“Yes, I didn’t always entertain these views concernin’ romance. You wouldn’t believe it, but there was a time when I just nacherally went careerin’ round enveloped in fantasies. I was young then—just about the time I married paw. Every novel that was read to me, I mean that I read”—Mrs. Yellett blushed a deep copper color through her many coats of tan—“convinced me that I was the heroine thereof. And, nacherally, I turned over to paw the feachers and characteristics of the hero in said book I happened to be enjoyin’ at the time. Paw never knew it, but sometimes he was a dook, and it was plumb hard work. Just about as hard as ropin’ a mountain-lion an’ sayin’, ‘remember, you are a sheep from this time henceforth, and trim your action accordin’.’ I’d say to paw, ‘Let’s walk together in the gloaming, here in this deserted garden’; and paw would say, ‘Name o’ Gawd, woman, have you lost your mind? It’s plumb three hundred and fifty miles to the Tivoli beer-garden in Cheyenne, and it ain’t deserted, either!’ “Then I’d wring my hands in anguish, same as the Lady Mary, an’ paw would declare I was locoed. He seemed a heap more nacheral when I pretended he was ‘Black Ranger, the Pirate King.’ His language came in handy, and his cartridge-belt and pistol all came in Black Ranger’s outfit. Yes, it was a heap easier playing he was a pirate than a dook. All this happened back to Salt Lake, where me an’ paw was married.” Mrs. Yellett looked towards the mountain-range that separated her from the Mormon country, and her listeners realized that she was verging perilously close to confidences. Mary Carmichael, who dreaded missing any detail of the chronicle that dealt with paw in the rôle of apocryphal duke, hastened to say: “And you lost your taste for romance, finally?” “In Salt Lake I was left to myself a whole lot-there was reasons why I didn’t mingle with the Mormon herd. Paw was mighty attentive to me, but them was troublous times for paw. I pastures myself with the fleetin’ figures of romance the endoorin’ time and enjoys myself a heap. When paw wasn’t a dook or a pirate king, unbeknownst to himself, like as not he was Sir Marmaduke Trevelyun, or somebody entitled to the same amount of dog.