in health
and in disease as she had brought with her from the Corinna Institute.
Naturally enough, she carried the anonymous paper to the doctor, to get
his opinion about it, and compare it with her own. They both agreed that
it was probably, they would not say certainly, the work of the solitary
visitor. There was room for doubt, for there were visitors who might
well have travelled to all the places mentioned, and resided long enough
on the shores of the waters the writer spoke of to have had all the
experiences mentioned in the paper. The Terror remembered a young lady,
a former schoolmate, who belonged to one of those nomadic families
common in this generation, the heads of which, especially the female
heads, can never be easy where they are, but keep going between America
and Europe, like so many pith-balls in the electrical experiment,
alternately attracted and repelled, never in contented equilibrium.
Every few years they pull their families up by the roots, and by the
time they have begun to take hold a little with their radicles in the
spots to which they have been successively transplanted up they come
again, so that they never get a tap-root anywhere. The Terror suspected
the daughter of one of these families of sending certain anonymous
articles of not dissimilar character to the one she had just received.
But she knew the style of composition common among the young girls,
and she could hardly believe that it was one of them who had sent this
paper. Could a brother of this young lady have written it? Possibly; she
knew nothing more than that the young lady had a brother, then a student
at the University. All the chances were that Mr. Maurice Kirkwood was
the author. So thought Lurida, and so thought Dr. Butts.

Whatever faults there were in this essay, it interested them both. There
was nothing which gave the least reason to suspect insanity on the part
of the writer, whoever he or she might be. There were references to
suicide, it is true, but they were of a purely speculative nature, and
did not look to any practical purpose in that direction. Besides, if the
stranger were the author of the paper, he certainly would not choose a
sheet of water like Cedar Lake to perform the last offices for him, in
case he seriously meditated taking unceremonious leave of life and its
accidents. He could find a river easily enough, to say nothing of other
methods of effecting his purpose; but he had committed himself as to