lieve the image of himself which he saw there to be an accurate likeness.

Of course interviews so frequent and so pleasant must grow to something more. It doesn't matter what a young man and a young woman talk about, even sympathetic conversations about missionary labors in Texas or in Greenland are apt to become tender. One enthusiasm translates itself so easily into another! This worship of his real and imaginary goodness, and this stimulus of what was best in him was so agreeable to Bonamy that he began to doubt whether after all it was best to undertake a mission to the Texans single-handed and alone. Good old sisters whose matchmaking proclivities had not died but had only been sanctified, took occasion to throw out hints on the subject, which greatly encouraged Mark to believe that Roxy was divinely intended and molded to be his helpmate in that great, vast, vague enterprise which should be worthy of the large abilities he had consecrated.

Roxy on her part was a highly imaginative girl. Here was a large-shouldered, magnificent, Apollo-like fellow, who thought himself something wonderful, and whom his friends thought wonderful. It was easy to take him at the popular estimate, and then to think she had discovered even more than others saw in him. For was it not to her that he revealed his great unsettled plans for suffering and dying for the cross of Christ? And as he came more and more, the pure-spirited girl began to long that she might somehow share his toils and sufferings. The ambition to do some heroic thing had always burned in her heart, and in her it was a pure flame with no taint of selfishness or egotism. Mark went into Adams's shop one day to have his boots mended.

"So you are going to Texas, are you?" broke out the shoe-maker, with half-suppressed vehemence. "Yes."

"Fool's errand,-fool's errand," muttered the old man as he turned the boots over to look at the soles. Then he looked furtively at Bonamy and was disappointed to find in his face no sign of perturbation. "Fool's errand, I say," sharper than before.

Mark tossed back his black hair, and said with a twinkle :

"So you think, no doubt."

"Think? think?" Here the shoe-maker choked for utterance. "I tell you if you were my son I'd" then he went on

turning the boots over and left the sentence unfinished. Perhaps because he could not think what he would do to such a strapping son as Mark; perhaps because the sentence seemed more frightful in this mysterious state of suspended animation than it could have done with any conceivable penalty at the end.

"You'd spank me and not give me any supper, may be," said Mark, who was determined to be good-natured with Roxy's father.

The old man's face did not relax. "That shoe needs half-soling," he said, ferociously. "What makes you run your boot down at the heel?” "To make business lively for the shoemakers."

I

"And what'll you do when you get to Texas where there are no shoe-makers? wish I could patch cracked heads as easy as cracked shoes."

Adams was not averse to Mark's flattering attentions to Roxy, to which he had attached a significance greater than Mark had intended or Roxy suspected. Missionary fever would soon blow over perhaps, and then Mark was sure to "be somebody."

Besides, the shoe-maker was himself meditating a marriage with Miss Moore. Her sign hung next to his own on Main street, and read "Miss Moore, Millinery and Mantua-maker." Adams may have guessed from the verbal misconstruction of the sign, that the mantua-maker was as much in the market as the millinery; but at least he had taken pity on her loneliness and Miss Moore had "felt great sympathy for" his loneliness, and so they were both ready to decrease their loneliness by making a joint stock of it. Mr. Adams, thinking of marriage himself, could not feel unkind toward a similar weakness in younger people.

There was, however, one person who did not like this growing attachment between Mark Bonamy and Roxy Adams. Twonnet had built other castles for her friend. She was not sentimental, but shrewd, practical, matter-of-fact-in short she was Swiss. She did not believe in Mark's steadfastness. Besides, her hero was Whittaker, whose serious excellence of character was a source of perpetual admiration in her. She was fully conscious of her own general unfitness to aspire to be the wife of such a man; she had an apprehension that she abode most of the time under the weight of the minister's displeasure, and she plainly saw that in his most kindly moods he

treated her as one of those who were doomed to a sort of perpetual and amiable childhood. It was by no great stretch of magnanimity, therefore, that Twonnet set herself to find a way to promote an attachment between Whittaker and Roxy. Next to her own love affair a girl is interested in somebody else's love affair.

But Twonnet saw no way of pushing her design, for Whittaker carefully abstained from going to Adams's house. Twonnet beguiled Roxy into spending evenings at her father's. Whittaker, on such occasions, took the dispensations of Providence kindly, basking in the sunlight of Roxy's inspiring presence for a few hours, and lying awake in troubled indecision the entire night thereafter. It was with an increase of hope that Twonnet saw the mutual delight of the two in each other's society, and she was more than ever convinced that she was the humble instrumentality set apart by Providence to bring about a foreordained marriage. She managed on one pretext or another to leave them alone at times in the old-fashioned parlor, with no witness but the Swiss clock on the wall, the tic-tac of whose long, slow pendulum made the precious moments of communion with Roxy seem longer and more precious to the soul of the preacher. But nothing came of these long-drawn seconds of conversation on indifferent topics-nothing ever came but sleepless nights and new conflicts for Whittaker. For how should he marry on his slender salary and with his education yet unpaid for? After each of these interviews contrived by Twonnet, the goodhearted maneuverer looked in vain to see him resume his calls at the house of Mr. Adams. But he did not. She could not guess why.

