I called out:—

"More lights, Clem! I need all you have."

Whereat Miss Caroline fell into her chair with a marvellous blush, an undeniable darkening of the pink on cheeks that were in texture like the finest, sheerest lawn.

Never thereafter could I refuse credence to tales, of which many came to me, exposing Miss Caroline as an able and relentless coquette. Nor could I fail to understand how the late Colonel Jere Lansdale would have found need to be a duellist after he became her lover, even had he aforetime been unskilled in that difficult art.

As she chatted, chiefly of her journey, I falsely pretended to listen, whereas I only stared and in spirit was prostrate before her. Mere kneeling at her feet savored too nearly of arrogance. I felt the need to be a spread rug in her presence. She sat back in the chair that embraced her loosely, a slight figure with a small head, on which the heavy strands of whitening hair seemed only a powdered lie above the curiously girlish face. A tiny black patch or two on the face, I thought, would have made this illusion perfect. And yet when she did not laugh, or in some little silence of recollection, the deeper lines stood out, and I could see that sorrow had long known its way to her face. It even lurked now back of her eyes, and I knew that she tried to keep her face lighted for me so that I should not detect it. She succeeded admirably, but the smile could not always be there, and ghosts of her dead years came stealthily to haunt her face as surely as the smile went.

When Clem, with an air of having had word from a numerous kitchen crew, stood before us and bowed out, "Miss Cahline, dinneh is suhved!" I gave her my arm with a feeling of vast relief. Not only was Miss Caroline an abiding joy, but apprehension as to my modest complicity in her late distress had, too, evidently been groundless. She had once, with what seemed to be an almost artificial politeness, asked me about our timber supply and the state of the lumber market; queries to which I had replied with an assumption of interest equally artificial, for I was ignorant of both topics, and not even remotely concerned about either.

Seated at the table, which Clem had arrayed with a faultless artistry, I promptly demanded the removal of a tall piece of cut glass and its burden of carnations, asserting that both glass and flowers might be well enough in their way, but that I could regard them only as a blank wall of exasperating ugliness while they interrupted a view of my hostess. Whereat I was again regaled with that imcomparable blush.

Clem served a soup that had been two days in the making and was worth the time. But even ere the stain had faded from the cheeks of my hostess, cheeks of slightly crumpled roseleaf, another look flashed the smile from her eyes—a quick, firm, woman look of suffering and defiance.

She had raised her glass, and I mechanically did the same.

"Mr. Blake, let us drink standing!—we women earned the right to stand with you."

A little puzzled, I stood up to face her, as Clem pulled back her chair. One hand on the table, the other reaching her slender stemmed glass aloft, she leaned toward me with a look of singular vehemence.

"To our murdered brothers and husbands and sons, Mr. Blake! To our lost leaders and our deathless lost cause! To Jefferson Davis and Robert Edmund Lee! To the Confederate States of America!"

A black wind seemed to blow across the face of her servitor's fluttering eyelids. But I drank loyally to Mrs. Caroline Lansdale and whatsoever that woman would. I could see that Clem exhaled a deep breath. How long he had held it I know not.

We resumed our seats, and the dinner went forward with my hostess again herself. It was a dinner not heavy but choice, a repast upon which Clem had magically worked all his spells. There was a bass that had nosed the river's current that morning, two pullets cut off in the very dawn of adolescence, and a mysteriously perfect pastry whose secret I had never been able to wring from him beyond the uninforming and obvious enough data that it contained "some sugah an' a little spicin's."

Having for my luncheon that day suffered an up-to-date dinner at Budds's, I felt a genuine craving for food; yet the spell of my hostess was such that I left her table ahungered.

Again there was an inexplicable reference from her to the timber and sawed-lumber interests of the Little Country, and the circumstance that another black wind seemed to shiver the eyelids of Clem lent no light to the mystery of it. But then, as if some recondite duty to me had been safely performed, she talked to me of herself, of days when the youth of the Old Dominion had been covetous of her smiles, of nightly triumphs in ball and rout, of gay seasons at the nation's capital, amid the fashion and beauty and wit of Pierce's administration and of Buchanan's, of rounds of calls made in her calash, of bewitching gowns she had worn, of theatres and musicales and teas and embassy receptions, in a day when Harriet Lane was mistress of the White House.

For my pleasing she laughed her sprightly way through memories of that romantic past, when she danced and chattered in the fulness of her bellehood, bringing out a multitude of treasured mementoes, compliments she had compelled, witticisms she had prompted, pranks she had played, delectable repasts she had eaten at Lady Napier's or another's, the splendor of pageants she had witnessed. And though she was back in an elder day, she glowed young as she talked, whether recalling official solemnities or a once-cherished gown of embroidered tulle, caught up with bunches of grapes. The girl's mouth was her's—fresh and full, unlined by care.

It was not until she talked of later, younger days that her face took on an old look.

"When our federated states rose up in their might," was a phrase that brought the change. Thereafter she spoke in subdued tones of a time more eventful than romantic, but still absorbing.

She remembered the words in which she felicitated General Pope Walker for having issued the order to fire on Sumter. She gave details of the privation that Richmond on her seven hills had suffered in the latter days, and she made plain why their women should rise with their men to drink certain toasts; how they, too, had sacrificed and toiled and suffered with the same loyal tenacity. She mentioned "the present government" casually, as the affair of a day; and spoke of "Mr. Lincoln, their Northern President," in a tone implying confidence that I shared her feeling for him.

