"Are you going to keep him?" fications; and if not, our sailorman and "You wouldn't part a doctor from his I could teach you, and it is a good place fee, would you?" to learn. Father is here, and thinks pretty well of the golf-links. Mother would play bridge six hours a day instead of five, as at present, if she had your help. My brother William approves of our environment, and says there is a remarkably good line of girls hereabouts.' He is young still, as you know, and so are most of the girls; but in girls-as you know-youth is an excusable defect. The air here is salubrious, and is highly recommended by physicians to persons who have spent the month of July in town. Mother sends you her compliments, and directs me to offer you the simple hospitalities of her cottage, beginning when you arrive, and lasting during your honorable pleasure. Yours sincerely. SUSAN HERRON." The issue of this letter was the appearance of Dr. Arthur Finch at Pemaquid Bay on August 8. Three weeks later he held the tiller of the sail-boat I went back I would ask you to marry me, and that this was my last day!" "Oh! Well, I-I'm glad you haven't. Father says he never sets himself any vacation tasks; the it spoils his fun. I think that's a good rule. I was going to read a lot of Herbert Spencer jib isn't pulling a mite-while I was up here, and I brought the books along; but I haven't opened them. The next best thing to not intending to do anything August is not to do what you intend." in Glint, under orders of Miss Susan Her- ing this boat, unless you mean to let her ron, skipper. "I was thinking that before I went back I would ask you to marry me, and this is my last day!" "Keep her off a little; the jib's flapping. I beg your pardon. What were you saying?" "Only that I was thinking that before gybe with the sheet two-thirds out." "You are absolutely discouraging." "I don't mean to turn a man from the path of duty if his feet are obstinately set in it, but it is such a nice sailing-day!" "Duty? Misery! Duty?" "Why dissemble? What other motive could excuse such a suggestion in a man of declared sentiments such as yours? An ordinary, troublesome man might have an ordinary motive, but not you! She's falling off again." "Oh, let her drop! What have you laid up against me? What sentiments have I ever declared ?" "You shake my faith in mankindyou that were a bachelor and did not have to be greedy, and hoped not to be for years to come. And I have thought of you as a safe person, and confided in you with all the credulity of inexperience " "Inexperience! Oh dear!" "You haven't got mine yet." "Please come and take the tiller for a moment." "No, I don't think I will. Our sailorman is watching you from the wharf, and he expects you to do credit to his lessons." "Then I may speak to him?” "Not a word to the sailorman, nor even to father. Let my dear father have his holiday out. Neither he nor I can bear to be pestered with hard questions in August." "But you are coming home in a fortnight." "And meanwhile you will have a "-of inexperience, and played with chance to remember how disadvantageous you as confidently as-as-" "I respect your hesitation. It becomes you." "And I had thought you sincere, and you turn out to be merely plausible. There's a puff of wind coming. Do you see?" "I didn't bind myself never to progress. That was almost a whole year ago. I had just begun to know you then. All my professions were suitable for a man who had met you only the day before, and had learned of you chiefly as a dangerous young woman. I told you that civilization was a process of developing wants. Am I to be shut off from the privileges of a civilized-" "Excuse me! If you don't come about, we shall be on the rocks. If you will pull in the sheet, I will look after the jib. There! You were arguing—?” "Arguing nothing; merely asserting my privilege as a civilized man to develop a want in the course of a year." "In the course of a year! What deliberation!" "You know better. A woman of your experience must have recognized that it was virtually at first sight." "Only virtually? And you want to go and risk the last of your summer holidays on a mere virtuality!" "Well, I will speak to your father as soon as we get ashore." "You won't make the landing unless you keep her up better. What are you going to say to father?" "I am going to ask his consent to my marrying you." VOL CVII.-No. 637.-13 it is to a beginning doctor to have to concern himself about money-making." "And you will have a chance to consider Herbert Wilson, whose money is all made." "Herbert Wilson isn't going to be troublesome. Bring her up without bumping her, and you shall have a long mark!" "That isn't just what I want at this moment. What shall I do for a whole fortnight, until you come home?" "Have patience, and grope along, and, if necessary, write to me. What is a mere fortnight among two?" "Among two! It is not much among two. All ready to come about! Mind the boom! Catch her, Johnson! Thank you! That was beautiful. Please, lady, give me my long mark!" The wedding came after Easter. When the bride and groom had gone away, Judge Finch, with two glasses of champagne, sought out Mrs. Herron. "I bring a cup of consolation to the mother of the bride." "I think, Judge, that you must feel that you invented this wedding." "Marriages are made in heaven. I trust that this one was. We have not hindered it, certainly, but here's hoping that it may turn out to be far better devised than either you or I could have planned." They drank the wine. Mrs. Herron wiped her eyes; the Judge snuffled a little. They both smiled. "Well, Judge, it was a sweet wedding, wasn't it?" The Tenement Book and Reader BY NORMAN DUNCAN OME tenement books come from obscure little publishing-houses in the foreign quarters-serene, deliberate places where, in the gloom of the back room, slow journeymen set type, and an old man turns the crank of a creaking hand-press: a shop, it may be, in a swarming tenement street, elbowed by a butcher-stall and given an arm by a dusty dealer in old clothes; the grimy sign-board, in Hebrew or Arabic characters, is lost in a bewilderment of less modest signs, and fire-escapes, and airing garments. High-minded writers-pinched and long-haired for the most part, and abstracted to the last man-seek out these printing-shops with manuscript and subscription list in pocket; they hope no more for their message (God give them honor!) than