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agreed with me that it would not do at all to have Miss Gage stay with us; the fact that there was a vacant room seemed to settle the question.

We were still congratulating ourselves on our escape when Mrs. Deering suddenly reappeared round our corner of the veranda. She was alone, and she looked excited.

«Oh, it is n't anything,» she said in answer to the alarm that showed itself in Mrs. March's face at sight of her. «I hope you won't think it's too presuming, Mrs. March, and I want you to believe that it's something I have thought of by myself, and that Julia would n't have let me come if she had dreamed of such a thing. I do hate so to take her back with me, now that she's begun to have a good time, and I was wondering-wondering whether it would be asking too much if I tried to get her a room here. I should n't exactly like to leave her in the hotel alone, though I suppose it would be perfectly proper; but Mr. Deering found out when he was trying to get rooms before that there were some young ladies staying by themselves here, and I did n't want to ask the clerk for a room unless you felt just right about it.»>

«Why, of course, Mrs. Deering. It's a public house, like any other, and you have as much right->

«But I did n't want you to think that I would do it without asking you, and if it is going to be the least bit of trouble to you-» The poor thing while she talked stood leaning anxiously over toward Mrs. March, who had risen, and pressing the points of her fingers nervously together.

"It won't, Mrs. Deering. It will be nothing but pleasure. Why, certainly. I shall be delighted to have Miss Gage here, and anything that Mr. March and I can do- Why, we had just been talking of it, and Mr. March has this minute got back from seeing the clerk, and she can have a very nice room. We had been intending to speak to you about it as

soon as we saw you.»

I do not know whether this was quite true or not, but I was glad Mrs. March said it, from the effect it had with Mrs. Deering. Tears of relief came into her eyes, and she said: «Then I can go home in the morning. I was going to stay on a day or two longer, on Julia's account, but I did n't feel just right about Mr. Deering, and now I won't have to.»

There followed a flutter of polite offers and refusals, acknowledgments and disavowals, and an understanding that I would arrange it all, and that we would come to Mrs. Deer

ing's hotel after supper and see Miss Gage about the when and the how of her coming to us.

« Well, Isabel,» I said, after it was all over, and Mrs. Deering had vanished in a mist of happy tears, «I suppose this is what you call perfectly providential. Do you really believe that Miss Gage did n't send her back?»

«I know she did n't. But I know that she had to do it, just the same as if Miss Gage had driven her at the point of the bayonet.»> I laughed at this tragical image. «Can she be such a terror? »

«She is an ideal. And Mrs. Deering is as afraid as death of her. Of course she has to live up to her. It's probably been the struggle of her life, and I can quite imagine her letting her husband die before she would take Miss Gage back unless she went back satisfied.»

<< I don't believe I can imagine so much as that exactly, but I can imagine her being afraid of Miss Gage's taking it out of her somehow. Now she will take it out of us. I hope you realize that you've done it now, my dear. To be sure, you will have all your life to repent of your rashness.»>

<< I shall never repent,» Mrs. March retorted hardily. It was the right thing, the only thing. We could n't have let that poor creature stay on, when she was so anxious to get back to her husband.»

«No.»

now.>>

And I confess, Basil, that I feel a little pity for that poor girl, too. It would have been cruel, it would have been fairly wicked, to let her go home so soon, and especially you mean Kendricks welists say. «How sick ose that by especially now, «Oh! And I supp I said, and I laughed mockingly, as the now love-business between am of this stale old ht to know betteryoung people! We ougast you are.» we 're old enough; at level the gibe. «Why,

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«Romance? Bah! It's unreality in the world. If sympathy for that stupid pointment, why had n't you poor woman, in her anxiety husband? But a husband is you have got him.»

«I did sympathize with her. «You did n't say so.» «Well, she is only his second ous. Did n't wife, and I don't suppose it 's anything seri really say anything to her?» «Not a word. It is curious,

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I went on,

<how we let this idiotic love-passion absorb us to the very last. It is wholly unimportant who marries who, or whether anybody marries at all. And yet we no sooner have the making of a love-affair within reach than we revert to the folly of our own youth, and abandon ourselves to it as if it were one of the great interests of life.>>

"Who is talking about love? It is n't a question of that. It's a question of making a girl have a pleasant time for a few days; and what is the harm of it? Girls have a dull enough time at the very best. My heart aches for them, and I shall never let a chance slip to help them, I don't care what you say.»

«Now, Isabel,» I returned, «don't you be a humbug. This is a perfectly plain case, and you are going in for a very risky affair with your eyes open. You shall not pretend you're not.»