As we went back to the drawing-room for coffee, she summed up herself to me, though she thought to sum up more than herself.

"They swept us with the besom of war, Mr. Blake, and they overwhelmed—but they could not subjugate us."

As she spoke, my eyes caught for the first time a portrait that hung on the wall back of her. It was the portrait of one dark but fair, with shoulders of a girlish slenderness all but thin, with eyes of glowing dusk and a half-smile upon her lips. It was like my hostess in a fashion of line and color, and yet enough unlike her so that I knew it must be the daughter. The face was a shade narrower of chin, a bit longer, and in some obscure differing of the features there was an effect of more poise, almost of a maturer dignity, so that while I divined it was the face of her daughter, it would seem to have been better planned for the face of her mother.

She followed my eyes to the picture, and her face was still almost stern from her last speech, though it is true that the sternness was a dimpled sternness, for the chin of my hostess was rounded.

"They overwhelmed us, Mr. Blake,—my daughter there, and me, and God alone has counted how many other wretched women. Her they struck a double blow—they killed the two men she loved. One was her father, but she flew to the other. She found her picture in his dead hands. Our young men were apt to die in that fashion; and when she put it back to be buried with him, her eyes were dry. Even under her double blow, she was stronger than I. She has been stronger ever since, but she suffered more than I was made to. Oh, it was a fine thing for them to do!"

Her voice rose at the last into a little trembling gust of passion, and I saw again the spirit that gave those women the right to stand with the men. She recovered herself quickly, and the girl in her smiled upon me again.

"You must overlook my forgetfulness. I shall not forget often, especially now that I am among these murderous fanatics. But I was tired to-night, and I was so glad when I knew I could talk to you freely."

Her eyes were upon me in friendly unreserve, in confident appeal.

In the face of what I should have felt, I was ashamed at that moment, and in the nervousness of hidden guilt I handled the minute coffee cup awkwardly. Clem, who must have been equally nervous, stepped to right the thing in its saucer, with "Yes, seh, Mahstah Majah!"

From across the table I knew, without raising my eyes, that his mistress glanced up at Clem in quick astonishment, then that her eyes were fastened upon my face. I still regarded the coffee interestedly, but I knew that I myself blushed now and I suspected that my hostess was pale.

"Major?" she began questioningly, then more decidedly, "Major Blake?"

I raised my eyes to hers and nodded idiotically.

She laughed a little laugh that was icy in its politeness.

"How stupid of me, and now I must ask your pardon for all my tirade, for my blasphemies, and for that monstrous toast I—really—"

She shot a look at Clem, under which he blanched visibly, then her eyes were again upon me and she smiled with a rare art.

"Really, you will overlook an old woman's weakness."

It was the inimical, remote, icy superiority of her tone that nettled me—perhaps her implied assumption that I would not know it for such. But also I felt curiously stricken by that swift withdrawal of her confidence, for Mrs. Caroline Lansdale had won me by her laugh and blush of ancient girlishness. Further, I would not now be hurt by any woman, though she were ten times my years, without a show of defence.

I arose as Clem hastily fled from the room.

"Miss Caroline—" I waited for the fine little brows to go up at that. I had not long to wait.

"I shall positively never call you anything else but Miss Caroline while you permit me to address you at all—understand it—I've associated with your boy too long. Well, I did do four years of fighting, and I was mustered out with the rank of Major. You might as well know it now as later. You'll have longer to forget it. I wish I could forget it myself. Not the fact, for I should fight again as long and try to fight harder in the same cause, but the hellishness of it—the damnable, inhuman obscenity of it—I should like to forget. I never said so before, Miss Caroline,—there was no one to say it to,—but it made me old before my time. Why, I could almost be a son of yours, if you will pardon that minor brutality, and the thing is aging me to this day. I helped to kill your young men and your old men, but you ought to know that I didn't do it for holiday sport. The first one of your men I saw dead lay alone by the roadside, a boy, foolishly young, with a tired face that was still smiling. He'd fallen there as if sleep had overtaken him on the march. Our column had halted, and I went to him. It must have taken a full minute for me to realize that this was dignified war and not the murder of a boy in a homely gray uniform. When I did realize it, I was so weakened that I broke down and cried. I was a private then. I covered his face, and got up strong enough to assault two other privates who had found my snivelling funny. One of them went to the field hospital, and I went under arrest when I'd finished with the other. You ought to know, Miss Caroline, that the sight of thousands of your other dead never moved me to any merriment. I tried to be a good soldier, but I felt the death pains of every fallen man I saw. I didn't stop to note the color of his uniform. Miss Caroline—"

I waited until I had made her look at me.

"The war is over, you know. Suppose you forget me as a soldier and take me as a man. Really, I believe we ought to know each other better."

Clem had once found occasion to say, "When Miss Cahline tek th' notion to shine huh eyes up, she sho' is a highly illuminous puhsonality."

I saw then what he meant, for Miss Caroline had "shined" her eyes, and they flooded me with a distracting medley of lights. I thought she struggled very uncertainly with herself. Her eyes shifted from my face to the empty sleeve. Twice before that evening—I remembered it had been when she spoke so enigmatically of the lumber industry—her eyes had rested there briefly, discreetly, but in all sympathy. Now the look was different. It wavered. At one instant I seemed to read regret that I had come off so well—her eyes flickered suggestively to my remaining arm.

