“Where are you going--not to Chattanooga?” “Only to Scott’s Plains. What’s your name?” “Horatio Higginbotham,” I have to reply, fearing she will laugh, though the name is well known in Salem. She does not laugh at all, but smiles divinely. “My name is Jeanie Bruce. And that’s my sister May. Come over, and I’ll introduce you.” We walk across the car and Miss Jeanie says to Miss May (who, it appears, is not asleep), “May, I want to introduce to you my friend, Mr. Higginbotham. Mr. Higginbotham, Miss May Bruce.” I bow to the more languid beauty, who does not rise, but smiles a twin sister of Miss Jeanie’s smile, showing her little white teeth and tapping her little foot in a way to make a man distracted which to look at. “I thought you didn’t seem to be getting on very well,” says the recumbent May, “but now, I suppose, I can go to sleep,” and she pulls the lace handkerchief back over her eyes, and Jeanie leads me (it is the word) back to our seat on the other side of the car. “We are twin sisters; and some people can’t tell one from the other. Could you?” And she takes off her hat, pushes the soft black mass back from her brow, and looks at me, frankly, sweetly. “I shouldn’t want to,” I say. I think I am getting on; but she looks at me as if puzzled, half displeased. “May is engaged,” she answers, “and I am not. I have been, though.” “Dear me,” I answer, heedlessly; “how old----” “Seventeen. But I never had a gen’leman ask me such a question before.” She is silent; I speechless. Yet I wish she would pronounce the t in “gentleman.” She does not bear malice long, but asks “where I come from?” “Boston,” I say; “and _I_ am twenty-three.” She laughs merrily, in forgiveness, with a dear, lovable, quick sense of humor. Then she scans me curiously. “I never saw a gen’leman from Boston before.” “There are some there,” I answer, humbly. “Of course we see plenty of commercial travellers,” she says, and the conversation languishes. I look out the window, for suggestions, at the tall mountain timber and the bearded gray moss. It suggests nothing but partridges. “But you have not yet told me whether you can tell us apart.” Thus challenged, I bring my eyes to hers; there is something dazzling about them that always makes it hard to see her face, except when she is looking away; my eyes wander not from hers, until she does look away--out the window--and I suddenly see something familiar in the face. “Is there much shooting about here?” I ask, abruptly, meaning game. “Yes, there is a terrible deal. Why, my cousin, Kirk Bruce, was only eighteen when he shot and killed another gen’leman at school.” “Dear me, I didn’t mean men,” I say. “I meant quail and partridges. And I thought I had seen you yesterday with a shot-gun down in that green bottom by the Tennessee. It might have been men, though; for your shot whistled about the ears of my friend, Mr. Coe.”