answer.

"Look here, Lulie, I cry quits. If you'll only let a body off this once,
you may keep house on your own plan, little lady, and I'll never tell you
how mother did it again so long as I live."

"Well, then, don't, that's a dear," I replied, "for you'll only make me
dislike her memory, without doing any good. Just be patient with me,
Charlie, and maybe after a while I'll be as good a housekeeper as your
mother was before me. The mistake you and all other men make is, in
comparing your wives at the end of their first year of housekeeping with
your mothers, whose housekeeping you knew nothing about until it was of
ever so many years' duration. I'm young yet, but I'm improving in that
matter every day, Charlie."

With which little moral lecture I gave Charlie a kiss, and some water to
wash the mud from his poor red hands.

_Moral._--My dear girls, don't you ever marry a man that cannot take his
affidavit he never had a mother, unless it is expressly stipulated in the
marriage contract that he is never to tell you how his mother did it.

J.R. HADERMANN.

The Red Fox: A Tale of New Year's Eve.

It was New Year's Eve, 184-. I and my two little boys, children of five
and seven, were alone in the house. My husband had been unexpectedly
called away on business, and the servant had gone to her friends to spend
the coming holiday.

It was drawing toward night. The cold shadows of the winter twilight were
already falling. A dull red glow in the west told where the sun was going
down. Over the rest of the sky hung heavy gray clouds. A few drops of rain
fell from time to time, and the wind was rising, coming round the corner
of the house with a long, mournful howl like that of a lost hound.

I am not a very nervous person, but I did not like the idea of spending by
myself the long evening that would come after the children's bed-time.

We were living then in a very new place in Michigan, which I shall call
Maysville. My husband, an ex-army officer, had resigned the sword for the
saw-mill. Our house was the oldest in the village, which does not speak
much for its antiquity, as five years before Maysville had been unbroken
forest. The house stood outside the cluster of houses that formed the
little settlement: it was a quarter of a mile to our nearest neighbor.

Now, Maysville calls itself a city, has an academy and a college, and a
great quantity of church in proportion to its population. Then, we "went
to