"Be fair," I said; "did I not drink your toast?"

I thought she wavered at this, for a blush deeper than all the others suffused her.

"Besides," I continued warningly, "you are within the enemy's lines now, and you may find me a help. Come!" and I held out my hand.

Very slowly she put her own within it. I noticed that it was still plump, the fine skin not yet withered.

"You are very kind, Major Blake. I had been misinformed, or you should have had no occasion to think me rude."

It was then that I wished definitely to shake Miss Caroline.

"Come, come," I said, "you are not giving me what you gave at first. I'm not to be put off that way, you know. If I call you Miss Caroline,—and I've sworn to call you nothing else,—you must be Miss Caroline."

She searched my face eagerly,—then—

"You shall call me Miss Caroline—but remember, sir, it makes you my servant." She smiled again, without the icy reserve this time, whereat I was glad—but back of the smile I could see that she felt a bitter homesickness of the new place.

"Your most obedient servant," I said. "You have another slave, Miss Caroline, another that refuses manumission—another bit of personal property, clumsy but willing."

"Thank you, Major, I need your kindness more than I might seem to need it. Good night!" and even then she gave me a rose, with the same coquetry, I doubt not, that had once made Colonel Jere Lansdale quick to think of his pistols when another evoked it. Only now it masked her weariness, her sense of desperate desolation. I took the rose and kissed her hand. I left her wilting in the big chair, staring hard into the fireplace that Clem had rilled with summer green things.

When my fellow-chattel appeared next morning with my coffee, he was embarrassed. With guile he strove to be talkative about matters of no consequence. But this availed him not.

"Clem," I said frigidly, "tell me just what you said to Mrs. Lansdale about me."

He paltered, shifting on his feet, his brow contracted in perplexity, as if I had propounded some intricate trifle of the higher mathematics.

"Huh! Wha—what's that yo'-all is a-sayin', Mahstah Majah?"

"Stop that, now! I needn't tell you twice what I said. Out with it!"

"Well, seh, Mahstah Majah, of co'se, yo'-all tole me to fix it man own way, an' Ah lay Ah'd do it raghtly—an' so Miss Cahline is ve'y busy goin' th'oo th' rooms an' spressin' huhse'f how grand evehthing suttinly do look an' so fothe an' so on, an' sh' ain't payin' much attention—Ah reckon sh' ain't huhd raghtly—"

"Clem—the Bible says, 'How forceful are right words!'"

He stopped at my look, despaired, and became succinct.

"Well, seh, Ah jes' think Ah brek it to huh easy-lahk, by degrees, so Ah sais yo' is a genaman of wahm South'n lahkings. Ah sais yo' been so hot fo' th' South all th'oo that theh wah that evehbody yeh'bouts despised an' reviled you. An' she sais why ain't yo' gone faght fo' th' South ef yo'-all so hot about it, an' Ah sais yo' was eageh to go, but yo' been in the timbeh business, an' one day yo' got rash about yo' saw-mill, an' th' ole buzz-saw jes' natchelly tuk off yo' ahm, so's yo' couldn't go to th' wah. Yes, seh, Mahstah Majah—Ah laid Ah'd brek it grajally—an' Ah suttingly did have that lady a-thinkin' ve'y highly of yo' at th' time of yo' entrance, seh,—yes, seh!"



CHAPTER XV

LITTLE ARCADY VIEWS A PARADE

And so began the time of Miss Caroline among us,—one effect the more of Fate's mad trickery. It was my privilege to be more intimately aware of her concerns than was the town at large. And even to me in those days she carried off the difficulties of her lot with a manner so plausible that it clenched my admiration if it did not win my belief. I knew that she daily bore a burden of ruin and faced a future of perilous uncertainty. I knew that she must have journeyed into our strange land with a real terror, nerved to that course only by a resolve to be no longer a burden upon her impoverished kinsman. Surely it had been like dying a death for her to leave the land of her own people, devastated though it was and vacant of those who had made the world easy for her.

And I was not a little puzzled by the tie that bound her to her one remaining stay. Both she and Clem, I saw, considered her coming to him to be a thing so natural that it should excite no wonder, a thing familiar in the thought and as little to be puzzled about as their own breathing. I saw that her perplexities lay not at all in this black fellow's unthinking adherence to his life of service, but rather in the circumstance of her spirit-grieving exile and in the necessary doubts of her chattel's competence for the feat he had undertaken.

I despaired very soon of ever comprehending the intricate strands of their relationship. When I understood, as I was not long in doing, that each was in certain ways genuinely afraid of the other, I knew that the problem must always be far beyond my own little powers.

As to Little Arcady at large, some aspects of this complication were simpler than they appeared to me; others were more obscure. Of the tragedy of Miss Caroline's mere coming to us they could suspect nothing, save it might be the humiliation her old-fashioned furniture must put upon her in a prosperous town where so much of the furniture was elegant to the point of extravagance.

