omething I had never known. The large, white, graceful hand of the
doctor sweeping the strings, the clear ringing shout of the tenor and
the chiming, bird-like voice of the girl lent to the absurd words of
this ballad a singular dignity. They made all other persons and events
of the day of no account.

In the intervals between the songs the doctor talked of catarrh and its
cure, and offered his medicines for sale, and in this dull part of the
program the tenor assisted, but the girl, sinking back in her seat,
resumed her impersonal and weary air.

That was forty years ago, and I can still sing those songs and imitate
the whoop of the shouting tenor, but I have never been able to put that
woman into verse or fiction although I have tried. In a story called
_Love or the Law_ I once made a laborious attempt to account for her,
but I did not succeed, and the manuscript remains in the bottom of my
desk.

No doubt the doctor has gone to his long account and the girl is a gray
old woman of sixty-five but in this book they shall be forever young,
forever beautiful, noble with the grace of art. The medicine they
peddled was of doubtful service, but the songs they sang, the story they
suggested were of priceless value to us who came from the monotony of
the farm, and went back to it like bees laden with the pollen of new
intoxicating blooms.

* * * * *

Sorrowfully we left Huckleberry's unfinished race, reluctantly we
climbed into the farm wagon, sticky with candy, dusty, tired, some of us
suffering with sick-headache, and rolled away homeward to milk the cows,
feed the pigs and bed down the horses.

As I look at a tintype of myself taken at about this time, I can hardly
detect the physical relationship between that mop-headed, long-lipped
lad, and the gray-haired man of today. But the coat, the tie, the little
stick-pin on the lapel of my coat all unite to bring back to me with
painful stir, the curious debates, the boyish delights, the dawning
desires which led me to these material expressions of manly pride. There
is a kind of pathos too, in the memory of the keen pleasure I took in
that absurd ornament--and yet my joy was genuine, my satisfaction
complete.

Harriet came home from school each Friday night but we saw little of
her, for she was always engaged for dances or socials by the neighbors'
sons, and had only a young lady's interest in her cub brothers. I
resented this and was open