quartette, they would gather late on summer nights and conduct
themselves in a manner to make me wish that old Azariah Prouse's
peculiar belief as to house structure might have included a sound-proof
fence about his premises. For, on the insufficient stretch of lawn
between that house and my own, the four rivals sang serenades.

"She sleeps--my lady sleeps," they sang, with a volume that seemed bound
to insure their inaccuracy as to the lady, and which assuredly left them
in the wrong as to her mother's attorney--if their song meant in the
least to report conditions at large. As this was, however, the one
occasion when they felt that none of the four had any advantage over his
fellows, they made the most of it. Then, in the dead of night, I would
be very sorry that I had not counselled the mother of Eustace Eubanks to
send him around the world on a slow sailing ship; for it was his voice,
even in songs of sleep, that rendered this salutary exercise most
difficult.

On one of these wakeful summer nights, however, I received a queer
little shock. Perhaps I half dreamed it in some fugitive moment of half
sleep; but it was as if I were again an awkward, silent boy, worshipping
a girl new to the school, a girl who wore two long yellow braids. I
worshipped her from afar so that she saw me not, being occupied with
many adorers less timid, who made nothing of snatching a hair ribbon.
But the face in that instant of dream was the face of Miss Katharine
Lansdale, and coupled with the vision was a prescience that in some
later life I should again look back and see myself as now, a grown but
awkward boy, still holding aloof--still adoring from some remote
background while other and bolder gallants captured trophies and lightly
carolled their serenades. It seemed like borrowing trouble to look still
farther into the future, but the vision was striking. Surely, History
does repeat itself. I should have made this discovery for myself had it
not been exploited before my day. For on the morrow I found my woman
child on the Lansdale lawn when I went home in the afternoon. She had
now reached an age when she was beginning to do "pretties" with her lips
as she talked--almost at the age when I had first been enraptured by her
mother, with the identical two braids, also the tassels dangling from
her boot tops. This latter was unexciting as a coincidence, however. I
myself had deliberately produced it.

Miss Lansdale turned from talk with