a forgery
flies into the face of more incontestable facts than the anachronisms do.
We know, from Suzanne and Francoise, without this manuscript, that there
was an Alix Carpentier, daughter of a count, widow of a viscount, an
_emigree_ of the Revolution, married to a Norman peasant, known to M.
Gerbeau, beloved of Suzanne and Francoise, with whom they journeyed to
Attakapas, and who wrote for them the history of her strange life. I hold
a manuscript carefully kept by at least two generations of Francoise's
descendants among their valuable private papers. It professes to be that
history--a short, modest, unadorned narrative, apparently a copy of a
paper of like compass, notwithstanding the evident insertion of two
impossible statements whose complete omission does not disturb the
narrative. I see no room to doubt that it contains the true story of a
real and lovely woman. But to come back to my attorney.

While his grave negotiations were still going on, there met me one evening
at my own gate a lady in black, seeking advice concerning her wish to sell
to some publisher a private diary never intended for publication.

"That kind is the best," I said. "Did you write it during the late war?" I
added at a guess.

"Yes."

"I suppose, then, it contains a careful record of each day's public
events."

"No, I'm sorry to say--"

"Nay, don't be sorry; that lack may save it from the waste-basket." Then
my heart spoke. "Ah! madam, if you had only done what no woman seems to
have seen the importance of doing--written the women's side of that awful
war--"

"That's just what I have done," she interrupted. "I was a Union woman, in
the Confederacy. I couldn't talk; I had to write. I was in the siege of
Vicksburg from beginning to end."

"Leave your manuscript with me," I said. "If, on examining it, I find I
can recommend it to a publisher, I will do so. But remember what I have
already told you--the passage of an unknown writer's work through an older
author's hands is of no benefit to it whatever. It is a bad sign rather
than a good one. Your chances of acceptance will be at least no less if
you send this to the publishers yourself."

No, she would like me to intervene.

How my attorney friend and I took a two days' journey by rail, reading the
manuscript to each other in the Pullman car; how a young newly married
couple next us across the aisle, pretending not to notice, listened with
all their might; how my friend the at