and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
sees him, as it should seem. The young Marylander, who I thought would
have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks from his
corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to say, I
wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--which would,
perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present one. But nothing
comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my sagacious idea of finding
out the girl's fancies by looking into her locked drawing-book.

Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made
an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber. For this
purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was just
ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk, followed
him as he toiled back to his room. He rested on the landing and faced
round toward me. There was something in his eye which said, Stop there!
So we finished our conversation on the landing. The next day, I mustered
assurance enough to knock at his door, having a pretext ready.--No
answer.--Knock again. A door, as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and
locked, and presently I heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled,
misshapen boots. The bolts and the lock of the inner door were
unfastened,--with unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the
passage. He pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one
at which I stood. He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as
"Mr. Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in; and
a quaint-looking key in his hand. Our conversation was short, but long
enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not want my company
in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.

I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits. I mean to give up
such nonsense and mind my own business.--Hark! What the deuse is that
odd noise in his chamber?

--I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I was
a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct
apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the
neighborhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of
marks called the "Devil's footsteps." These were patches of sand in
the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush blackberry, the
"dewberry," as our Southern neighbors call it, in