Shortly afterward, a boy who had been playing truant and the Jews' harp at the same time, in a subdued and melancholy way under the window, and who had, doubtless, been bribed to undertake his present commission through some extraordinary means, entered the school-room, and laid on my desk a note from the auburn-haired fisherman. It was hastily scrawled in lead pencil, on a leaf torn from a memorandum. The fisherman confessed to all the meekness and long suffering, without the cheerful intrepidity of Mary's little lamb! He would do all his waiting outside. Mr. Levi was down from West Wallen to-day, and said that he had heard somebody say that there were four letters came for the teacher in last night's mail. Would I like to drive over to West Wallen and get them. The fisherman did not believe that I had been in earnest in the prudish and unreasonable notions I had propounded when he left me the other evening. "Prudish!" In my newly-acquired elevation of mind, I hugged the term with a deep, intense, and mysterious delight. Oh, if my mother could only know--if my elder sister could only know that I had actually been accused of prudishness! It was in the glow and inspiration of this idea that I indited the answer to Mr. Rollin's missive: "Why would he make it unpleasant and disagreeable for me to do what seemed so plainly my duty?"--and dispatched the same by the pensive and unpunished truant, who was soon heard again revelling in the stolen sweets of his Jews' harp beneath the window. After this I had no further intercourse with the fisherman for some days. If I chanced to meet him in the lane, Rebecca was always with me. He came one evening to the Ark. The young people were there, singing. Then I heard, from time to time, of his taking Rebecca to drive, and congratulated myself that, through my composed wisdom and forethought, the little world of Wallencamp was destined to move very smoothly, on the whole. "I wonder why Mr. Rollin don't go home," observed Grandma Keeler, complacently, on one of those rare occasions when the Keeler family circle held quiet possession of the Ark before the songful company had arrived. "He didn't use to stay but a week or two at a time, and all the rest o' the fishermen have been gone some time now; and he keeps them horses down here, and goes loungin' around with no more object than a butterfly in December." "I tell ye he's a makin' up to Beck," said Grandpa Keeler, with the knowing air of an old man accustomed to fathom mysteries of this peculiar nature. A spark shot out of Madeline's great, black eyes. Then she laughed unpleasantly. "There's something in the wind besides Beck," said she.