yet there are people who profess to
disbelieve in total depravity.

Nor did the veil walk away alone. My trunk became imbued with the spirit
of adventure, and branched off on its own account up somewhere into
Vermont. I suppose it would have kept on and reached perhaps the North
Pole by this time, had not Crene's dark eyes--so pretty to look at that
one instinctively feels they ought not to be good for anything, if a
just impartiality is to be maintained, but they are--Crene's dark eyes
seen it tilting up into a baggage-crate and trundling off towards the
Green Mountains, but too late. Of course there was a formidable hitch in
the programme. A court of justice was improvised on the car-steps. I was
the plaintiff, Crene chief evidence, baggage-master both defendant and
examining-counsel. The case did not admit of a doubt. There was the
little insurmountable check whose brazen lips could speak no lie.

"Keep hold of that," whispered Crene, and a yoke of oxen could not have
drawn it from me.

"You are sure you had it marked for Fontdale," says Mr. Baggage-master.

I hold the impracticable check before his eyes in silence.

"Yes, well, it must have gone on to Albany."

"But it went away on that track," says Crene.

"Couldn't have gone on that track. Of course they wouldn't have carried
it away over there just to make it go wrong."

For me, I am easily persuaded and dissuaded. If he had told me that
it must have gone in such a direction, that it was a moral and mental
impossibility it should have gone in any other, and have said it times
enough, with a certain confidence and contempt of any other contingency,
I should gradually have lost faith in my own eyes, and said, "Well, I
suppose it did." But Crene is not to be asserted into yielding one inch,
and insists that the trunk went to Vermont and not to New York, and is
thoroughly unmanageable. Then the baggage-master, in anguish of soul,
trots out his subordinates, one after another,--

"Is this the man that wheeled the trunk away? Is this? Is this?"

The brawny-armed fellows hang back, and scowl, and muffle words in a
very suspicious manner, and protest they won't be got into a scrape. But
Crene has no scrape for them. She cannot swear to their identity. She
had eyes only for the trunk.

"Well," says Baggager, at his wits' end, "you let me take your check,
and I'll send the trunk on by express, when it comes."

I pity him, and relax my clutch.

"No," whispers