here this young
Jezebel of a singer teaches the children to chant in unknown tongues?
Didn't he find him living with a wrinkled Indian witch who called him
'Padrone'--and speaking her gibberish? Didn't he find him, who left here
a man mortified in flesh and spirit and pale with striving with sinners,
fat and rosy from native wines and fleshpots, and even vain and gaudy
in colored apparel? And last of all, didn't Brother Bulkley hear that a
rumor was spread far and wide that this miserable backslider was to take
to himself a wife--in one of these strange women--that very Jezebel who
seduced him? What do you call that?"

"It looks a good deal like human nature," said the doctor, musingly,
"but I call it a cure!"

THE INDISCRETION OF ELSBETH

The American paused. He had evidently lost his way. For the last half
hour he had been wandering in a medieval town, in a profound medieval
dream. Only a few days had elapsed since he had left the steamship that
carried him hither; and the accents of his own tongue, the idioms of
his own people, and the sympathetic community of New World tastes and
expressions still filled his mind until he woke up, or rather, as it
seemed to him, was falling asleep in the past of this Old World town
which had once held his ancestors. Although a republican, he had liked
to think of them in quaint distinctive garb, representing state and
importance--perhaps even aristocratic pre-eminence--content to let the
responsibility of such "bad eminence" rest with them entirely, but a
habit of conscientiousness and love for historic truth eventually led
him also to regard an honest BAUER standing beside his cattle in the
quaint market place, or a kindly-faced black-eyed DIENSTMADCHEN in a
doorway, with a timid, respectful interest, as a possible type of his
progenitors. For, unlike some of his traveling countrymen in Europe, he
was not a snob, and it struck him--as an American--that it was,
perhaps, better to think of his race as having improved than as having
degenerated. In these ingenuous meditations he had passed the long rows
of quaint, high houses, whose sagging roofs and unpatched dilapidations
were yet far removed from squalor, until he had reached the road
bordered by poplars, all so unlike his own country's waysides--and knew
that he had wandered far from his hotel.

He did not care, however, to retrace his steps and return by the way
he had come. There was, he reasoned, some other street o