In the much-discussed matter of mistress and slave, the town agreed simply that Clem was stupid and had been deluded by Miss Caroline into believing that a certain proclamation had stopped short of her personal property. It was believed that she had terrorized him by threatening to put bloodhounds on his trail if he ever tried to run off—for the town knew its "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as well as it knew "Gaskell's Compendium." It was thought that if Clem proved to be disobedient or rebellious, his mistress would try to hire "Big Joe" Kestril or some equally strong person to whip him with a "black-snake." Also it was said that she had sold his wife away from him, and might try to sell Clem himself if ever she got "hard up," though it was felt that she would be wise not to go too far in that matter.

For the rest, Little Arcady rather rejoiced in the novelty of Miss Caroline's establishment. There was a flavor of much-needed romance in this survival at our very doors of an ante-bellum unrighteousness. The town cherished a hope that Clem would try to run off some time, or that Miss Caroline would have his back cut to ribbons, or try to sell or mortgage him or something, thus creating entertainment of an agreeable and exciting character.

If the town could have overheard Clem scolding the lady with frank irritation in his voice,—as I chanced to do once or twice,—had it beheld his scowl as he raged, "Miss Cahline, yo' sho'ly gittin' old 'nuff to know betteh'n that. I suttinly do wish yo' Paw was alive an' yeh'bouts. Ah git him afteh yo' maghty quick. Now yo' jes' remembeh Ah ain't go'n' a' have no sech doin's!"—if it could have noted the quailing consternation of the mistress at these moments, it might have been puzzled; but of such phenomena it never knew. It was aware only that Miss Caroline treated Clem with a despotic severity, issuing commands to him as from a throne of power and in tones of acrid authority that were the envy of all housekeepers among us who kept "hired girls."

Even Mrs. Potts, long before the arrival of Miss Caroline, had despaired of teaching Clem to make something of himself. He had refused to subscribe for a "Compendium," and her cordial assurance that he was, by the law of the land, both a man and a brother, did not even mildly elate him. Mrs. Potts was soon in a like despair regarding Miss Caroline, whom she regarded as too frivolous ever to make anything of herself. These two ladies, indeed, were widely apart. Perhaps I can intimate the extent of their unlikeness by revealing that Mrs. Potts, early in our acquaintance, had observed of me that I was not serious enough; whereas Miss Caroline was presently averring to my face that I was entirely too serious. These judgments of myself seemed to contrast the ladies informingly.

The impression that Miss Caroline was frivolous—or even worse—became current the day after her arrival in Little Arcady. Arrayed in a lavender silk dress of many flounces, with bonnet beribboned gayly beyond her years, shod in low walking shoes of heel iniquitously high, a toe minute and shining and an instep ornate to an unholy degree, bearing a slender gold-tipped staff of polished ebony to assist theatrically in her progress, and bestowing placid, patronizing looks to right and left, she had flounced into Main Street, followed ceremoniously by her black chattel, himself set up with a palpable and shameless pride in his degradation, saluting stiffly and with an artificial grandeur those whom he would otherwise have greeted with the unstudied ease of long association.

This procession regaled both Main and Washington streets, where Miss Caroline visited our shops to make inconsiderable purchases and many friends. It was a function the pleasant data whereof I was not long in collecting.

Her first conquest was Chester Pierce, our excellent hardware merchant, whom she commissioned to make a needed repair to her range. It was a simple business matter, and Chester Pierce is a simple business person of plain manners. But as he slouched comfortably upon his counter and listened to Miss Caroline's condescending exposition of her needs, he became sensible of a strange influence stealing upon him. By degrees he brought himself erect and slowly, dazedly performed an act which had never before been perpetrated within his establishment. It was not that he deliberated, nor that his reason dictated it; but instinctively, almost from a purely reflex muscular action, he removed his hat while Miss Caroline talked, feeling himself thrill with a foreign and most suave deference. It was customary in our town to raise your hat to a lady on the street; but for a merchant, and a solid citizen at that, to do this thing in his own establishment, was a thing unheard of—and a thing of pretentious and sickening foppery when it was heard of, for that matter, though this need not now concern us.

"And be sure to tell my servant to give you a glass of wine when your work is done," concluded Miss Caroline, as she turned to rustle silkily out. Whereat Chester Pierce, charter member and President of our Sons of Temperance, a man primed with all statistics of the woe resulting traditionally from that first careless glass, murmured words unintelligible but of gratified import, and bowed low after the retreating vision. A moment later he was staring with mystified absorption at the hat in his hands, quite as if the hat were a stranger's—and then he brushed it around and around with the cuff of his coat sleeve as if the stranger had not been careful enough of it.

Thence paraded Miss Caroline to the City Drug Store, to be bowed well out to the sidewalk by young Arthur Updyke when her errand within had been done. But Arthur had attended a college of pharmacy far away from Slocum County, and it was not unnatural that he should exhibit an alien grace in times of emergency.

With Westley Keyts again, to whose shop Miss Caroline next progressed, it was as with Chester Pierce, a phenomenon of instinctive muscular reaction,—that of his hat coming off as he greeted the stately little lady at his threshold and apologized for the sawdust on his floor which was compelling her to raise a froth of skirts above the tops of those sinful-looking shoes. I suspect that Miss Caroline was rather taken with Westley. She called him "my good man," which made him feel that he had been distinguished uncommonly, and she chatted with him at some length, asking cordially about cuts of meat and his family, two matters in which Westley was much absorbed. He declared later that she was "a grand little woman."

There followed pilgrimages that June morning to the First National Bank and to several of our lesser establishments; pilgrimages rarely diverting to Little Arcady and which invariably provoked bows under strangely lifted hats.

