The other night when I came in I heard him twanging his lute--'The Harp that once through Tara's Hall'; you know, Colonel." And John Barclay closed his letter to Bob Hendricks: "Well, Bob, as I sit here with fifty letters written this evening and ready to mail, and the blessed knowledge that we have 18,000 acres of winter wheat all planted if not paid for, I can hear old Watts wheezing away on his accordion in his shop down street.

Poor old Watts, it's a pity that man hasn't the acquisitive faculty--he could turn that talent into enough to keep him all his days.

Poor old Watts!" And Molly Culpepper, sitting in her bedroom chewing her penholder, finally wrote this: "Watts McHurdie went sailing by the house to-night, coming home from the Wards', where he was making his regular call on Nellie.

You know what a mouse-like little walk he has, scratching along the sidewalk so demurely; but to-night, after he passed our place I heard him actually break into a hippety-hop, and as I was sitting on the veranda, I could hear him clicking clear down to the new stone walk in front of the post-office." Oho, Molly Culpepper, you said "as I was sitting on the veranda"; that is of course the truth, but not the whole truth; what you might have said was "as we were sitting on the veranda," and "as we were talking of what I like" and "what you like," and of "what I think" and "what you think," and as "I was listening to war tales from a Southern soldier," and as "I was finding it on the whole rather a tiresome business "; those things you might have written, Molly Culpepper, but you did not.

And was it a twinge or a prick or a sharp reproachful stab of your conscience that made you chew the tip of your penholder into shreds and then madly write down this:-- "Bob, I don't know what is coming over me; but some way your letters seem so far away, and it has been such a long time since I saw you, a whole lonesome year, and Bob dear, I am so weak and so unworthy of you; I know it, oh, I know it.