ough.

The riddle of the young stranger's peculiarity did not seem likely to
find any very speedy solution. Every new suggestion furnished talk for
the gossips of the village and the babble of the many tongues in the two
educational institutions. Naturally, the discussion was liveliest among
the young ladies. Here is an extract from a letter of one of these young
ladies, who, having received at her birth the ever-pleasing name of
Mary, saw fit to have herself called Mollie in the catalogue and in her
letters. The old postmaster of the town to which her letter was directed
took it up to stamp, and read on the envelope the direction to "Miss
Lulu Pinrow." He brought the stamp down with a vicious emphasis, coming
very near blotting out the nursery name, instead of cancelling the
postage-stamp. "Lulu!" he exclaimed. "I should like to know if that
great strapping girl isn't out of her cradle yet! I suppose Miss Louisa
will think that belongs to her, but I saw her christened and I heard
the name the minister gave her, and it was n't 'Lulu,' or any such baby
nonsense." And so saying, he gave it a fling to the box marked P, as if
it burned his fingers. Why a grown-up young woman allowed herself to be
cheapened in the way so many of them do by the use of names which become
them as well as the frock of a ten-year-old schoolgirl would become a
graduate of the Corinna Institute, the old postmaster could not guess.
He was a queer old man.

The letter thus scornfully treated runs over with a young girl's written
loquacity:

"Oh, Lulu, there is such a sensation as you never saw or heard of 'in
all your born days,' as mamma used to say. He has been at the village
for some time, but lately we have had--oh, the weirdest stories about
him! 'The Mysterious Stranger is the name some give him, but we girls
call him the Sachem, because he paddles about in an Indian canoe. If I
should tell you all the things that are said about him I should use up
all my paper ten times over. He has never made a visit to the Institute,
and none of the girls have ever spoken to him, but the people at the
village say he is very, very handsome. We are dying to get a look at
him, of course--though there is a horrid story about him--that he has
the evil eye did you ever hear about the evil eye? If a person who is
born with it looks at you, you die, or something happens--awful--is n't
it?

"The rector says he never goes to church, but then you know a good many