But there were Little Arcadians of Miss Caroline's own sex to whom she might not so swiftly fetch confusion. Aunt Delia McCormick devoted a chance view of the newcomer to discovering that the gown of lavender satin had been turned and made over, none too expertly, from one originally built some years before the war. Later she found what our ladies agreed was its primal design, after much turning of the leaves of ancient Godey's magazines.

Mrs. Judge Robinson, from one sidelong glance, brought off detailed intelligence of the bonnet's checkered past.

The elder Miss Eubanks decried the mannishness of cane-bearing; and Mrs. Westley Keyts, entering the shop as Miss Caroline was bowed out, declared that her silk stockings were of a hue hardly respectable, and that she wore shoes "twice too small for her."

The eyes of the suddenly urbane Westley glistened when he overheard this, but he fell to dissecting a beef without further sign.

For better or worse, Miss Caroline and Little Arcady had exchanged impressions of each other.

I met her by chance that morning and was charmed by her flattering implication of reliance upon myself. She made me feel that our understanding was secret and our attachment romantic. To complete her round of our commercial centre I escorted her to the Argus office. Her greeting of Solon Denney was a thing to behold with unalloyed delight. They seemed to understand each other at once. Two minutes after Solon had looked up in some astonishment from his dusty, over-piled desk, they were arrayed as North and South in a combat of blithest raillery.

Miss Caroline sat in Solon's battered chair with the missing castor, surveyed his exchange-laden desk with a humorous eye, and seized the last Argus, skimming its local columns with a lively interest and professing to be enthralled by its word-magic. She read stray items that commended themselves to her critical judgment, such as, "A wind blew last week that you could lean up against like the side of the house;" or "Westley Keyts has a bran-new 'No Admittance!' sign over the door of his slaughter-house. We don't see why. He could put up a 'Come one, come all!' sign and still not get us into the place. They're messy."

Further she read, "Some fiend with sub-human instincts ravaged our secret hoard of eating-apples while we were out meeting the farmers last Saturday afternoon. We wish they had been of no value to any one except the owner." And then, in her sprightliest manner, and with every sign of enjoyment, she went on to an item during the reading of which I think we both flushed a little, Solon and I:—

"The United States Is

"Some grammar sharp down East says you must say 'The United States are.' But we guess not. Opinions to that effect prevailed widely to the south of us some years ago, but the contrary was proved, we believe. The United States is, brother, ever since Appomattox, and even the grammar book should testify to its is-ness—to its everlasting and indivisible oneness."

She carried it off so finely that I knew Miss Caroline had recovered from the fatigues of her journey.

"I shall write you an item myself," she exclaimed, and seizing a stubby pencil, she wrote rapidly:—

"A battered and ungrammatical old woman from the valley of Virginia has settled in our midst. She will always believe that the United States are, but she is harmless and otherwise sane."

"Have I caught the style?—have I used 'in our midst' correctly?" she asked Solon. And he protested that her style was faultless but that her matter was grossly misleading.

From this she was presently assuring him, in all pleasantness, that the seed of Cain, descended through Ham, would, by reason of the curse of God, be a "servant of servants" unto the end; while Solon was assuring her, with equal good nature, that this scriptural law had been repealed by President Lincoln.

Her retort, "I dare say your Mr. Lincoln was capable of wishing to repeal the Bible," was her nearest approach to asperity.

"A battered old woman!" said Solon to me later. "She looks more like a candy saint, if they make such things,—one that a child has been careless with." We agreed that she was an addition to Little Arcady.

The editor of the Argus sighed at this point, and I thought he might be wishing that all feminine newcomers could be like the latest. For Mrs. Aurelia Potts, whose leisure Heaven had increased, was now redoubling her efforts to make the Argus a well of English undefiled—undefiled by what she called "journalisms." Solon must not, he confided to me, say "enthuse" nor "we opine" nor "disremember." He might not say that the pastor "was given" a donation party when he really meant that the party was given,—not that the pastor was given. Further, he must be cautious in the uses of "who" and "whom," and try to break himself of the "a good time was enjoyed by all present" habit.

"And she always says 'diddy-you' instead of 'dij-you,'" broke in my namesake, who, loitering near us, had overheard the name of Mrs. Potts.

"That will do, Calvin!" said his father, shortly. It seemed to me that the still young life of Solon was fast being blighted.



CHAPTER XVI

THE SPECTRE OF SCANDAL IS RAISED

A graver charge than frivolity was soon to be brought against the widow of the late Colonel Jere Lansdale. Not with her antiquated gown, her assisting staff, the gay bonnet, nor yet with the showy small slippers and silken hose tinted unseasonably to her years did scandal engage itself; but rather with the circumstance that she drank.

To "drink" meant in Little Arcady to get drunk, as "Big Joe" Kestril did every pay-day. Clarence Stull, polishing a stove in the rear of Pierce's hardware store, was swift to divulge that Mrs. Lansdale had "asked Chet Pierce to have a glass of wine,—and him a-bowin' and a-scrapin' like you'd think he was goin' to fly off the handle!"

It was enough for the town. The unfortunate woman had not yet reeled through its streets, but Little Arcady would give her time, and it knew there could be but one result. That sort of thing might be done in tales of vicious high life to point a moral, but in the real world it could not compatibly exist with good conduct. Even Aunt Delia McCormick, good Methodist as she was, who "put up" a little elderberry wine each year for communion purposes, was thought by more than one to strain near to the breaking point the third branch of that concise behest to "Touch not, taste not, handle not!"

