mething I should like to talk with my
wife about."

"Do so!" I applauded. "I only suggest it--or chiefly, or partly--because
you can have it reach our public in just the form you want, and the
Rochester and Syracuse papers will copy my paragraph; but if you leave
it to their Eastridge correspondents--"

"That's true," he assented. "I'll speak to Mrs. Talbert--" He walked so
inconclusively away that I was not surprised to have him turn and come
back before I left my place. "Why, certainly! Make the announcement!
It's got to come out. It's a kind of a wrench, thinking of it as a
public affair; because a man's daughter is always a little girl to him,
and he can't realize--And this one--But of course!"

"Would you like to suggest any particular form of words?" I hesitated.

"Oh no! Leave that to you entirely. I know we can trust you not to make
any blare about it. Just say that they were fellow-students--I should
like that to be known, so that people sha'n't think I don't like to have
it known--and that he's looking forward to a professorship in the same
college--How queer it all seems!"

"Very well, then, I'll announce it in our next. There's time to send me
word if Mrs. Talbert has any suggestions."

"All right. But she won't have any. Well, good-evening."

"Good-evening," I said from my side of the fence; and when I had watched
him definitively in-doors, I turned and walked into my own house.

The first thing my wife said was, "You haven't asked him to let you
announce it in the Banner?"

"But I have, though!"

"Well!" she gasped.

"What is the matter?" I demanded. "It's a public affair, isn't it?"

"It's a family affair--"

"Well, I consider the readers of the Banner a part of the family."

II. THE OLD-MAID AUNT, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

I am relegated here in Eastridge to the position in which I suppose I
properly belong, and I dare say it is for my best spiritual and temporal
good. Here I am the old-maid aunt. Not a day, not an hour, not a minute,
when I am with other people, passes that I do not see myself in
their estimation playing that role as plainly as if I saw myself in a
looking-glass. It is a moral lesson which I presume I need. I have just
returned from my visit at the Pollards' country-house in Lancaster,
where I most assuredly did not have it. I do not think I deceive myself.
I know it is the popular opinion that old maids are exceedingly prone to
deceive themselves concerning th