ng the conversation.

They were sitting together on the ground, she leaning against a
headstone.

"Let me sit there against that stone, and you put your head on my lap,"
the doctor proposed.

"What in the world is the use of it?" she said. "Do you think I'm deaf
that I could sleep with all this moaning around me? Just hear it! One
would think all these graves had just been made, and that all these
people were chief mourners for the dead."

"The strangest bivouac ever seen under heaven!" said the doctor, looking
around. "In a life liable to such vicissitudes," he continued softly,
"it is important that we possess our spirits."

"Oh, for pity's sake, don't preach! What's the use?" said the wife.

"What's the use, indeed?" said the husband in a saddened tone. "If one
heed not the voice of the past twenty-four hours--" He left the sentence
unfinished.

"Oh, I know. Everybody, the world over, will be preaching about Chicago.
She was so wicked. Sodom and Gomorrah and Babylon! That'll be the talk.
I suppose we shall be told ten thousand times that riches have
wings--just as though we hadn't seen the wings and couldn't swear to the
color of them. But, dear me! I've been thinking that your story of
losses by the fire is not worth telling. I wish to goodness we'd bought
the house. If you hadn't lost the money, we might have now a
respectable-sized story to tell of our losses. I shall be ashamed to
tell that we lost just some clothes and household traps, when some
people have lost millions. How much better it would sound to say that
our house and everything in it was burned! People wouldn't know but it
was a fifty-thousand-dollar house. But a few chairs and bedquilts!--it's
too small to talk about."

"We've lost enough to satisfy me," said the doctor. "All my practice
that I've been ten years in building up! I'm exactly where I was when I
began in Chicago. We own but five dollars in the world--haven't even a
change of clothes."

"I've a mind to say that we had just bought the house, and it was
burned," said Mrs. Lively. "I'm sure it was just the same. But then you
never would stand by me in the story: you'd be sure to let the cat out."

"But what good would come of such a story?" asked the doctor.

"Why, people would be so much sorrier for us. Nobody could feel sorry
for that old pop-corn woman you were talking to, even if she did lose
all she had; and just so it will be with us. It's just like you to be
always missi