«Very well, then, if I am going into it with my eyes open, I shall look out that nothing happens.»

"And you think prevision will avail! I wish,» I said, «that instead of coming home that night, and telling you about this girl, I had confined my sentimentalizing to that young French-Canadian ther and her dirty little boy, who ate the pea

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DRAWN BY IRVING R. WILES.

nut shells. I've no doubt it was really a more tragical case. They looked dreadfully poor and squalid. Why could n't I have amused my idle fancy with their fortunes-the sort of husband and father they had, their shabby home, the struggle of their life? That is the appeal that a genuine person listens to. Nothing does more to stamp me a poseur than the fact that I preferred to bemoan myself for a sulky girl who seemed not to be having a good time.>>

There was truth in my joking, but the truth did not save me; it lost me rather. «Yes,» said my wife; it was your fault. I should never have seen anything in her if it had not been for you. It was your coming back and work

ing me up about her that began the whole thing, and now if anything goes wrong you will have yourself to thank for it.»

She seized the opportunity of my having jestingly taken up this load to buckle it on me tight and fast, clasping it here, tying it there, and giving a final pull to the knots that left me scarcely the power to draw my breath, much less the breath to protest. I was forced to hear her say again that all her concern from the beginning was for Mrs. Deering, and that now, if she had offered to do something

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for Miss Gage, it was not because she cared anything for her, but because she cared everything for Mrs. Deering, who could never lift up her head again at De Witt Point if she went back so completely defeated in all the purposes she had in asking Miss Gage to come with her to Saratoga.

I did not observe that this wave of compassion carried Mrs. March so far as to leave her stranded with Mrs. Deering that evening when we called with Kendricks, and asked her and Miss Gage to go with us to the Congress Park concert. Mrs. Deering said that she had to pack, that she did not feel just exactly like going; and my tender heart ached with a knowledge of her distress. Miss

Gage made a faint, false pretense of refusing to come with us, too; but Mrs. Deering urged her to go, and put on the new dress, which had just come home, so that Mrs. March could see it. The girl came back looking radiant, divine, and-«Will it do?» She palpitated under my wife's critical glance.

«Do? It will outdo! I never saw anything like it!» The connoisseur patted it a little this way, and a little that. «It is a dream! Did the hat come, too?»

It appeared that the hat had come, too. Miss Gage rematerialized with it on, after a moment's evanescence, and looked at my wife with the expression of being something impersonal with a hat on.

«Simply, there is nothing to say!» cried Mrs. March. The girl put up her hands to it. «Good gracious! You must n't take it off! Your costume is perfect for the concert.»

«Is it really?» asked the girl, joyfully; and she seemed to find this the first fitting moment to say, for sole recognition of our

self-sacrifice, «I'm much obliged to you, Mr. March, for getting me that room.>>

I begged her not to speak of it, and turned an ironical eye upon my wife; but she was lost in admiration of the hat.

"Yes," she sighed; «it's much better than the one I wanted you to get at first.» And she afterward explained that the girl seemed to have a perfect instinct for what went with her style.

Kendricks kept himself discreetly in the background, and, with his unfailing right feeling, was talking to Mrs. Deering, in spite of her not paying much attention to him. I must own that I too was absorbed in the spectacle of Miss Gage.

She went off with us, and did not say another word to Mrs. Deering about helping her pack. Perhaps this was best, though it seemed heartless; it may not have been so heartless as it seemed. I dare say it would have been more suffering to the woman if the girl had missed this chance.

(To be continued.)

William Dean Howells.

A DAY IN TOPHET.

HE story of the first Doddville -old Doddville, as its exresidents always spoke of it -was full of pathos, the pathos of the prairie and of great skies, where snows drift and wild winds sweep, and humanity struggles against all the vast forces of earth and air to maintain its free gift of life.

The nucleus of the first town had been a small inland lake in Dakota. About it had been laid out (on paper) a city with wide streets and fine buildings, public and private. These never got beyond the paper period, but John Dodd's colony of old farming neighbors built a few cheap houses to begin with, and went to work, inspired by the optimism of his nature.

"We 're tied right into the wheat belt o' the great Northwest,» said he, «an' all you got to do is to git a crop planted. The railroad 'll be here afore you can cut it; it's got to come. We'll turn over a few crops an' git a ranch goin', an' by the time we do that you'll see the boom rollin' right over the prairie toward us. We 're in the way, an' we 're goin' to git hit.»>

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But the first summer was dry and rainless. Crops that had burst from the new soil in rank richness were scorched and blighted by the heat. The lake grew weedy.

