ectly upon the street. In one corner was a bed. Opposite the door
was a stove for cooking and warming the house. A table and two chairs
besides my little sewing-chair completed the furnishing of the
apartment. The floor was bare, except where I had put down an old
coverlet for a rug before the bed. Here in this crowded place I cooked,
ate, slept, worked, and received company and offers!

"Just as an example of the way in which some of my suitors broached
the subject I will describe a scene. Fancy me kneeling on the floor,
stanching the blood from quite a serious cut on Benton's hand. The door
opens behind me, and a man I never have seen before, thrusts his head
and half his body in at the opening. His salutation is 'Howdy!'--his
first remark, 'I heern thar was a mighty purty widder livin' here; and
I reckon my infurmation was correct. If you would like to marry, I'm
agreeable.'"

"How did you receive this candidate? You have not told me what you
replied on these occasions," I said, amused at this picture of pioneer
life.

"I turned my head around far enough to get one look at his face, and
asking him rather crossly 'if there were any more fools where he came
from,' went on bandaging Benton's hand."

The recollection of this absurd incident caused the narrator to laugh as
she had not often laughed in my hearing.

"This may have been a second Werther," I remarked, "and surely no
Charlotte could have been more unfeeling than you showed yourself. It
could not be that a man coming in that way expected to get any other
answer than the one you gave him?"

"I do not know, and I did not then care. One day a man, to whose
motherless children I had been kind when opportunity offered, slouched
into my room without the ceremony of knocking and dropping into a chair
as if his knees failed him, began twirling his battered old hat in an
embarrassed manner, and doing as so many of his predecessors had
done--proposing off-hand. He had a face like a terra-cotta image, a long
lank figure, faded old clothes, and a whining voice."

"He told me that he had no 'woman,' and that I had no 'man,' a condition
that he evidently considered deplorable. He assured me that I suited him
'fustrate;' that his children 'sot gret store by me,' and 'liked my
victuals;' and that he thought a 'heap' of my little boy. He also
impressed upon me that he had been 'considerin' the 'rangement of jinin'
firms for some time. To close the business at once, he p