t route, I am
convinced I should find it led me through dark valleys and over stony
pathways with storm clouds and thunders and lightnings smashing all
around my head.

"You admonished me to talk about myself and leave you alone. Well, I
suppose you know more about yourselves than I could possibly tell you,
and since it is your own little baby sister, I am sure you are more
than willing to turn your telescope away from the sunny slopes a while
for a glimpse of my business dabbles.

"This is Chicago.

"Aunt Grace was rendered more speechless than ever when I announced my
intention of coming, and Prudence was shocked. But father and I talked
it over, and he looked at me in that funny searching way he has and
then said:

"'Good for you, Connie, you have the right idea. Chicago isn't big
enough to swallow you, but it won't take you long to eat Chicago
bodily. Of course you ought to go.'

"I know it is not safe to praise men too highly, they are so easily
convinced of their astounding virtues, but that time I couldn't resist
shaking hands with father and I said, and meant it:

"'Father, you are the only one in the world. I don't believe even the
Lord could make your duplicate.'

"'Mr. Nesbitt was very angry because I left them'. He said that after
he took me, a stupid little country ignoramus, and made something out
of me, my desertion was nothing short of rank ingratitude and religious
hypocrisy and treason to the land of my birth. One might have inferred
that he picked me out of the gutter, brushed the dirt off, smoothed my
ragged looks, and seated me royally in his stenographic chair, and made
a business lady out of me. But it didn't work.

"I came.

"Mr. Baker, the minister there, is back of it. He met me on the street
one day.

"'I hear you are literary,' he said.

"'Well, I think I can write,' I answered modestly.

"Then he said he had a third-half-nephew by marriage, to whom, ground
under the heel of financial incompetency, he had once loaned the
startling sum of fifty dollars,--I say startling, because it startled
me to know a preacher ever had that much ready cash ahead of his
grocery bill. Anyhow, the third-half-nephew, with the fifty dollars as
a nucleus,--I think Providence must have multiplied it a little, for
our fifty dollars never accomplished miracles like that,--but with that
fifty dollars as a starter he did a little plunging for himself, and is
now owner and editor of a great pu