, with violet-blue eyes and red lips, and a way of smiling a little
when spoken to--but let that pass. I mean only to be scientifically
minute. A passion for fact has ever obsessed me. I have little literary
ability and less desire to sully my pen with that degraded form of
letters known as fiction. Once in my life my mania for accuracy involved
me lyrically. It was a short poem, but an earnest one:

Truth is mighty and must prevail,
Otherwise it were inadvisable to tell the tale.

I bestowed it upon the New York _Evening Post_, but declined
remuneration. My message belonged to the world. I don't mean the
newspaper.

Her eyes, then, were tinted with that indefinable and agreeable nuance
which modifies blue to a lilac or violet hue.

Watching her askance, I was deeply sorry that my cooking seemed to pain
her.

"Guide!" said Mrs. Doolittle Batt, in that remarkable, booming voice of
hers.

"Ma'am!" said Kitten Brown and I with spontaneous alacrity, leaping from
the ground as though shot at.

"This cooking," she said, with an ominous stare at us, "is atrocious.
Don't you know how to cook?"

I said with a smiling attempt at ease:

"There are various ways of cooking food for the several species of
mammalia which an all-wise Providence--"

"Do you think you're cooking for wild-cats?" she demanded.

Our smiles faded.

"It's my opinion that you're incompetent," remarked the Reverend Dr.
Jones, slapping at midges with a hand that might have rocked all the
cradles of the nation, but had not rocked any.

"We're not getting our money's worth," said Miss Dingleheimer, "even if
the Government does pay your salaries."

I looked appealingly from one stony face to another. In Miss McFadden's
eye there was the somber glint of battle. She said:

"If you can guide us no better than you cook, God save us all this day
week!" And she hurled the contents of her tin plate into Lake Susan W.
Pillsbury.

Mrs. Doolittle Batt arose:

"Come," she said; "it is time we started. What is the name of the first
lake we may hope to encounter?"

We knew no more than did they, but we said that Lake Gladys Doolittle
Batt was the first, hoping to placate that fearsome woman.

"Come on, then!" she cried, picking up her carved and varnished mountain
staff.

Miss Dingleheimer had brought one, too, from the Catskills.

So Kitten Brown and I loaded our mule, set him in motion, and drove him
forward into the unknown.

Where we were