Forty thousand words--and that is the number we have piled up in this story--is a large number of words to string together without a heroine. That is almost as bad as the dictionary, in which He and She are always hundreds of pages apart and never meet,--not even in the "Z's" at the end,--which is why the dictionary is so unpopular, perhaps. But this is the story of a man, and naturally it must have many heroines. For you know men--they are all alike! First, Mrs. Mary Barclay was a heroine--you saw her face, strong and clean and sharply chiselled with a great purpose; then Miss Lucy--black-eyed, red-cheeked, slender little Miss Lucy--was a heroine, but she married General Ward; and then Ellen Culpepper was a heroine, but she fluttered out of the book into the sunlight, and was gone; and then came Jane Mason,--and you have seen her girlish beauty, and you will see it develop into gentle womanhood; but the real heroine,--of the real story,--you have not seen her face. You have heard her name, and have seen her moving through these pages with her back consciously turned to you--for being a shy minx, she had no desire to intrude until she was properly introduced. And now we will whirl her around that you may have a good look at her. Let us begin at the ground: as to feet--they are not too small--say three and a half in size. And they support rather short legs--my goodness, of course she has legs--did you think her shoes were pinned to her over-skirt? Her legs carry around a plump body,--not fat--why, certainly not--who ever heard of a fat heroine (the very best a heroine can do for comfort is to be plump)--and so beginning the sentence over again, being a plump little body, there is a neck to account for--a neck which we may look at, but which is so exquisite that it would be hardly polite to consider it in terms of language. Only when we come to the chin that tips the oval of the face may we descend to language, and even then we must rise and flick the red mouth with, but a passing word. But this much must be plainly spoken. The nose does turn up--not much--but a little (Bob used to say, just to be good and out of the way)! That, however, is mere personal opinion, and of little importance here. But the eyes are brown--reddish brown, with enough white at the corners to make them seem liquid; only liquid is not the word. For they are radiant--remember that word, for we may come back to it, after we are done with the brow--a wide brow--low enough for Dickens and Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte, and for Longfellow and Whittier and Will Carleton in his day, and high enough for Tennyson at the temples, but not so high but that the gate of the eyes has to shut wearily when Browning would sail through the current of her soul. As to hair--Heaven knows there is plenty of that, but it had rather a checkered career. As she clung to her mother's apron and waved her father away to war, she was a