«I declare, John,» said Miranda, his wife, «I believe that there lake is dryin' up. I bet it ain't got no spring. 'Pears to me I can jes see it shrinking every time the cattle come down to drink. They'll swallow it all afore winter.»

Her husband scouted the idea, but nevertheless looked anxiously at the ever-increasing strip of black, sun-baked mud around it, cracked apart by the heat and pockmarked with trampling hoofs. Day by day yesterday's hoof-marks dried out. They were probed by an anxious finger, and proved as dry as the dust of Pharaoh. Cattail flags stood like withered pipes of Pan in a crust that crumbled underfoot.

«The dod-blasted thing ain't even marshy,»> he said to himself, moodily stalking about it when none was by to note his anxiety. But the lake did not vanish that year.

They made a living from their first crops -a living and no more. The winter was as bitter cold as the summer had been hot, and it was hard to winter their stock. The second

summer turned the prairie into a desert. The lake that was to become a summer resort, according to Dodd, became a mud-hole. Day by day the sun rose red and angry in the east, and smote the arid earth with hot rays like molten lashes. Alfred Bartell was sunstruck in his field; cattle died from thirst, and dropped their bony bodies in pastures where even the grass-roots were withered and sear. Often, as if in mockery of their first ambition, a floating mirage would rise on the horizon a lake, a city, with many roofs and slender spires and trees. Dodd used to nerve himself for a «mere-age,» as he called it.

«There's yer summer resort, John, sailin' right down here. I bet she's got the railroad an' the town hall an' the boom tailin' along after. Got the whole kit an' kitolic you laid out.»

« Wal, all I know is she 's be'n a blame long time gittin' here. Hope she 's come to stay.»

«Say, got a ladder, John? Le''s climb inter Doddville afore she floats off like that there scheme o' yourn 'bout the lake an' the summer resort.»>

Such remarks as these were hard to bear, but John Dodd bore them. In their own homes every family reviled him, and longed for the heaven of the past. Outside they flocked to him to bask in the sunshine of his hope. He knew it. He knew that, once away from the spell of his good humor and inspiring belief in the good time coming, he was the scapegoat on whom Doddville as a failure was saddled. But he stood behind his rude philosophy, and found comfort where other men would have faltered.

The second winter they burned twisted hay for fuel. Most of the stock that had survived the summer perished in a blizzard. Jacob Hatley, one of the seven original settlers, drove over to Claremont for supplies and news, and never came back. They found him after the first thaw sitting upright behind his dead horses, one of the span still standing. There was a little hollow south of the lake. He had driven into it and been buried by the drifting snow. In his pockets were January papers and letters with postmarks seven weeks old.

The little colony was discouraged. They talked their affairs over after Jake's funeral, and only the persuasive eloquence of their old leader kept them together. At the end of the third summer their resources were exhausted. "It's now or never,» they said, and John Dodd agreed with them. So they left the little group of houses by the weedy basin that

was not even a mud-hole then, and turned their faces eastward. They had seen enough of that dreadful horizon line, and no one cared to explore it. What parching suns had set in it! What marrow-chilling winds had blown out of it! What beautiful painted cities had hung against the dead level of its distance-cities that vanished like the hopes of the handful of settlers on the banks of the weedy little lake! No; not one man among them wanted any more West. Their cry was, « Eastward, ho!»

That was the story of the first Doddville. But, having left it and its miseries behind, Dodd, with the magic of his imagination and the infectious quality of his hope, presented the possibilities still in store for that stranded city in such a light that not a man among them but believed the boom might some day come, all Dakota bloom as a garden, and town lots in Doddville yet be worth two hundred cents on the dollar. At any rate, each man had «a house and lot» there, to say nothing of numerous acres; and government land was liable to draw interest, like a government bond, if it was only given time to mature.

A little before this the wonderful development of northern Michigan had first begun to be talked about. There was the «Soo,» with its fortunes being made every hour, according to the newspaper reports. All that vicinity, for a radius of any number of miles in any landward direction, was the Garden of Eden and the Mecca of dreams, if rumor could be depended upon. Mines were being opened with prodigious results. Its «natural resources,>> as the papers called it, «hitherto overlooked in the great onward march of civilization, were now being developed by the union of capital and labor, offering to both opportunities for advancement not to be computed, much less matched, in any other part of the country.» Upon the strength of these representations thither moved Doddville, individually and in a body, guided as before by the visionary hopefulness of the founder of the first town. But this time they had better cause to follow. Dodd's shrewd and thrifty old father had died, and his few thousands had made a man of means of the stranded settler. He it was who selected the site and made the purchase of the necessary land, portioning it out «on time» to his followers.

