ill
sighingly, "not yours! Up among the northern hills, yonder towards the
sunset, sits the owner, sorrowful, weeping, wailing"? I believe I am
wading out into the Sally Waters of Mother Goosery; but, prose or
poetry, somewhere a woman,--and because nobody of taste could
surreptitiously possess herself of my veil, I have no doubt that she
cut it incontinently into two equal parts, and gave one to her sister,
and there are two women,--nay, since niggardly souls have no sense of
grandeur, and will shave down to microscopic dimensions, it is every
way probable that she divided it into three unequal parts, and took
three quarters of a yard for herself, three quarters for her sister,
and gave the remaining half-yard to her daughter, and that at very
moment there are two women and a little girl taking their walks abroad
under the silken shadows of my veil! And 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,--had not
Crene's dark eyes seen it tilting 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 should have gone in any other, and have it times enough,
with a