Sam is on the Chicago Board of Trade and is one of our old-time boys. Two years ago he came back, roaringly prosperous, to visit for the first time since he had left, and pretty suddenly he discovered to his amazement that on packing up ten years before he'd left a pearl of great price behind, said pearl being Minnie. In other words he fell in love over his ears with her, and Minnie, who was one of our very nicest girls, with a disposition like triple distilled extract of charity, treated him like a dog. He stayed around for a month cluttering up the Briggs's front porch day and night, while Minnie put up an imitation of haughty indifference and careless frivolity which was as good as a show for every one in town except Sam, who couldn't see through it. That's one of our small town assets--you get to look on at most of the love affairs. We watched Minnie and Sam with our hearts in our mouths for fear she'd carry it too far and lose him, for every one had it straight from Mary Askinson, who is intimately acquainted with a close friend of Minnie's old school chum, that Minnie had been in love with Sam since they graduated from the high school together. It was all we could do from breaking in and interfering, especially when Sam went off his feed and began to throw out ugly talk about going to the Philippines or some place where fever can be gotten cheap. But one morning Sam came down-town, and the first man who saw his face called up his wife and told her the good news. Talk about extra editions for distributing news! Before a city paper could have gotten an extra on the street, five intimate friends of Minnie's had dropped in casually to see her, and when they saw her face, of course they fell on her neck. Sam told Chet Frazier next day that it made him so mad to think he'd lived twenty years in the same town with Minnie and had never appreciated his blessings that he felt like climbing Pikes Peak and kicking himself off. There's Mary Smith. She's our prize old maid and dresses like a mail sack full of government seeds, but they say she was the prettiest girl in Homeburg when young Cyrus McCord went to Chicago to carve out his future so that he could come home and marry her. But Cyrus didn't carve out his future. He married it instead, and Mary is almost fifty now, living alone and getting peculiar, like so many of our lonely old folks do.