The ladies were at once dismayed about Miss Caroline, from Aunt Delia herself, to Marcella Eubanks, who kept conspicuous upon her dressing-table a bedizened motto of the Daughters of Rebecca,—"The lips that touch wine shall never touch mine." It is true that this legend appeared to Marcella to be a bit licentious in its implications as to lips not touched by wine. It had, indeed, first been hung in the parlor; but one Creston Fancett, in the course of an evening call upon Miss Eubanks, had read the thing aloud, twice over, and then observed with a sinister significance that wine had never touched his own lips. Whereupon, in a coarsely conceived spirit of humor, he proceeded to act as if he had forgotten that he was a gentleman.

Hence the card's seclusion in Marcella's boudoir. Hence, likewise, Marcella's subsequent preference, in her temperance propaganda, for straightforward means which no gentleman could affect to misunderstand. She relied chiefly thereafter upon some highly colored charts depicting the interior of the human stomach in varying stages of alcoholic degeneration. According to these, "a single glass of wine or a measure of ale," taken daily for a year, suffices to produce some startling effects in color; while the result of "unrestrained indulgence for five years" is spectacular in the extreme.

Besides these disconcerting color effects Marcella enacted a brief but pithy drama in which she touched a lighted match to a tablespoonful of alcohol, to show the true nature of the stuff and to symbolize the fate of its votaries.

With charts and with blazing spirit, with tracts and with figures to prove that we spend "more for the staff of death than for the staff of life," Marcella was prepared to move upon the unsuspicious Miss Caroline. Nor was she alone in such readiness for a good work. The ladies all felt that their profligate sister should be brought to sign the pledge.

And they called upon Miss Caroline with precisely this end in view—called singly, and by twos and threes. But for some reason they seemed always to find obstacles in the way of bringing forward this most vital topic. If they had only discovered Miss Caroline in her cups, or if her shaded rooms had been littered with empty rum bottles and pervaded by the fumes of strong drink, or if she had audaciously offered them wine, doubtless the thing would have been easy. But none of these helpful phenomena could be observed, and Miss Caroline had a way of leading the talk which would have made any reference to her unfortunate habits seem ungraceful. It would be far too much to say that she charmed them, but all of her callers were interested, many of them were entertained, and a few became her warm defenders. Aunt Delia McCormick surprised every one by aligning herself with this latter minority. She declared, after her first call, that Miss Caroline was "a dear"; and after the second call, that she was "a poor dear," and she forthwith became of service to the newcomer in a thousand ways known only to the masonry of housekeeping.

And since none of the ladies, for one reason or another, had found a way to say those things that Mrs. Lansdale sorely needed to hear, it was agreed among them that the minister must say them.

"The minister" in Little Arcady meant him of the Methodist church, the two other clergymen being so young and unimportant as to need identification by name.

Of the official and inspired visit of this good man to Miss Caroline, the version that reached the public was one thing: its secret and true history was another. The latter has never been told until now. It was known abroad only that the minister had called on a warm afternoon in July; that Miss Caroline had received him out of doors, on the shaded east side of the house, where the heat had driven her to await a cooling breeze from the river. One of the dingy rugs had been spread upon the grass close to the lilac clump, and by an unfashionable little table Miss Caroline sat, in a chair sadly out of date, reading of Childe Harold. It was understood that the minister had there sat in another antiquated chair of capacious arms and upholstered in faded green velvet, a chair brought by Clem; and that he had weakly chatted away a pleasant hour or two without ever once daring to bring Miss Caroline's evil state to that attention which it merited from her. His difficulty seemed to have been similar to that experienced by the calling ladies. He could observe no opening that promised anything but an ungracious plunge or an awkward stumble, and the ladies had been wrong in suspecting that his authority as a cleric would nerve him to either of these things.

There was despair next day when it was known that he had come away even lavisher in praise of Miss Caroline than Aunt Delia had become; that he refused with a gentle but unbreakable stubbornness, a thing he was known to be cursed with latently, ever again to approach the lady with a concealed purpose or with aught in his heart but a warm and flagrant esteem.

So much for the public's knowledge; and doubtless the public in every case knows all that it ought to know. But these are the facts as they came to my privileged ears, and to what, I believe, are gifts of interpretation not below the average.

When Clem brought the chair for the minister, Miss Caroline gave him a brief, low-toned order, which he hurried away to execute. Within ten minutes, and before Miss Caroline had finished telling how altogether beautiful she found Arcady of the Little Country, Clem returned, bearing breast-high a napkin-covered tray, from which towered twin pillars of glass, topped with fragrant leafage and pierced each by a yellow straw. This tray he placed upon the table beside the poems of Lord Byron, and the minister permitted himself an oblique look thereat, even though this involved deserting the eyes of his agreeable hostess. The ice in the glasses tinkled a brief phrase of music, the tops burgeoned with a luxuriant summer green, and the straws were of a sweetly pastoral suggestiveness. The fragrance moved one to the heart of some spice-scented dell where a brooklet purled down a pebbled course. The ensemble was indeed overwhelming in its message of a refreshment joyous, satisfying, timely, and of a consummate innocence.

