nthropy, which he had nursed so long that it
was now hard to dismiss it.

Andrew Anderson belonged to a class noticed, I doubt not, by every acute
observer of provincial life in this country. In backwoods and
out-of-the-way communities literary culture produces marked
eccentricities in the life. Your bookish man at the West has never
learned to mark the distinction between the world of ideas and the
world of practical life. Instead of writing poems or romances, he falls
to living them, or at least trying to. Add a disappointment in love, and
you will surely throw him into the class of which Anderson was the
representative. For the education one gets from books is sadly
one-sided, unless it be balanced by a knowledge of the world.

Andrew Anderson had always been regarded as an oddity. A man with a good
share of ideality and literary taste, placed against the dull background
of the society of a Western neighborhood in the former half of the
century, would necessarily appear odd. Had he drifted into communities
of more culture, his eccentricity, begotten of a sense of superiority to
his surroundings, would have worn away. Had he been happily married, his
oddities would have been softened; but neither of these things happened.
He told August a very different history. For the confidence of his
"Teutonic friend" had awakened in the solitary man a desire to uncover
that story which he had kept under lock and key for so many years.

"Ah! my friend," said he with excitement, "don't trust the faith of a
woman." And then rising from his seat he said, "The Backwoods
Philosopher warns you. I pray you give good heed. I do not know Julia.
She is my niece. It ill becomes me to doubt her sincerity. But I know
whose daughter she is. I pray you give good heed, my Teutonic friend. _I
know whose daughter she is_!

"I do not talk much. But you have arrived at a critical point--a point
of turning. Out of his own life, out of his own sorrow, the Backwoods
Philosopher warns you. I am at peace now. But look at me. Do you not see
the marks of the ravages of a great storm? A sort of a qualified
happiness I have in philosophy. But what I might have been if the
storm had not torn me to pieces in my youth--what I might have been,
that I am not. I pray you never trust in a woman's keeping the happiness
of your life!"

[Illustration: "LOOK AT ME."]

Here Andrew slipped his arm through Wehle's, and began to promenade with
him in the large apartm