“You may laugh at me, grandfather, as much as you please, but Walter was made so nervous and uncomfortable by that old fellow’s disconcerting scrutiny that he acted almost silly. I have never seen him quite so ridiculously merry. That old Professor squinted even at Walter’s hands, as if he wished for a microscope to examine them, and after dinner while Walter was singing he edged up near the piano and peered down Walter’s throat, listening intently as if to catch some peculiar note for which he was waiting, all the time with his old head on one side like an ugly owl,” said the exasperated young woman. Lucy’s description of his old college friend and her manner of setting forth his idiosyncracies was too much for James Dunlap’s risibility. He threw back his head and incontinently laughed in his granddaughter’s pretty flushed face. “Oh! my, Oh! my! How old Cobb would enjoy this! My dearest, old Cobb Charlton is the jolliest, most amiable fellow on earth. He would not wound the sensibilities of a street-dog, and is one of the best bred gentlemen alive. Oh! my, Lucy! You’ll be the death of me yet with your whimsical notions,” cried the fine old fellow leaning back in his chair, shaking with laughter. “Well, I don’t care; it is just as I said, for finally, he seemed to discover something about Walter for which he had been seeking. I saw a self-satisfied smile steal over his face as he nodded his bushy white head. Then he stared at you as if amazed, and then, if I be not blind and I don’t think that I am, he had the impertinence to look at me with, actually, pity in his big, staring black eyes,” retorted Lucy angrily as she recalled the events of the previous evening. “Imagination, pure and simple!” exclaimed Mr. Dunlap, continuing to laugh, enjoying hugely Lucy’s anger. “Charlton was possibly thinking about something connected with his favorite science and probably did not even see us while apparently he was casting about those peculiar glances that you depict so vividly.” “Even so, I think it ill-bred and unkind in him to make my husband the subject of a study in ethnology.” “Ah!” gasped her grandfather, as though a sudden pain had struck his heart. Some new idea had flashed upon his brain, the laughter vanished from lips and the color from his face. He straightened up in his chair while a look of anxiety replaced the merriment that had sparkled in his eyes. “Why, what is the matter, grandfather?” cried Lucy in undisguised alarm at the change in his countenance. “Nothing, my darling, it will pass away. Please hand me a glass of water,” the old man answered. Lucy hastened to fill a glass with water and while she was so engaged Mr. Dunlap struggled to master some emotion that had caused the sudden departure of all his jocoseness of the moment before she said that her husband had been made a subject of a study in ethnology.