coming to?" asked Temperance. "You
are sowing your wild oats with a vengeance."

"Locke Morgeson's daughter can do anything," commented the villagers.
In consequence of the unlimited power accorded me I was unpopular.
"Do you think she is handsome?" inquired my friends of each other. "In
what respect _can_ she be called a beauty?" "Though she reads, she
has no great wit," said one. "She dresses oddly for effect," another
avowed, "and her manners are ridiculous." But they borrowed my dresses
for patterns, imitated my bonnets, and adopted my colors. When I
learned to manage a sailboat, they had an aquatic mania. When I
learned to ride a horse, the ancient and moth-eaten sidesaddles of the
town were resuscitated, and old family nags were made back-sore
with the wearing of them, and their youthful spirits revived by new
beginners sliding about on their rounded sides. My whims were sneered
at, and then followed. Of course I was driven from whim to whim, to
keep them busy, and to preserve my originality, and at last I became
eccentric for eccentricity's sake. All this prepared the way for my
Nemesis. But as yet my wild oats were green and flourishing in the
field of youth.

CHAPTER XIII.

I was preaching one day to mother and Aunt Merce a sermon after the
manner of Mr. Boold, of Barmouth, taking the sofa for a desk, and
for my text "Like David's Harp of solemn sound," and had attracted
Temperance and Charles into the room by my declamation, when my
audience was unexpectedly increased by the entrance of father, with a
strange gentleman. Aunt Merce laughed hysterically; I waved my hand to
her, _a la_ Boold, and descended from my position.

"Take a chair," said Temperance, who was never abashed, thumping one
down before the stranger.

"What is all this?" inquired father.

"Only a _Ranz des Vaches_, father, to please Aunt Merce."

The stranger's eyes were fastened upon me, while father introduced us
to "Mr. Charles Morgeson, of Rosville."

"Please receive me as a relative," he said, turning to shake hands
with mother. "We have an ancestor in common that makes a sufficient
cousinship for a claim, Mrs. Morgeson."

"Why not have looked us up before?" I asked.

"Why," said Veronica, who had just come in, "there are six Charles
Morgesons buried in our graveyard."

"I supposed," he said, "that the name was extinct. I lately saw your
father's in a State Committee List, and feeling curious regarding it,
I came