out it now," said Sol the next day, explaining the
previous episodes of this history to Ruth: "you've got the whole plot
before you. It dragged a little in the second act, for the actors
weren't up in their parts. But for an amateur performance, on the whole,
it wasn't bad."

"I don't know, I'm sure," said Rand impulsively, "how we'd have got on
without Euphemia. It's too bad she couldn't be here to-day."

"She wanted to come," said Sol; "but the gentleman she's engaged to came
up from Marysville last night."

"Gentleman--engaged!" repeated Rand, white and red by turns.

"Well, yes. I say, 'gentleman,' although he's in the variety profession.
She always said," said Sol, quietly looking at Rand, "that she'd never
marry OUT of it."

AN HEIRESS OF RED DOG.

The first intimation given of the eccentricity of the testator was, I
think, in the spring of 1854. He was at that time in possession of a
considerable property, heavily mortgaged to one friend, and a wife of
some attraction, on whose affections another friend held an encumbering
lien. One day it was found that he had secretly dug, or caused to be
dug, a deep trap before the front-door of his dwelling, into which a few
friends, in the course of the evening, casually and familiarly dropped.
This circumstance, slight in itself, seemed to point to the existence of
a certain humor in the man, which might eventually get into literature,
although his wife's lover--a man of quick discernment, whose leg was
broken by the fall--took other views. It was some weeks later, that,
while dining with certain other friends of his wife, he excused
himself from the table to quietly re-appear at the front-window with a
three-quarter inch hydraulic pipe, and a stream of water projected at
the assembled company. An attempt was made to take public cognizance of
this; but a majority of the citizens of Red Dog, who were not at dinner,
decided that a man had a right to choose his own methods of diverting
his company. Nevertheless, there were some hints of his insanity; his
wife recalled other acts clearly attributable to dementia; the crippled
lover argued from his own experience that the integrity of her limbs
could only be secured by leaving her husband's house; and the mortgagee,
fearing a further damage to his property, foreclosed. But here the cause
of all this anxiety took matters into his own hands, and disappeared.

When we next heard from him, he had, in some mysterious w