and to several of our lesser establishments; pilgrimages rarely
diverting to Little Arcady and which invariably provoked bows under
strangely lifted hats.

But there were Little Arcadians of Miss Caroline's own sex to whom she
might not so swiftly fetch confusion. Aunt Delia McCormick devoted a
chance view of the newcomer to discovering that the gown of lavender
satin had been turned and made over, none too expertly, from one
originally built some years before the war. Later she found what our
ladies agreed was its primal design, after much turning of the leaves of
ancient Godey's magazines.

Mrs. Judge Robinson, from one sidelong glance, brought off detailed
intelligence of the bonnet's checkered past.

The elder Miss Eubanks decried the mannishness of cane-bearing; and Mrs.
Westley Keyts, entering the shop as Miss Caroline was bowed out,
declared that her silk stockings were of a hue hardly respectable, and
that she wore shoes "twice too small for her."

The eyes of the suddenly urbane Westley glistened when he overheard
this, but he fell to dissecting a beef without further sign.

For better or worse, Miss Caroline and Little Arcady had exchanged
impressions of each other.

I met her by chance that morning and was charmed by her flattering
implication of reliance upon myself. She made me feel that our
understanding was secret and our attachment romantic. To complete her
round of our commercial centre I escorted her to the _Argus_ office. Her
greeting of Solon Denney was a thing to behold with unalloyed delight.
They seemed to understand each other at once. Two minutes after Solon
had looked up in some astonishment from his dusty, over-piled desk, they
were arrayed as North and South in a combat of blithest raillery.

Miss Caroline sat in Solon's battered chair with the missing castor,
surveyed his exchange-laden desk with a humorous eye, and seized the
last _Argus_, skimming its local columns with a lively interest and
professing to be enthralled by its word-magic. She read stray items that
commended themselves to her critical judgment, such as, "A wind blew
last week that you could lean up against like the side of the house;" or
"Westley Keyts has a bran-new 'No Admittance!' sign over the door of his
slaughter-house. We don't see why. He could put up a 'Come one, come
all!' sign and still not get _us_ into the place. They're messy."

Further she read, "Some fiend with sub-human instincts ravaged our
secre