o more delay was necessary in disposing of his heart.

CHAPTER III. "How to Win the Affections"

Miss Sally glanced hurriedly around, seeking some retreat to which she
could fly. Mrs. Smith, having introduced Eliph' Hewlitt, had turned
away, and the other picnickers were gathered around the minister,
looking over his shoulders at the copy of Jarby's Encyclopedia. Although
she could have no idea, as yet, that Eliph' Hewlitt had decided to marry
her, Miss Sally was afraid of him. She was a dainty little woman, with
just a few gray hairs tucked out of sight under the brown ones, but
although she was ordinarily able to hold her own, each year that was
added to her life made her more afraid of book agents.

Time after time she had succumbed to the wiles of book agents. It made
no difference how she received them, nor how she steeled her heart
against their plausible words, she always ended buying whatever they had
to sell, and after that it was a fight to get the money from her father
with which to pay the installments. Pap Briggs objected to paying out
money for anything, but he considered that about the most useless thing
he could spend money for was a book. Whenever he heard there was a book
agent in Kilo he acted like a hen when she sees a hawk in the sky, ready
to pounce down upon her brood, and he pottered around and scolded and
complained and warned Miss Sally to beware, and then in the end the book
agent always made the sale, and Miss Sally felt as if she had committed
seven or eight deadly sins, and it made her life miserable. Only a few
months before she had fallen prey to a man who had sold her a set of Sir
Walter Scott's Complete Works, two dollars down, and one dollar a month,
and she felt that the work of urging the monthly dollar out of her
father's pocket was all she could stand.

Why and how she bought books always remained a mystery to her; it is a
mystery to many book buyers how they happen to buy books. Book agents
seemed to have a mesmerizing effect on Miss sally, as serpents daze
birds before they devour them. The process applied between the time when
she stated with the utmost positiveness that she did not want, and would
not buy, a book, and the time, a few minutes later, when she signed her
name to the agent's list of subscribers, was something she could not
fathom.

And now she had been left face to face with a book agent, actually
introduced to him, and her father still under monthly mi