One night Twonnet spent with Roxy. Mark dropped in, in his incidental way, during the evening, but he did not get on well. The shrewd Twonnet got him to tell of his electioneering experiences, and contrived to make him show the wrong side of his nature all the evening. Roxy was unhappy at this, and so was Mark, but Twonnet felt a mischievous delight in thus turning Mark aside from talking about Roxy's pet enthusiasms, and in showing them the discords which incipient lovers do not care to see.

The girls sat at the breakfast-table a little late the next morning,-late in relation to village habits, for it was nearly seven o'clock. Twonnet proposed to tell fortunes with coffee-grounds, after the manner of

girls. Roxy hesitated a little; she was scrupulous about trifles, but at Twonnet's entreaty she reversed her cup to try the fortune of her friend.

"I don't see anything, Twonnet, in these grounds," she said, inspecting the inside of her cup, "except-except-yes-I see an animal. I can't tell whether it's a dog or a mule. It has a dog's tail and mule's ears. What does that mean?"

"Pshaw! you aren't worth a cent, Roxy, to tell fortunes," and with that Twonnet looked over her shoulder. "Dog's tail! why that's a sword, don't you see. I am to have a gentleman come to see me who is a military man."

"But will he carry his sword up in the air that way as if he were going to cut your head off if you should refuse him?" asked Roxy, "and what about these ears?"

"Ears! that is beastly, Roxy. Those are side-whiskers. Now, see me tell your fortune."

With this, Twonnet capsized her cup in the saucer and let it remain inverted for some seconds, then righting it again she beheld the sediment of her coffee streaked up and down the side of the cup in a most unintelligible way. But Twonnet's rendering was fore-determined.

"I see," she began, and then she paused a long time, for in truth it was hard to see anything. "I

see

"Well, what?" said Roxy, "a dog's tail or side-whiskers ?"

"I see a young man, rather tall, with flowing hair and-and broad shoulders." Twonnet now looked steadily in the cup, and spoke with the rapt air of a Pythoness. Had she looked up she would have seen the color increasing in Roxy's cheeks. "But his back is turned, and so I see that you will reject him. There are crooked lines crossing his figure by which I perceive it would have been a great source of trouble to you had you accepted him. There would have been discord and evil.”

Here Roxy grew pale, but Twonnet still looked eagerly in the cup.

"I see," she continued, "a tall, serious man. There is a book in front of him. He is a minister. The lines about him are smooth and indicate happiness. His face is toward me and I perceive-that

But here Roxy impatiently wrested the cup from her hand and said, "Shut up, you gabbling story-teller!" Then looking in the cup curiously, she said, "There's nothing of all that there. Just a few streaks of coffeegrounds."

simply overborne and disregarded by numbers of most respectable women of their own acquaintance filing in, with baskets of all sorts of edibles, proper and improper, which they proposed to distribute indiscriminately among the patients, they looked at each other again and again, and said : "Would you have believed women were such geese?"

"Did you tell those women that Doctor Hale's strict orders were that no one should be admitted to the wards without a pass from him?" exclaimed Sarah one day indignantly, to the sentry.

"Indeed ma'am, and I did," he replied, "but it didn't stop her. She said she knew Doctor Hale very well, and he would let her go in."

"But they must not go in," persisted Sarah. "It is against orders."

"What am I to do ma'am?" said the sentry.

"Put your bayonet straight across the door, and hold it there, John," said Sarah. "Ah, ma'am, an' I couldn't to a woman. If it was a man I could; but I couldn't to a woman. Besides, she'd jump over."

The next time, however, John tried it. Sarah heard a parley and flew to her door, to re-enforce John by the moral support of her countenance.

What to her horror did she see? Her own aunt, Mrs. Winthrop, red with rage, and Clara behind her, both abusing the poor sentry in no measured terms, and threatening to report him for insolence.

"I am in charge of the diet kitchen," said Clara, "and my mother can go where she pleases in this hospital."

John lowered his bayonet, and the two angry women walked past him, darting withering glances at his discomfited face.

"It's no use, Netty," said Sarah after this. "It's no use. I do believe that ninety-nine women out of a hundred are absolutely destitute of logic. If you were to talk to Clara till the millennium, you could never make her see that her being in charge of the diet kitchen gives her no right to break Doctor Hale's rules."

As week after week went by, and Sarah and Netty sat in the two hard wooden chairs in the linen room, mending, mending, mending, eight hours a day, there began, as I said, to cross their minds a dim distrust of the common sense of their proceedings.

"How much do you suppose I have saved the United States Government by mending that stocking?" said Netty one day, hold

ing up on her little round fist a stocking whose foot was one solid mass of darns.

Sarah laughed. "Oh, Netty," she said, "what did you mend that for? It wasn't worth it."