"The day is warm," said Miss Caroline, receiving one of the glasses from her servant, and with a bright look at her guest.

"It is intensely warm, and quite unusually so for this time of year," said the minister, absently taking the other glass now proffered him.

"We shall combat it," said Miss Caroline with some vivacity. She delicately applied her lips to the straw, and a slight depression appeared in each of her acceptable cheeks.

"A cooling beverage at this hour is most grateful," said the minister, rejoicing in the icy feel of the glass, and falling hopefully to his own straw.

"Clem makes them perfectly," said Miss Caroline.

"What do you call them?" asked the minister. He had relinquished his straw, and his kind face shone with a pleased surprise.

"Why, mint juleps," replied Miss Caroline, glancing quickly up.

"Ah, mint! that explains it," said the minister with satisfaction, his broad face clearing of a slight bewilderment.

"Clem found a beautiful patch of it by a spring half a mile up the river," volunteered Miss Caroline, between dainty pulls at her straw.

"It is a lovely plant—a lovely plant, indeed!" rejoined the minister, for a moment setting down his glass to wipe his brow. "I remember now detecting the same fragrance when I watered my horse at that spring. But I did not dream that it—I wonder—" he broke off, taking up his glass—"that its virtues are not more widely apprehended. I have never heard that an acceptable beverage might be made from it."

"Not every one can make a mint julep as Clem can," said his hostess.

A moist and futile splutter from the bottom of the minister's glass was his only reply.

He set the glass back on the table with a pleasant speculation showing in his eyes. The talk became again animated. Chiefly the minister talked, and his hostess found him most companionable.

"Let me offer you another julep," she said, after a little, noting that his eyes had swept the empty glass with a chastened blankness. The minister let her.

"If it would not be troubling you—really? The heat is excessive, and I find that the mint, simple herb though it be, is strangely salutary."

The minister was a man of years and weight and worth. He possessed a reliant simplicity that put him at once close to those he met. Of these, by his manner, he asked all: confidence without reserve, troubles, doubts, distresses, material or otherwise. And this manner of his prevailed. The hearts of his people opened to him as freely as his own opened to receive them. He was a good man and, partly by reason of this ingenuous, unsuspicious mind, an invaluable instrument of grace.

When he had talked to Miss Caroline through the second julep,—digressing only to marvel briefly again that the properties of mint should so long have been Nature's own secret in Little Arcady,—telling her his joys, his griefs, his interests, which were but the joys and griefs and interests of his people, he wrought a spell upon her so that she in turn became confiding.

She was an Episcopalian. Her line had been born Episcopalians since a time whereof no data were obtainable; and this was, of course, not a condition to meddle with in late life, even if one's mind should grow consenting. For that matter, Miss Caroline would be frank and pretend to no change of mind. She was an old woman and fixed. She could not at this day free herself of a doubtless incorrect notion that the outside churches—meaning those not Episcopal—had been intended for people other than her own family and its offshoots. Clem had once been a Baptist, and it was true that he was now a Methodist. He had told her that his new religion was distinguished from the old by being "dry religion". But these were intricacies with which a woman of Miss Caroline's years could not be expected to entangle herself. This she would say, however, that during her residence in Little Arcady she would fling aside the prejudice of a lifetime and worship each Sabbath at the minister's Methodist church.

It did not seem to the minister that she said it as might an explorer who consents for a time to adopt the manner and customs of the tribe among which a spirit of adventure has led him. He accepted her implied tribute modestly and with unaffected gratification, again wiping his brow and his broad, good face.

When I joined them at four o'clock, having been moved by hope of a cooling chat with Miss Caroline, the minister was slightly more flushed, I thought, than the day could warrant. He was about to leave, was, in fact, concluding his choicest anecdote of "Big Joe" Kestril—for he was a man who met all our kinds. "Big Joe," six feet, five, a tower of muscled brawn, standing on a corner, pleasantly inebriated, had watched go feebly by the tottering, palsied form of little old Bolivar Kent, our most aged and richest man. The minister, also passing, had observed Kestril's humorous stare.

"The big fellow called to me," he was saying to Miss Caroline as I came up. "'Parson,' said he—they all know me familiarly, madam—'Parson,' said he, 'I wish I could take all I'm worth and all old Kent is worth and put it in a bunch on the sidewalk there and then fight the old cuss for it!'"

It was a favorite anecdote of the minister's, but I had never known him before to tell it to a lady on the occasion of his first call. Miss Caroline laughed joyously as she turned to greet me.

"I can't tell you how finely I've been entertained," she said to me.

"Nor can I tell him for myself, madam," retorted the minister. I thought indeed he spoke with an effort that made this gallantry seem not altogether baseless in fact.

"I was on the point of leaving," said the minister.

"Are you returning home, or have you more calls in the neighborhood?" I asked, feeling just a tinge of uneasiness about his expansive manner.

"No more calls, no. I had planned, instead, a pleasant walk up along the riverside to a spring some distance above. I mean to procure a supply of this delicious mint—for mint juleps," he added affably.

"Come with me," I urged. I was about to walk out myself. Together we bade adieu to Miss Caroline.

But the minister's walk ended at my own door. In the cool gloom of my little library I asked him if he would be good enough to excuse me a moment, indicating the broad couch beneath the window.

