ndescend
to name the day?"

"I should prefer, Pierre, not to have any ghostly influences brought to
bear on this occasion. Suppose we try a valse, which I think will tend
to dissipate your melancholy forebodings."

I may as well own it here: the little witch could not be brought to make
any final arrangements, although I did entreat her seriously.

"You must talk about these things when I am at home with my papa and
mamma," she insisted; and I was compelled to respect her decision.

But we have been married almost a year, and we often refer to the
strange interview we had with Chief Nittinat. Perhaps the Smoke-eller
doctrine now popular among the northern Indians, and which corresponds
to our spiritualism, may have some foundation in similar occurrences
themselves. Who knows but Nittinat was talking to us through a medium?

MR. ELA'S STORY.

Three or four years ago, my husband and I were making a winter voyage up
the Oregon coast. The weather was not peculiarly bad: it was the
ordinary winter weather, with a quartering wind, giving the ship an
awkward motion over an obliquely-rolling sea. Cold, sick, thoroughly
uncomfortable, with no refuge but the narrow and dimly-lighted
state-room, I was reduced in the first twenty-four hours to a condition
of ignominious helplessness, hardly willing to live, and not yet fully
wishing or intending to die.

In this unhappy frame of mind the close of the second weary day found
me, when my husband opened our state-room door to say that Mr. Ela, of
----, Oregon, was on board, and proposed to come and talk to me, in the
hope of amusing me and making me forget my wretchedness. Submitting
rather than agreeing to the proposal, chairs were brought and placed
just inside the door-way, where the light of the saloon lamps shown
athwart the countenance of my self-constituted physician. He was a young
man, and looked younger than his years; slightly built, though
possessing a supple, well-knit frame, with hands of an elegant shape,
fine texture, and great expression. You saw at a glance that he had a
poet's head, and a poet's sensitiveness of face; but it was only after
observation that you saw how much the face was capable of which it did
not convey, for faces are apt to indicate not so much individual culture
as the culture of those with whom we are habitually associated. Mr.
Ela's face clearly indicated to me the intellectual poverty, the want of
aesthetic cultivation in his acc