clothes. The house was still and everybody
asleep when I finally ventured home. I was very heavy-hearted, and full
of a sense of disgrace. Pinned to my pillow I found a slip of paper
which bore a line that did not lighten my heart, but only made my face
burn. It was written in a laboriously disguised hand, and these were its
mocking terms:

"You probably couldn't have played _bear_, but you played _bare_ very
well--oh, very very well!"

We think boys are rude, unsensitive animals, but it is not so in all
cases. Each boy has one or two sensitive spots, and if you can find out
where they are located you have only to touch them and you can scorch
him as with fire. I suffered miserably over that episode. I expected
that the facts would be all over the village in the morning, but it was
not so. The secret remained confined to the two girls and Sandy and me.
That was some appeasement of my pain, but it was far from
sufficient--the main trouble remained: I was under four mocking eyes,
and it might as well have been a thousand, for I suspected all girls'
eyes of being the ones I so dreaded. During several weeks I could not
look any young lady in the face; I dropped my eyes in confusion when any
one of them smiled upon me and gave me greeting; and I said to myself,
"_That is one of them_," and got quickly away. Of course I was meeting
the right girls everywhere, but if they ever let slip any betraying sign
I was not bright enough to catch it. When I left Hannibal four years
later, the secret was still a secret; I had never guessed those girls
out, and was no longer expecting to do it. Nor wanting to, either.

One of the dearest and prettiest girls in the village at the time of my
mishap was one whom I will call Mary Wilson, because that was not her
name. She was twenty years old; she was dainty and sweet, peach-bloomy
and exquisite, gracious and lovely in character, and I stood in awe of
her, for she seemed to me to be made out of angel-clay and rightfully
unapproachable by an unholy ordinary kind of a boy like me. I probably
never suspected her. But--

The scene changes. To Calcutta--forty-seven years later. It was in 1896.
I arrived there on my lecturing trip. As I entered the hotel a divine
vision passed out of it, clothed in the glory of the Indian
sunshine--the Mary Wilson of my long-vanished boyhood! It was a
startling thing. Before I could recover from the bewildering shock and
speak to her she was gone. I thought ma