at fine lion talk like a 'hill-Billy' such as yourself--as if he were
fresh caught in the Great Smoky Mountains!" he stormed at the indignant
ventriloquist. The other partners in the management interfered in
Brent's behalf; they feared that the proud mountaineer, resenting the
contemptuous designation "hill-Billy" might withdraw from the Company,
taking his wife with him, and the loss of Valeria from the pageant would
be well nigh irreparable, for her ethereal and fragile beauty as Una
with her lion had a perennial charm for the public. The management
therefore assumed the responsibility for the linguistic disaster, having
confided the rehearsal to a foreigner, for the Norwegian lion-trainer
naively explained that to him it seemed that all Americans talked alike.

A course in elocution was recommended to Brent by the managers, and he
fell in with this plan delightedly, but after two or three elementary
bouts with the vowel sounds, long and short, consonants, sonant and
surd, he concluded that mere articulation could be made as laborious as
sawing wood, and he discovered that it was incompatible with his dignity
to be a pupil in an art in which he had professed proficiency.
Thereafter his accomplishment rusted--to the relief of the
management--although he required that Valeria should be described in the
advertisements as the wife of "the _celebrated ventriloquist_, Mr. Brent
Kayle," thus seeking by faked notoriety to secure the sweets of fame,
without the labor of achievement.

Valeria had welcomed the pacific settlement of the difficulty, because
her "good money" earned in the show so brightened and beautified the
evening of life for the venerable grandparents at home. For their sake
she had conquered her dread of the lion in the pageant. Indeed she had
found other lions in her path that she feared more--the glitter and
gauds of her tinsel world, the enervating love of ease, the influence of
sordid surroundings and ignoble ideals. But not one could withstand the
simple goodness of the unsophisticated girl. They retreated before the
power of her fireside traditions of right thinking and true living which
she had learned in her humble mountain home.

It had come to be a dwelling of comfortable aspect, cared for in the
absence of the young couple by a thrifty hired housekeeper, a widowed
cousin, and here they spent the off-seasons when the circus company went
into winter quarters. Repairs had been instituted, several room