garly conditions, and brazen
assumption raises the dust from its chariot wheels for modest merit
to plod along in, the Professor swung himself off his horse to attack
a blackberry bush, and the Friend, representing simple truth, and
desirous of getting a wider prospect, urged his horse up the hill.
At the top he encountered a stranger, on a sorrel horse, with whom he
entered into conversation and extracted all the discouragement the
man had as to the road to Burnsville.

Nevertheless, the view opened finely and extensively. There are few
exhilarations comparable to that of riding or walking along a high
ridge, and the spirits of the traveler rose many degrees above the
point of restful death, for which the Professor was crying when he
encountered the blackberry bushes. Luckily the Friend soon fell in
with a like temptation, and dismounted. He discovered something that
spoiled his appetite for berries. His coat, strapped on behind the
saddle, had worked loose, the pocket was open, and the pocket-book
was gone. This was serious business. For while the Professor was
the cashier, and traveled like a Rothschild, with large drafts, the
Friend represented the sub-treasury. That very morning, in response
to inquiry as to the sinews of travel, the Friend had displayed,
without counting, a roll of bills. These bills had now disappeared,
and when the Friend turned back to communicate his loss, in the
character of needy nothing not trimm'd in jollity, he had a
sympathetic listener to the tale of woe.

Going back on such a journey is the woefulest experience, but retrace
our steps we must. Perhaps the pocket-book lay in the road not half
a mile back. But not in half a mile, or a mile, was it found.
Probably, then, the man on the sorrel horse had picked it up. But
who was the man on the sorrel horse, and where had he gone? Probably
the coat worked loose in crossing Toe River and the pocket-book had
gone down-stream. The number of probabilities was infinite, and each
more plausible than the others as it occurred to us. We inquired at
every house we had passed on the way, we questioned every one we met.
At length it began to seem improbable that any one would remember if
he had picked up a pocketbook that morning. This is just the sort of
thing that slips an untrained memory.

At a post office or doctor's shop, or inn for drovers, it might be
either or neither, where several horses were tied to the fence, and
a group of men were ti