Readers of “Appleton’s Journal” in the early ’70’s must have looked forward from week to week to the stories of Albert Webster. For, often as he wrote, he always had a story to tell. It might be merely a romance of incident; it was usually a situation of very human significance; it always showed narrative instinct. With this native sense he was experimenting variously toward his art, while through his investigations of prisons, courts, and medical advice he was developing a serious and definite philosophy of life. But his own life was doomed. The quest of health, very like Stevenson’s, may be read in the titles of his descriptive essays during 1875 and 1876: _Spring Days in Aiken_, _From New York to Aspinwall_, _The Isthmus and Panama_, _Up the Mexican Coast_, _Winter Days in California_, etc. On the steamer from San Francisco to Honolulu he died, and was buried in the Pacific. He was betrothed to Una, eldest daughter of Hawthorne. Of his many stories perhaps the most striking is _An Operation in Money_ (“Appleton’s Journal,” September 27, 1873, volume x, page 387); the nicest in adjustment, _Miss Eunice’s Glove_, printed below. _The Daphne_ (“Appleton’s Journal,” 1873, volume x, page 290) and _A Fool’s Moustache_ (ibid., 1874, volume xii, page 259) read as if sketched for the stage. How he kept at his work appears pathetically in his leaving behind a tale laid at Santa Barbara and published after his death, _The Owner of “Lara”_ (ibid., 1877, new series, volume ii, page 350). MISS EUNICE’S GLOVE [_From the “Atlantic Monthly,” July, 1873_] I For a long time blithe and fragile Miss Eunice, demure, correct in deportment, and yet not wholly without enthusiasm, thought that day the unluckiest in her life on which she first took into her hands that unobtrusive yet dramatic book, “Miss Crofutt’s Missionary Labors in the English Prisons.” It came to her notice by mere accident, not by favor of proselyting friends; and such was its singular material, that she at once devoured it with avidity. As its title suggests, it was the history of the ameliorating endeavors of a woman in criminal society, and it contained, perforce, a large amount of tragic and pathetic incident. But this last was so blended and involved with what Miss Eunice would have skipped as commonplace, that she was led to digest the whole volume,--statistics, philosophy, comments, and all. She studied the analysis of the atmosphere of cells, the properties and waste of wheaten flour, the cost of clothing to the general government, the whys and wherefores of crime and evil-doing; and it was not long before there was generated within her bosom a fine and healthy ardor to emulate this practical and courageous pattern.