Dan'l is the most appealing child! I've always fancied the freckles and splinters and grime and cheek type of little boy, but Dan'l gets into your heart, some way. He makes me think of Andrea del Sarto's young St. John in the Wilderness, for he has, in addition to the unearthly sweetness in his eyes, a warmth of coloring at variance with the drained fairness of these islanders. His Canadian mother explains that,--"her that was Angerleek Larrydoo," as the neighbors say, and that just expresses it. She was--but she isn't any more. She's just the Deacon's "woman." (That is his own gallant phrase: "I guess likely my woman'll cal'late she c'n do fer y'u," he said when I asked for board.) She has a sort of petrified prettiness, the ghost of girlhood in a face furrowed and sagging with fretted years. Age and unhappiness have hardened about the sweetness of long ago--like a rose imbedded in ice at a country fair. And the Deacon! I didn't know it gave his like, in these lax days. He has a beautifully chiseled old face with an eagle beak and ice-blue eyes, and he looks as if his favorite winter sport were Turning Erring Daughters Out into the Snow. Dan'l is the only child at home now and they both adore him,--the mother with timid tenderness and the old man with fierce repression. Even the pup takes on character from the family. I call it Sweet-Alice-Ben-Bolt, because it very nearly weeps with delight when you give it a smile and trembles with fear at your frown. The Deacon is of that large and austere order of persons who "like dogs, in their place"; S.A.B.B. wears his stumpy, little tail at half mast whenever the head of the house is near. There is some mystery about Dan'l's watching for a letter. His mother yearns over him and says,--"But, maybe to-morrow, Dannie!" but his father sneers, and then the child seems to shrivel before my eyes. I wish I could slip some silver-gray fog in this letter, to rub on your burning brow! J. V. _Some Day in October._ My days slip by like pearl-gray beads on a rosary, Michael Daragh. I honestly haven't an idea of the date. But I know Dan'l's story. We were sitting on the toppled-over tombstone of a sturdy old patriarch who had buried four wives, just after the postman went by one day, and the child said, defensively, as if in answer to my thought---- "But I did get a letter, once!" I kept mouse-still, and he told me. Last summer there came to Three Meadows a lazy, charming, gypsy sort of fellow from nowhere, stony broke, to whom the Deacon gave work for his board. Out of Danny's clipped phrases I could build up the rogue's personality,--the gay, lavish, careless, happy-go-lucky-ness which warmed the cockles of the little lad's hungry heart.