The day of the wedding the blow came. A very starched-up little boy with strawberry juice frescoed around his mouth brought in a note from Maybelle and a tightly-rolled manuscript tied with blue baby-ribbon. In the note she said that she thought it would be so romantic to "write up her own wedding--recalling the dear, dead days when she was a neophyte in letters." We handed the manuscript to Miss Larrabee, from whom, as she read, came snorts: "'Drawing-room!' Huh! 'Music-room.' Heavens to Betsy! 'Peculiar style of beauty!' Oh, joy! 'Looked like a wood-nymph in the morn.' Wouldn't that saturate you! 'The Apollo-like beauty of the groom.'" Miss Larrabee groaned as she rose, and putting her raincoat on the floor by her chair she exclaimed: "Do you people know what I am going to do? I have got to lie right down here and have a fit!" VII "By the Rod of His Wrath" Saturday afternoons, when the town is full, and farmers are coming in to the office to pay their subscriptions for the _Weekly_, it is our habit, after the paper is out, to sit in the office and look over Main Street, where perhaps five hundred people are milling, and consider with one another the nature of our particular little can of angle-worms and its relation to the great forces that move the world. The town often seems to us to be dismembered from the earth, and to be a chunk of humanity drifting through space by itself, like a vagrant star, forgotten of the law that governs the universe. Go where our people will, they find change; but when they come home, they look out of the hack as they ride through town, seeing the old familiar buildings and bill-boards and street-signs, and say with surprise, as Mathew Boris said after a busy and eventful day in Kansas City, where he had been marketing his steers: "Well, the old town seems to keep right on, just the same."