the little sister of Miss Grace, were the attendants. They came in
first, Steve dressed as a page in a velvet suit which went well with
his clear, dark complexion, and little Nita, as she was called,
tripped beside him in delicate pink as a fairy flower girl. They stood
on either side of a beautiful fox-skin rug with a history, upon which
the bride and groom, slowly following, took their places to repeat the
sacred vows which bound them for life.

Steve and Nita, as the only children, spent the evening together,
roaming about the house, Steve finding new interests everywhere. He
looked around at the rich furnishings and beautiful floral decorations
with appreciative eyes, seeming not at all out of place in such
surroundings. A feeling of awkwardness and timidity might have
possessed so poor a boy reared anywhere else, but mountain-born as he
was, he accepted man's magnificence with the same tranquil spirit that
he did the shimmering silver of a mountain sunrise or the gorgeous
colour-triumph of its sunset. But he did not understand Nita. She
tried her most grown-up ways upon him, chatting after the manner of a
little society belle, and while she was so pretty that he loved to
look at her as he would have looked at a beautiful flower, he did not
know what to say to her. Having talked of many things, and being an
ardent little lover of pretty clothes, taken in with appreciative eyes
the handsome costumes of the guests, she sighed at last and said:

"Oh, I just love to go down Broadway, don't you, and see all the
handsome gowns on people as they pass, and look in at the store
windows!"

"I don't know; I nuver was there," he answered with a touch of his
mountain speech, and then she laughed a silvery, childish laugh and
said:

"You funny mountain boy," in a natural, frank way that made Steve
smile back and feel more at ease.

After this they got on well as a couple of children, while Nita often
exclaimed, "You funny mountain boy."

Mr. and Mrs. Polk called him their boy with a new sense of parentage
after their marriage, and wanted to make him legally their son, but
when it was proposed that he be known in the future as Stephen Polk,
he looked far off into space a moment, and then as though his spirit
had winged its way back into the wilderness of its birth, he dropped
into the old manner of speech and said:

"I thank yer, but I was born Langly, an' I think I ought ter die
Langly."

They said no more, and soon d