had, from repeated disappointments, become inured to all sorts of bitter things, and had come to have a strange pitiful endurance; so that it really did not sound absurd when he would say in his grandiloquent way, as he often did, "I laugh at fate." He evidently did laugh at fate, and felt that in so doing he baffled his bitterest enemy.

At the time of his advent among us, the Dolly Varden style of dress - goods had just made its appearance in market, and from the belle of the neighboring village down to "Old Miss Sanders' little Indian maid Jim (diminutive of Jemima) every girl in the whole country had a Dolly Varden dress, not to mention Dolly Varden hats, shoes, gloves, collars, and other articles of wearing apparel. The name became monotonously familiar. All the pied calves, the pinto colts, and speckled chickens and pigs about our place were christened Dolly Varden, irrespective of sex; and just about the time I thought I should go crazy in the confusion of Dolly Vardens, a happy thought occurred to the youngsters. Here was one more chance to pile on the agony. Dollicarden was so near the word they wanted, the change of a few letters would fix the thing just as it should be. I can not tell who first gave him the name, but it was fastened on him firmly before he had been with us a fortnight. He accepted it humbly, of course; and if he pitied the ignorance and want of taste that prompted us in thus rechristening him, his only comment was made to that responsive and sympathetic inner spirit which was the recipient of his communings. He was averse to answering any questions about himself, but eventually gave us his history as he knew it. He came from Georgia, he said. He lived in a deserted cabin in a dense forest with his mother. They lived principally upon berries and roots, but occasionally made a raid upon the neighboring town after

night and took such articles of food and clothing as they could find. His mother was darker than he was, and her hair was silky and curly. (She was probably some good-looking mulatto girl seduced by her master and banished by her enraged mistress, but he did not tell us that.) When he was about ten years old, as he supposed, his mother died, and he was shortly after found by some hunters and taken to the settlement. He was a perfect little brute when he was found, and yet he said, "that in that remarkably ferine condition he had an intuitive knowledge of all those studies, those moral and intellectual ethics into which he was afterward inducted." What those studies were I never knew, and have no idea that he did; the dictionary was the only thing he ever studied, I fancy. And yet he was a sort of a philosopher, and advanced some opinions that only fell short of the great minds of the day by the insane manner in which he uttered them. This may be accounted for by the fact that he was taken into the family of a very peculiar man of whom the neighbors said, as Agrippa of the apostle Paul, "that much learning had made him mad." He was more than skeptical in his religious views; could not believe in any hereafter. He had found life so hard he considered it a swindle. Though he tried to endure it with fortitude, and had braced his back to bear its ills, yet he fought at every step the encroachment of outrageous destiny and "laughed at fate." He believed he should die like a dog, and in so doing he should cheat that cruel intelligence whose sport man is, and get the best of the joke in the last act. It was only by isolated sentences let fall occasionally that I learned his true sentiments. He was too humble to intrude his opinions upon us at any length; and yet his mania for big words was so great, it was with difficulty that he forbore to repeat our

own ideas after we had spoken them, and clothe them in the gorgeous apparel of his own language. For instance, this is the way the conversation goes on. Jack is telling the story of Joaquin, the famous robber of California. I shall put all of Dolly's observations in brackets, and the reader must imagine for himself the loud measured ostentation of his style. Jack has advanced to that part of the story where the reward of $10,000 is offered for Joaquin's life.

"He was captured by a man named Love," said Jack. "Love and his assistants found the robber and his three accomplices ['Yes, sir'] sitting under some trees. Their horses ['Yes, sir'] were picketed out on some grass near by. [To masticate, I presume.'] They had the saddles off ['To permit the hosses to rest mo' copiously, of coase'] for the night. The men were all sitting on the grass ['Pawticipating in their evening repast, beyond doubt'], playing a game of cards. ['Ah, I beg youah pawdon, sah; my mind, as you perceive, is remawkably rapid in its alchemical evolutions.'] They dusted from there double-quick. ['I pesume youah mean they extemporized an exhilarating exodus.'] I mean they vamosed the ranch-absquatulated, made tracks, cut dirt, hoed it out of there. ['Yes, sir.'] Joaquin struck out and got on his horse barebacked," etc.

Jack took delight in drawing Dolly out of an evening for the general entertainment, and for this purpose he reduced his choice of words in conversation to the minimum of simplicity. He made many an opening into which Dolly invariably stalked with his gorgeous array of high-sounding words. Now, Tildy, whose use of language was extremely limited, secretly admired this verbose individual; and it would, no doubt, have taken Jack down in his own estimation could he have known how unfavorably she contrasted him with

Dolly. I am sure she must have known we laughed at him, and with her plain practical sense she was vexed that he should lay himself open to ridicule. Doubtless she thought he was casting pearls before swine; but she also thought he ought to know that fact, and desist. She was sometimes vexed with him on another score. In private conversation between themselves he often used language she did not understand, when her ire would burn to the surface in some such expression as "that he needn't think she was a fool, becase she looked like one." Tildy's education had been of that rigid type in which the three Rs, Readin', Ritin', and Rithmetic, were adjudged not only unnecessary in girls, but absolutely hurtful, unfitting them for the practical duties of every-day life. She had been born in the State of "Pike County," at so early a date that her opportunities were as limited as her inclination. She had heretofore ridiculed persons who made any pretension to elegance in the choice of language, and it appeared strange to me that she had selected Dolly as an exception. It had not entered my head that she cared for him more than for another, and up to this time he had paid her no attention whatever. The first time he took any special notice of her was one evening as we sat in the dining-room; Willy chanced to mention her proper name, Laura Matilda. Dolly caught at it immediately.

