t, in which he had been so strange that she
did not know him, seemed the only one that he had ever worn. This effect
lasted till Mr. Arbuton could find his way to her, and place in her
eager hand a letter from the girls and Dr. Ellison. She forgot it then,
and vanished till she read her letter.

V.

MR. ARBUTON MAKES HIMSELF AGREEABLE.

The first care of Colonel Ellison had been to call a doctor, and to know
the worst about the sprained ankle, upon which his plans had fallen
lame; and the worst was that it was not a bad sprain, but Mrs. Ellison,
having been careless of it the day before, had aggravated the hurt, and
she must now have that perfect rest, which physicians prescribe so
recklessly of other interests and duties, for a week at least, and
possibly two or three.

The colonel was still too much a soldier to be impatient at the doctor's
order, but he was of far too active a temper to be quiet under it. He
therefore proposed to himself nothing less than the capture of Quebec in
an historical sense, and even before dinner he began to prepare for the
campaign. He sallied forth, and descended upon the bookstores wherever
he found them lurking, in whatsoever recess of the Upper or Lower Town,
and returned home laden with guide-books to Quebec, and monographs upon
episodes of local history, such as are produced in great quantity by the
semi-clerical literary taste of out-of-the-way Catholic capitals. The
colonel (who had gone actively into business, after leaving the army, at
the close of the war) had always a newspaper somewhere about him, but he
was not a reader of many books. Of the volumes in the doctor's library,
he had never in former days willingly opened any but the plays of
Shakespeare, and Don Quixote, long passages of which he knew by heart.
He had sometimes attempted other books, but for the most of Kitty's
favorite authors he professed as frank a contempt as for the
Mound-Builders themselves. He had read one book of travel, namely, The
Innocents Abroad, which he held to be so good a book that he need never
read anything else about the countries of which it treated. When he
brought in this extraordinary collection of pamphlets, both Kitty and
Fanny knew what to expect; for the colonel was as ready to receive
literature at second-hand as to avoid its original sources. He had in
this way picked up a great deal of useful knowledge, and he was famous
for clipping from newspapers scraps of instructive