"DEAR MR. NETTLES: My niece, Susie Brown, tells me you have an engagement to drive with her this afternoon. Being unwilling to trust the dear child in a vehicle at livery, permit an old lady to put one of her buggies and fast trotters at your service." If Bob Nettles had one dearer wish than another, it was to see his little playmate once more, and make up that dispute before facing her cousin's pistol. Aunt Fanny's plan of detaining him was likely to thrive. Sudie came down, pale and tremulous as a little white withering rosebud--very pretty and timid and tender. There was a forced smile at meeting, and but few words. He had intended to say how sorry he was to have offended her, but he did not. He saw or felt that there was nothing to forgive between them now. His was but a shallow, practical mind, and she was only a timid, silly little girl; yet they knew of that unspoken love between them, and that there was a great trouble, without words. The mare stooped to her work and shook herself into a trot, the spokes whirling into feathery fans down the silvery-dusted pike cityward, and then, skirting its southern flanks, on golden-cushioned country roads, rolling smoother and lighter, and the swift wheels growing more wing-like at top speed; under silver-leafed poplars and lombardies tapering like road-side steeples; by thoroughfare and farm-gate; under beech and maple copses and broad oaks on the park-like common; by scarp and counterscarp and over the smooth glacis of earthworks, memorials of the late war; by woodlands of ash and beech, and over low fallow of redeemed marsh, right into the golden eyelashes of the sun. The great summer city lay northward under its nebulous canopy of dust, a soft hazy picture, dimpled with domes and spires. By surburban villas; by farmsteads overflowed by the swelling city; by log churches in cool nooks, contradicting the pretentious architecture about them; by happy evening lovers, and wives waiting at the gate for their home-coming husbands; by noisy German gardens, and revellers in quaint picturesque costumes; by rival coaches, and racing-buggies of the sporting gentry that tried to pass them, but soon gave out under the black mare's long, tireless stride; about the great city till the broad river lay all ablush before them with sunset. And then curving back into town, the soft dazzle melting into umber; through streets breaking into brilliants of parallel burners that end in a star, to the utter confusion of geometric definition; through streets of home-going multitudes, and by open summer windows showing the spread cloth and tableware; over the hoarse drum-beat of the bridge, and by the marble palaces of the dead looking cool and tranquil in the rising moon; winding the shell drive between Osage orange hedges; and then the half-aërial flight of those wing-like wheels is over for ever and for ever.