"With pleasure, Major!" and he sank among the restful pillows. "I am ashamed to say that the heat has rendered me a trifle indolent".

When I came softly back five minutes later, he lay in deep slumber, his face cherubically innocent, his breathing soft as a babe's. He awoke freshly two hours later. He apologized for his rudeness and expressed a wish for a glass of cool water. Three of these he drank with evidences of profound relish. Then he drew his large silver watch from his pocket.

"On my word, Major, it's after six, and I shall be late for tea! I have trespassed shamefully upon you!"

"The heat was very trying," I said.

"Quite enervating, indeed! I seem only now to be feeling its effects."

As he walked briskly down the now cooling street, he bared his brow to the gentle breeze of evening.

To the ladies, solicitous about Miss Caroline, who called upon him a few days later, he said, "She is a most admirable and lovely woman—not at all a person one could bring one's self to address on the painful subject of intoxicants. Had she offered me a glass of wine or other stimulant, a way might have been opened, but I am delighted to say that her hospitality went no farther than this innocent beverage." The minister indicated on his study table a glass containing sweetened ice-water in which some leaves of mint had been submerged.

"It is called a mint julep," he added, "though I confess I do not get the same delicate tang from the herb that her black fellow does. As he prepared the decoction I assure you its flavor was capital!"



CHAPTER XVII

THE TRUTH ABOUT SHAKSPERE AT LAST

Miss Caroline dutifully returned the calls that were paid her, with never a suspicion that her slavery to strong drink had been the secret inspiration of them. She was not yet awake to our sentiments in this matter. She had given strong waters to the minister with a heart as innocent as their disguise of ice and leafage had made them actually appear to that good man. And I, who was well informed, hesitated to warn her, hoping weakly that she would come to understand. For I had seen there were many things that Miss Caroline had not to be told in order to know.

For one, she had quickly divined that the ladies of Little Arcady considered her furniture to be unfortunate. She knew that they scorned it for its unstylishness; that some of them sympathized in the humiliation that such impossible stuff must be to her; while others believed that she was too unsophisticated to have any proper shame in the matter. These latter strove by every device to have her note the right thing in furniture and thus be moved to contrast it instructively with her own: as when Mrs. Judge Robinson borrowed for an afternoon Aunt Delia McCormick's best blue plush rocker, Mrs. Westley Keyts's new sofa, upholstered with gorgeous ingrain, and Mrs. Eubanks's new black walnut combination desk and bookcase with brass trimmings and little spindled balconies, in which could be elegantly placed the mineral specimens picked up along the river bank, and the twin statuettes of the fluting shepherd and his inamorata. As Mrs. Judge Robinson herself possessed new and high-priced furniture, including a gold-and-onyx stand to occupy the bay window and uphold the Rogers group, "Going for the Parson," as well as two fragile gilt chairs, which considerate guests would not sit in but leave exposed to view, and a complete new set of black walnut, the effect that day—which included a grand smell of varnish—was nothing less than sumptuous.

The occasion was a semi-monthly meeting of the Ladies' Home Study and Culture Club, at which Miss Caroline was to be present. There had been a suspension of the Club's meetings while Mrs. Potts was in abeyance, but on this day she was to enter the world again and preside over the meeting as "Madam President," though the ladies sometimes forgot to call her that.

The paper read by Mrs. Potts—who was not at all ineffective in her black—was on "The Lake Poets," with a few pointed selections from Wordsworth and others.

Whether or not Miss Caroline was rightly impressed by the furniture exhibit was a question not easy to determine. True, she stared at it with something in her eyes beyond a mere perception of its lines; but whether this was the longing passion of an awakened soul or the simple awe of the unenlightened was not to be ascertained at the moment.

Testimony as to her enjoyment of the President's paper was more circumstantial. In the midst of this, as the listeners were besought to "dwell a moment on this exquisite delineation of Nature,"—expertly pronounced "Nate-your" by Mrs. Potts,—Miss Caroline turned her head aside as one deeply moved by the poet's magic. But Marcella Eubanks, glancing at that moment into a mirror on the opposite wall,—a mirror in a plush frame on which pansies had been painted,—caught the full and frank exposure of a yawn. It was a thorough yawn. Miss Caroline had surrendered abjectly to it, in the belief—unrecking the mirror—that she could not be detected.

The discussion that followed the paper—as was customary at the meetings—proved to be a bit livelier. Each lady said something she had thought up to say, beginning, "Does it not seem—" or "Are we not forced to conclude—"

I suspect that Miss Caroline was sleepy. Perhaps she was nettled by the boredom she had been made to endure without just provocation; perhaps the fashionable fumes of varnish had been toxic to her unaccustomed senses. At any rate she now compromised herself regrettably.

Mrs. Westley Keyts had been thinking up something to say, something choice that should yet be sufficiently vague not to incriminate her. It had seemed that these requirements would be met if she said, in a tone of easy patronage, "Mr. Wordsworth is certainly a very bright writer of poetry, but as for me—give me Shakspere!"

She had thought of saying "the Bard of Avon," a polished phrase coined for his "Compendium" by the ingenious Mr. Gaskell; but, hearing her own voice strangely break the silence, Mrs. Keyts became timid at the last moment and let it go at "Shakspere."

"Oh, Shakspere—of course!" said most of the ladies at once, and those not quick enough to utter it concertedly looked it almost reprovingly at the speaker.