"Why,» said he, on the day of the second Doddville's first inception, «riches is jes waitin' to be dug up or pulled down here. Look at the timber; we got to have a mill 'bout the first thing. Look at the soil; anything on God's earth 'll grow in it. Money jes floatin' 'roun' on top o' the groun', an' when you

fill the pockets in one suit o' clothes, buy another an' dig. You may be settin' right on a iron-mind fer all you know; an coal-you're liable to kick your heel right into a coal-mind any day. I tell you, boys, we 've struck the place this time! Look out fer the townhall an' the school-house an' the meetin'-house; they 're comin', an' comin' a-runnin': »

It seemed this time as if fortune had favored them. The railroad came through. It brought business; it brought more settlers; they brought their children; the children needed a school-house; it was built. Dodd put up a cheap mill, and cut the timber into boards for the new buildings. They were all of pine-pine that had grown in the ground upon which it was finally nailed. They had a hotel, a post-office, a railroad station, and two stores for general merchandise. A big firm from Chicago built a lean-to against one of the stores, and sheltered farm machinery under it, and four or five saloons did a brisk business. The new Doddville had taken root, and the residents from the old town still spoke of their «<property » in Dakota, and were looked upon as people of importance who had wide business interests. The two widows whose husbands had been slain by the elementary enemies of the prairie, heat and cold, married again on the strength of their «claims » in the West. And, struggling through the time when they all swapped work» to get started, and no man except John Dodd had anything but his debts and his expectations, they worked into the time when prosperity had arrived and fortune smiled and Doddville was going to celebrate her third birthday.

«She 's comin' in under the wire a neck ahead o' every filly in her class,» said her founder, «an' The Doddville Weekly Boomer) is goin' to show her paces to some o' the towns that 's be'n runnin' agi'n' her, an' they 're goin' to feel pretty cheap; they're out o' sight in the dust from our heels. Ain't one on 'em got a paper ner a bank ner a fire department. Their Fourth o' July is goin' to look pretty measly 'longside o' our Fourth o' July an' Christmas an' birthday all celebrated together. But they can come an' look on an' feel mean. We're willin'. We 'll invite 'em. We ain't stuck up none if we air han'some an' sassy an' way up in the high notes.>>

It was quite true that Doddville possessed all the improvements claimed for her by her vaporing parent. The fact that the bank was not fashionably housed, but consisted of a ten by twelve foot room, furnished with a plank counter and a second-hand safe with the combination out of order, did not alter the opulent

sound of the statement when it was put into print and read by outsiders. John Dodd knew the worth of advertising, and he had started «The Doddville Weekly Boomer» by offering a tramp editor going from the «Soo» to St. Paul on a tie pass the privilege of a room rentfree, and all expenses of publication for the first year. The « Boomer » came out on a crank press, and its foreign news consisted largely of mythological telegrams from the «Soo, Chicago, St. Paul, and Minneapolis, in which the «boom » in those cities was reported as being in a state of collapse, owing to the unprecedented rise of property in Doddville, and the consequent migration of their respective populations to the new Jerusalem of Michigan.»>

The crank press was second-hand, and so were the Associated Press despatches. In fact, everything about that enterprising sheet except its «ads.» and its «eds.» was cribbed without giving credit. Its «ads.» were printed big for two reasons: one was to give each patron the satisfaction of seeing himself in big type, so that he could feel that he had his money's worth, and the other was because there were few patrons and much space, and big type spread out most. Its «eds.» were lurid fictions about the increase of population in Doddville, its manifold improvements, its enterprise, its wealth, its salubrious climate, its general blessedness.

«Stick 'em up, Elihu,» said Dodd. «We'll make 'em feel sick. We don't have no plain boys an' girls born in this town; they 're all twins. Say, I've got an ole brown hen comin' off this week with fourteen chicks, if they ain't none o' the eggs addled. You might jes say there air rumors of the expected arrival of a family o' fourteen. We don't say fourteen what. It'll read good; set 'er up.»

The fire department of the town was conducted on much the same principle-or lack of it-as the bank and the paper. John Dodd, who had the privilege of all the exchanges in the «Boomer» office, and who daily labored through the «ads.,» had discovered a fireengine offered for sale in Minnewaugen. It had been in use twenty years, but was in good working order, and could be had cheap on time. John Dodd visited the place and bought the engine. Nobody knew just how much he paid for it, but his friends were safe in assuming that it was a bargain. The engine had been new when Minnewaugen was young, and had been named after its first mayor, Andrew Cox. It still retained the name, and was spoken of familiarly by all the townspeople in its new home as «Andrew.» All the able-bodied citi

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