"Laura Matilda," he said; "well, that is a beautiful name. I read a story in the New Yo'k Ledgah that had that name for one of the cawackters. It was Laura Matilda St. Clair. I thought at the time that if-in shawt-as a mattah of coase, that it was the most beautiful, most affluent, and purpureal cognomen I evah read or heard mentioned. Now, I suppose youah sahname is not St. Clair-that would be a reminiscence, indeed?"

"Southerland!" he said, nearly bouncing out of his chair. "Is it pawsible? Do I heah auricularly, or do my yeahs deceive me?"

His "yeahs" did not deceive him; Tildy assured him it was Southerland. Anything "mo' beautiful than that melliferous, auriferous, felodious, and incompahable name" he had never heard; from that time she became an object of interest to him. His natural politeness, always excessive, was redoubled from that moment. He rarely entered or left the room without a bow too curious to bear description. In the morning his salute was very elaborate, and even more so his nightly adieu. He pronounced "good-night" in a hard, loud, monotonous voice, with a sudden drop and a strong emphasis on the last word"good-night." The children could imitate him perfectly; and I saw a sudden spasm of pain in Tildy's face only yesterday when my thoughtless little Jim, in going to bed, paused a moment at the door to say "good-night" just as Dolly used to say it. For Dolly is gone now, and to hear him speak that word again would be to awaken the dead.

But before his time came he had wrought great changes in our little world of home, and had left blessings of untold wealth to one poor heart now opening slowly from day to day, and from hour to hour.

It soon dawned on my perceptions that there was an obvious case of "spoons" in the house, and I watched developments stealthily and cautiously. I did not dare take Jack into my confidence; men are such blunderers, I could not trust him. His want of tact might spoil everything. What a pretty little delusion the male part of humanity entertains as to the ability of the female sex to keep secrets! Bah! gentlemen.

pretty head that rested on your arm last night-that has rested there all the nights for a dozen years and more. If you could see beneath the forehead, half-shaded by those innocent, baby-looking curls, and read the thoughts, the dreams, the hopes with which the teeming brain is busy, you would probably stand back in a kind of ceremonious surprise, and with newly awakened admiration begin to hope that some mutual friend would happen along and introduce you to this charming stranger. We live widely-severed lives in this world. Even those of us who are nearest and dearest to each other touch only at far-distant points. It makes one lonesome to feel that the great world of longing in each bosom, while growing upward continually, is constantly rounding into a more compact and isolated individuality. Will it be so in the next world, I wonder?

Dolly had been with us about six months, when one night, after seeing the children snugly in bed, I came into the dining-room and found Jack in the closet that opened with a large door toward us, and with a slide just large enough to admit dishes into the kitchen. He turned as I entered, gesticulating furiously to me to keep still. I supposed he had a rat or a mouse in there and was "laying low" for him.

"O, Jack," I whispered, "do let me see, too."

"Sh-sh-sh," he said. Nevertheless, I squeezed in, and was instantly arrested by the sound of voices in the kitchen. The little door was ajar so that I could see Tildy sitting straight as a poker in one of the rawhide-bottomed chairs, and Dolly Varden kneeling before her with his hands lifted and laid together lengthwise, like the pictures of the infant Samuel. Tildy looked disgusted, and yet I thought I could perceive some latent satisfaction in her eyes. Dolly was rehearsing something it must have taken

him days to compose and commit to memory; for surely no such heterogeneous jumble of dictionary words ever flowed spontaneously from any human lips, even if those lips were Dolly's. I did not hear the first of it, but I heard enough to know that he was asking Tildy to marry him. And she being indignant from the fact of his manifest advantage in their little theatricals, and not quite knowing what was expected of her, was in her most obstinate, unyielding mood. So she only said in her crustiest

manner:

"Meanin', Laura Matilda—I ax youah pawdon-Miss Southerland? I imagined I had enunciated my idees with most ebullient lucidity. I observed that having existed solely by the refulgence of youah chawms dewing the six solar or six and a half lunar months that have perspired since I made my début upon the threshold of this palatial-ah palace"

"I don't want to heer no more o' that truck."

"O, Laura Matilda-Miss Southerland-do not avert the classical horoscope of your erubescent countenance from him who survives only by your permission-do not exacerbate the limpid tenderness of your contemporaneous heart to a position so antipodal to all my eager and long-cherished desires. Lay thy commands upon me, faiah one. Bid me peregrinate to the most northern extremity of the earth's axletree. Bid me lay down my existence to appease the carboniferous appetite of those northern monsters, the mammoth maneating saurian of the frozen alpine avalanches of that invincible region of everlasting ice. Bid me incinerate beneath the combustuous horizon of a-ahsweltering equator, in a clime conducive to the gigantic growth of the huge leviathan, the hi-popper-tamus and the

"an' I don't know what to do with yer." Here she stretched a long bony hand, and caught him by the hair; but she must have seen something in his face that moved her stony heart, for her hand gradually relaxed and slid down to his shoulder. Then he, with a gesture as stiff and stilted as his language, spread his arms out wide, and brought them slowly together around the immaculate virgin's waist.

Was it the Widow Bedott or Josh Billings that said, "Man is an uncertain critter?" No doubt that he is. And yet, if you want a creature you never know where to find, can never depend on to do as you expect, the last thing in creation to bet on— take a woman. The most ordinary one of your acquaintance will give you more surprises in a week than all your male friends together will give you in a year. Think of Tildy's "settling down," as it were, in Dolly's arms! If all the world had told me she did it, I would not have believed it. Then for as much as two full minutes Dolly hung by the bur of his left ear to the projecting ledge of Tildy's corsetsteels. (I know it sounds more elegant to say he rested his head on her bosom, but truth is superior to all considerations, and Tildy had no bosom). He hung so long in that perilous position that I became alarmed for his personal