“He actually followed Herbert to the front door to supplicate—Herbert declares, ‘with tears in both eyes’—that he would at least tell him if his information was ‘authentic, or if it might not be that he was trying to scare him?’ Herbert excused himself upon the plea of pressing business, but invited him to ‘drop into the office some time if he would have further particulars.’ “Our plot works to a charm. The reverend swain sets out ‘this very week’ for Powhatan, and ‘means to have the matter settled.’ So, look out for him! “All this rigmarole is strictly true. No boy of seventeen was ever more angrily jealous or desperate. You may, if you like, let the Montrosians into the fun, but, until the matter is settled, don’t let the key pass into other hands. “Isn’t it glorious? Two bald heads ducking and ogling to one fortunate damsel—their bleared eyes looking ‘pistols for two, coffee for one!’ at each other? What an entrancing interruption to the monotony of a life that, until now, has flowed as gently as a canal stream over a grade of a foot to a mile?” I remark, _en passant_, what will probably interest not a living creature of this generation—to wit, that neither of the competitors won the amiable woman they made ridiculous by their wintry wooing. She returned a kindly negative to both bachelor and widower, and died, as she had lived, the beloved maiden “Auntie” of numerous nieces and nephews. Before transcribing other passages from the same letter—one of unusual length even for that epistolary age—I must retrace my steps to pick up the first thread of what was in time to thicken into a “cord of stronger twine.” When I was sixteen I began to write a book. It was a school-girl’s story—a picture crudely done, but as truthful as I could make it—of what was going on in the small world I thought large, and every personage who figured in it was a portrait. In that book I lived and moved, and had my inmost being for that year. I spoke to nobody of what I was doing. The shrinking from confiding to my nearest and dearest what I was writing, was reluctance unfeigned and unconquerable in the case of this, my best-beloved brain-child. None of my own household questioned me as to what went on in the hours spent in my “study,” as the corner, or closet, or room where I planted myself and desk, was named. We had a way of respecting one another’s eccentricities that had no insignificant share in maintaining the harmony which earned for ours the reputation of a singularly happy family.