hy! Take
something to eat!"

Cynthia pleaded that she was not hungry; Mrs. Durgin declared that she
would die if she kept on as she was going; and then the girl escaped
to the kitchen on one of the errands which she made from time to time
between the stove and the table.

"I presume it's your coming, Mr. Westover," Mrs. Durgin went on, with
the comfortable superiority of elderly people to all the trials of the
young. "I don't know why she should make a stranger of you, every time.
You've known her pretty much all her life."

"Ever since you give Jeff what he deserved for scaring her and Frank
with his dog," said Whitwell.

"Poor Fox!" Mrs. Durgin sighed. "He did have the least sense for a dog I
ever saw. And Jeff used to be so fond of him! Well, I guess he got tired
of him, too, toward the last."

"He's gone to the happy hunting-grounds now. Colorady didn't agree
with him-or old age," said Whitwell. "I don't see why the Injuns wa'n't
right," he pursued, thoughtfully. "If they've got souls, why ha'n't
their dogs? I suppose Mr. Westover here would say there wa'n't any
certainty about the Injuns themselves!"

"You know my weak point, Mr. Whitwell," the painter confessed. "But I
can't prove they haven't."

"Nor dogs, neither, I guess," said Whitwell, tolerantly. "It's
curious, though, if animals have got souls, that we ha'n't ever had any
communications from 'em. You might say that ag'in' the idea."

"No, I'll let you say it," returned Westover. "But a good many of the
communications seem to come from the lower intelligences, if not the
lower animals."

Whitwell laughed out his delight in the thrust. "Well, I guess that's
something so. And them old Egyptian devils, over there, that you say
discovered the doctrine of immortality, seemed to think a cat was about
as good as a man. What's that," he appealed to Mrs. Durgin, "Jackson
said in his last letter about their cat mummies?"

"Well, I guess I'll finish my supper first," said Mrs. Durgin, whose
nerves Westover would not otherwise have suspected of faintness.
"But Jackson's letters," she continued, loyally, "are about the best
letters!"

"Know they'd got some of 'em in the papers?" Whitwell asked; and at the
surprise that Westover showed he told him how a fellow who was trying to
make a paper go over at the Huddle, had heard of Jackson's letters and
teased for some of them, and had printed them as neighborhood news in
that side of his paper which he did not b