eard of him writin' to her, or anything, 'n' if he had, old
Hawkins that brings the mail couldn't have kep' it, any more'n he could
keep the news he reads off postal cards. They talked enough first about
her being love-cracked, but there wa'n't any signs of it I could hear,
excep' her trailin' 'round the beach, 'n' looking wimbly, 'n' not doin'
jus' like other folks. She never _said_ a word to anybody. Might 'a'
been it turned her some," said Mrs. Libby, thoughtfully, rolling the
flour in white scales from her heavy wrists. "Might 'a' been she was
queer any way--sending off to the city for white silk gowns, 'n' things
to wear in that old rack of boards, jus' because she was bein' courted.
Most would 'a' kep' the money 'gainst their fittin' out. I guess that
was all there was, jus' a little triflin', 'n' she took it in earnest.
Well, it don't make any difference now," she concluded coolly, as she
turned to her sink of baking-dishes.

I sat listening stupidly to her heavy tread, to the cheery clash of the
tins as she washed and put them in place. To never know any more! Yet
after all, I knew all that could be known, strangely enough. Then, with
a long shiver, I remembered the small closet beside the chimney with its
empty, dusty shelves.

"Mrs. Libby," said I, rising, "I think I will go back to the city
to-morrow."

A STORY OF THE VERE DE VERE.

The landlord called it an apartment-house, the tenants called their
three or four little closets of rooms, flats, and perhaps if you or I
had chanced to be in West ---- Street, near the river, and had glanced
up at the ugly red brick structure, with the impracticable fire-escape
crawling up its front, like an ugly spider, we should have said it was a
common tenement house.

Druse, however, had thought it, if a trifle dirty, a very magnificent
and desirable dwelling. The entrance floor was tesselated with diamonds
of blue and white; there was a row of little brass knobs and
letter-boxes, with ill-written names or printed cards stuck askew in the
openings above them. Druse did not guess their uses at first, how
should she? She had never in all her fifteen years, been in the city
before. How should one learn the ways of apartment-houses when one had
lived always in a little gray, weather-beaten house, on the very
outskirts of a straggling village in Eastern Connecticut?

It happened like this. One day, Tom, the fourth of the nine hungry and
turbulent children, sent to