"I know that as well as you do," retorted Netty. "But we have barely enough to go round, and to-morrow's Saturday. I did hope that box from Provincetown would have had some stockings in it, but there was only one pair. Look at them!" and Netty held up a pair of socks knit of fine scarlet worsted on very fine needles. They were really beautiful socks, barring the color, which was a fiery yellow scarlet, but one remove from an orange.

"Goodness!" exclaimed Sarah. "What lunatic ever knit those stockings ? I don't believe a man in this hospital would put them on; do you?"

"No," said Netty.

"It wouldn't be any

"What could she have done it for? I wonder if she knit the stockings?"

"Perhaps she has a brother or lover in the war, and doesn't know where he may be, and thought the stockings might happen to hit him," said Sarah, reaching out her hand for the paper, and looking at it curiously. “Isn't it odd? Who knows, now, but the man she meant that for may be in this very hospital!"

"I guess not," said Netty. "There isn't a single Massachusetts man here. They're mostly from New York, and Maine and Connecticut, so far as I have found out. I suppose I'd better put it back," she said,

folding the paper up, and holding the stocking open.

"Yes, indeed," said Sarah. "Put it back, by all means. Who knows what'll come of it. It's something like a letter in a bottle

at sea!"

"What!" exclaimed Netty, in unutterable amazement; "like a bottle at sea! What's the matter with you? What do you mean?"

Sarah colored: hidden very deep in her heart she had a vein of romance which did not show on the surface of her shrewd, active nature, and which never took form in words. "Why, I mean," she replied, "that it is trusting a thing to just as blind chance to stick it in a stocking and send it to the Sanitary Commission to be allotted to any hospital between Maine and Mississippi, as it is to cork it in a bottle and toss it out in the Atlantic Ocean. Of course that girl put that name in that stocking to reach somebody, and I just hope it will reach him. I don't suppose it ever will, though, and yet I imagine stranger things have happened.'

Perhaps she put it in just for fun," said Netty, as she pushed the little roll of paper tight down again into the stocking from which she had taken it. "I think that's quite as likely."

'Why, I don't see any fun in it," said Sarah.

"Nor I either," replied Netty; "but then things may seem funny in Provincetown which wouldn't anywhere else. It's a real New England name, 'Matilda Bennet.' I wonder how she looks. An old maid, I guess. I don't know why I think so."

"Well, if she did it for fun, as you say, it's more likely to be a young girl," said Sarah. "A girl too young to think whether it were proper or not."

Early every Saturday morning clean. clothes were given out in the hospital. All the convalescent men who were able came for their own; and the ward nurses came for what they needed for the men who were in bed. It was always an interesting day to Netty and Sarah. They liked to survey the faces of the men, and to watch their behavior as they received the clothes. It was pathetic to see the importance which the little incident assumed in the lives of some of them, the child-like pleasure they would show in an especially nice garment, the difficulty they would find in selecting a pocket handkerchief. The stockings were Netty's especial department; and she had endless amusement on the subject of sizes.

"Never yet did I hand a man a pair of stockings," she said, "that he didn't look at them, turn them over, and hand them back to me, and say he'd like a pair either a little longer or a little shorter. It's too droll."

On this particular Saturday morning, Netty was much afraid the stockings would not hold out to go round. One or two pairs had come out of the wash so hopelessly ragged that even her patience had not been equal to the trials of mending them; and the washerwomen were still in arrears with part of the wash, so that the piles on the stocking shelf looked ominously low. By noon there were not a dozen pairs left.

"I'm going to begin to offer the scarlet ones, now," said Netty. "It's a shame not to use them, they're so nice. Perhaps I can put them off on somebody who is color-blind."

No man so color-blind as not to be startled at that flaming red! Man after man refused them. Netty held them out, saying with her most winning smile, "Here is a very nice pair of stockings; perhaps you like red," but man after man replied, some timidly, some brusquely, that they'd rather have any other color. At last came a man who wanted two pairs,-one for himself, one for the man who slept in the next bed to him, and was asleep now; and the nurse thought he'd most likely not wake up before night, for he'd been taking laudanum for the toothache.

"Here's my chance," thought Netty, and laid the red stockings on the pile of clean clothes to be carried to the unconscious victim of the toothache.

"I suppose he'll like these red stockings as well as any," said she quietly. "They are very nice."

The man looked askance at them.

"Powerful bright, aint they. I shouldn't like 'em myself; but perhaps he wont mind;" and he walked away with them.

"What'll you wager they don't come back?" said Sarah.

"Nothing," said Netty, "I expect them." The afternoon wore on, and the red stockings did not come back. The last man from the last ward had come, taken his Sunday ration of clean clothes, and gone, and not a single pair of stockings was left on the shelf.

"Wasn't it lucky I put those red stockings off on that poor toothache fellow in his sleep?" laughed Netty. "I should have come one pair short if I hadn't." The words had not more than left her lips when