that it may issue from the tenement press and touch some heart in the tenement throng: nor is it granted a larger fortune. But whether or not the books are tenement born-whether from the hand of the Ghetto poet who gives tongue to the sweat-shop sorrows from the typewriter of the fallen Park Row hack by way of a down-town establishment-they are no more like the books upon which the light of your lamp falls in quiet hours than the Alley is like the Avenue. They may better be likened, it seems to me, to the people who drift past in mean streets-to the shabby, shuffling characters of the submerged, passed by, but remembered for an oddity of gait or feature: for a twinkle or a droop or an incongruous pomposity. Such folk, be as queer as they may, find congenial company and a welcome where they go; and so do the tenement books. or The Langdon Book of Poetry is papercovered and pink. It has a black, disjointed ornamentation, in which the shamrock, the thistle, and the rose struggle desperately to cling together, as, according to Bowery sentiment, they should, The Popular Poetical Orator of the Curio Halls-bald, blear-eyed, and quavering— speaks of it, with a little lifting of the eyebrows, as "Oh, a spasm I throwed in the off hours!" It is devoted altogether to the celebration of Freaks, with whom, in the daily round, the poet comes in contact. Watch the living wonders, When through the halls you're steered; The Bearded Lady rises, You hear she's loudly cheered. In love and friendship reared! Thus the poet sings of the Bearded Lady-" a poetical effusion introduced in his series of popular descriptive lectures." The cover-page calls the "Living Skeleton" an effusion too; but the Professor, in his hours of relaxation after midnight, confesses that it is "just another little fit." There was a boy, his mama's joy, Although he'd eat of bread and meat He grew the thinner for every dinner With wink and gesture and a low bow to the distinguished Monstrosity, the poet recites. Jimmie Dugan's "bundle o' ribbons" from Catharine Street whispers that she thinks it's lovely. When, at last, the Professor divulges the interesting fact that it is all contained in a little book which may be had for the small sum of twenty-five cents, Jimmie does his duty like a man. So the Langdon Book of Poetry finds its way to a box in Lizzie Cassidy's room on the fourth floor of a tenement near the Bridge, where it keeps company with the Book of Etiquette and Policy Players' Guide and the Old Witch's Dream Book. Pretty Lizzie may then add a new recitation, "The Elastic Man," to her accomplishments "for an evening party." A little fantastic, The Social Monster is a ragged, thumbworn book, italicized and exclamationpointed. It came to me warm and damp from the pocket of a man with bristling gray hair and furtive eyes and a malformed jaw. There are many like itthe fact is frankly advertised on the last page. They go from pocket to pocket in the tenements, with a thought always for the place where "they'll do most good." "Read it," said my friend of the malformed jaw, pushing his empty beer-glass aside and leaning over the table to get close to my ear. "It'll do you good." The watery gray eyes did not waver then. "Down with the State!" I read, while the man with the bristling hair watched me narrowly. "Down with the Church! We take no pleasure in savage strife and the shedding of blood, but what cannot be attained peaceably will have to be fought for sword in hand. Working-men, join us! Recognize the yoke beneath which you groan, and strive to break it. Under our banner, under the red flag of anarchy, the emblem of revolution, is your proper battle-ground. Flock to it, that you may have a clear conception of how you must act to overthrow the existing disorder. Working-men of all countries, emancipate yourselves! Awake! Awake!" I looked up. effort transporting it from the loveliest county in all England to that district of New York where the rich but still orthodox Jews reside. "Go, girl!' cried the proud Duchess of Dufflevain, the aristocratic, willowy figure drawn to its full height. 'No son of mine shall sully the proudest name in England by a union with the daughter of a poor dancing-master!" Thus Her Grace of Dufflevain in Wooed for Love. It is a matter of no difficulty whatever to suit the words to the needs of a Yiddish romance of the Ghetto: "Go, girl!' cried Mrs. Gabowitzsky, shaking her jewelled hand until the diamonds dazzled the shrinking maid. 'No son of mine shall degrade the fortune of the richest merchant on East Broadway by a union with a Ludlow Street cigarette-maker!" "But I love her!"" It is immaterial, observe, whether this sentiment escapes the drawn lips of Lord Osmond, fair as a Greek god, or of the lustrous-eyed David Gabowitzsky, with a high standing in the University of New York. Her Grace of Dufflevain or the glittering Mrs. Gabowitzsky, as it may chance, faints on the spot. It is The tenement loves a love-book. evident that the downright youth of the East Side needs aid in the more delicate affairs of life. How to Woo and How to Win and The Happy Lover and How to Pop fall alike into the hands of the little milliner of Division Street and of Big Tom Slattery, who drives his truck that way of a fine afternoon when he can steal the time. But Big Tom must take "Read it!" said the anarchist. "Read care he is expressly warned in The it all! It'll open your eyes." In some of the book-shops of the Ghetto-in Ludlow Street, perhaps, the heart of the Quarter, where the tenement life is shrillest, thickest, dirtiest the transplanted thriller may be found. It is a curious product: the hack writer of the Quarter translates the lady novelist's high-strung story into Yiddish, cleverly adapting as he goes along-turning the ancestral hall, for instance, into a giltedged piece of real estate with a few strokes of the pen, and with no greater Lovers' Casket-that the "lady of his choice" is not prompted in her coquetry by the very book to which he turns for his own comfort and direction. "Proposals have been made under the most singular circumstances," is written in How to Make Love. "We know an instance of a gentleman proposing to a lady who sat opposite him in an omnibus, and whom he had not seen before; as it happened, they were married, and the match proved a tolerably happy one. But if the girl of your choice be of serious disposition, you will approach the |