be safe to tell a damaging story about John or James Smythe; but if
the slight change is made of spelling the name Smith, the Smythes would
never think of bringing an action, as if the allusion related to any of
them. The same gulf of family distinction separates the Thompsons with a
p from the Thomsons without that letter.

There are few pleasanter places in the Northern States for a summer
residence than that known from the first period of its settlement by the
name of Arrowhead Village. The Indians had found it out, as the relics
they left behind them abundantly testified. The commonest of these were
those chipped stones which are the medals of barbarism, and from
Which the place took its name,--the heads of arrows, of various sizes,
material, and patterns: some small enough for killing fish and little
birds, some large enough for such game as the moose and the bear, to say
nothing of the hostile Indian and the white settler; some of flint, now
and then one of white quartz, and others of variously colored jasper.
The Indians must have lived here for many generations, and it must have
been a kind of factory village of the stone age,--which lasted up to
near the present time, if we may judge from the fact that many of these
relics are met with close to the surface of the ground.

No wonder they found this a pleasant residence, for it is to-day one
of the most attractive of all summer resorts; so inviting, indeed, that
those who know it do not like to say too much about it, lest the swarms
of tourists should make it unendurable to those who love it for itself,
and not as a centre of fashionable display and extramural cockneyism.

There is the lake, in the first place,--Cedar Lake,--about five miles
long, and from half a mile to a mile and a half wide, stretching
from north to south. Near the northern extremity are the buildings of
Stoughton University, a flourishing young college with an ambitious
name, but well equipped and promising, the grounds of which reach the
water. At the southern end of the lake are the edifices of the Corinna
Institute, a favorite school for young ladies, where large numbers of
the daughters of America are fitted, so far as education can do it, for
all stations in life, from camping out with a husband at the mines in
Nevada to acting the part of chief lady of the land in the White House
at Washington.

Midway between the two extremities, on the eastern shore of the lake,
is a valley between