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A CHRISTMAS ACCIDENT 1

AFTER--THE DELUGE 32

MEMOIR OF MARY TWINING 67

A POSTLUDE 99

THE "DAILY MORNING CHRONICLE" 139

HEARTS UNFORTIFIED 177

HER NEIGHBOR'S LANDMARK 210

A Christmas Accident

[Illustration: Leaf]

AT first the two yards were as much alike as the two houses, each house
being the exact copy of the other. They were just two of those little
red brick dwellings that one is always seeing side by side in the
outskirts of a city, and looking as if the occupants must be alike too.
But these two families were quite different. Mr. Gilton, who lived in
one, was a pretty cross sort of man, and was quite well-to-do, as cross
people sometimes are. He and his wife lived alone, and they did not have
much going out and coming in, either. Mrs. Gilton would have liked more
of it, but she had given up thinking about it, for her husband had said
so many times that it was women's tomfoolery to want to have people,
whom you weren't anything to and who weren't anything to you, ringing
your doorbell all the time and bothering around in your
dining-room,--which of course it was; and she would have believed it if
a woman ever did believe anything a man says a great many times.

In the other house there were five children, and, as Mr. Gilton said,
they made too large a family, and they ought to have gone somewhere
else. Possibly they would have gone had it not been for the fence; but
when Mr. Gilton put it up and Mr. Bilton told him it was three inches
too far on his land, and Mr. Gilton said he could go to law about it,
expressing the idea forcibly, Mr. Bilton was foolish enough to take his
advice. The decision went against him, and a good deal of his money went
with it, for it was a long, teasing lawsuit, and instead of being three
inches of made ground it might have been three degrees of the Arctic
Circle for the trouble there was in getting at it. So Mr. Bilton had to
stay where he was.

It was then that the yards began to take on those little differences
that soon grew to be very marked. Neither family would plant any vines
because they would have been certain to heedlessly beautify the other
side, and consequently the fence, in all its primitive boldness, stood
out uncompromisingly, and the one or tw