Hopper, softly, pushing back his chair, and rising to
leave the table, "it's in our fam'ly some too. And in Ma's. One o' my
uncles and one o' her brothers." He shuffled out of the room with a
placid smile, as Mrs. Hopper said, deprecatingly, but with conscious
pride, "La, pa, Jim never wrote more'n two or three pieces."

For a few days I took a vacation. I wandered about the "back lots," down
to the mill-dam, up and down the lonely, winding street where all the
prim houses--and they were very far apart--wore a desolate, closed
look, as though the inhabitants were away, or dead. I grew accustomed to
my environments; the little bedroom began to seem like home to me. On my
way to the post-office some one passed me on the sandy, yellow patch, a
man clothed after the manner of civilization, whose garments, cut by no
country tailor, were not covered by overalls. I knew it must be "the
other orther." None of the males in Wauchittic appeared in public,
except on Sunday, save in overalls. It would have been, I think,
considered unseemly, if not indecent.

The man was young, with a worn, delicate face, marked by ill-health, and
though I had studiously avoided the yard near "milkin' time," in spite
of Mrs. Hopper's transparent insistance each evening on my going out to
see the brindled heifer, I think my indifferent glance was assumed, for
though John Longworth, so far as I knew, had not his name inscribed on
the records of fame, and was probably a penny-a-liner on a third-rate
newspaper, I had the instinct of fellow-craft, that is, alas! strongest
in the unknown and ardent young writer. He walked feebly, and his
brilliant eyes were haggard and circled, as though by long illness. I
saw him drive by nearly every afternoon, accompanied by his nurse, a
good-humored young fellow, who helped him tenderly into the carriage,
and drove, while he lay back with the irritated expression that the
sense of enforced idleness and invalidism gives a man in the heyday of
youth. Mrs. Hopper, who was loquacious to a degree, told me long stories
of his parents' wealth, of the luxuries brought down with him, and of
the beautiful pieces of furniture he had had sent down for his room, for
his physician had recommended him to an absolutely quiet place for the
entire summer. She burned with an irrepressible desire to have me make
the acquaintance of this son of wealth and literature, either from the
feminine proclivity for match-making, or because, possi