Hall Caine was accused, when he began writing, of obscurity, of a predilection for tortuous phrases. "I think that now I have almost gone too far in the other direction," he says; "the critics blame me for a neglect of style. But--you remember the story of Gough and his diamond ring--I am determined not to let any diamond ring get between me and my audience. Writing should not get between the reader and the picture. I take a great joy in sheer lucidity, and if any sentence of mine does not at the very first sight express my meaning, I rewrite it. Obscurity of style indicates that the writer is not entirely master of what he has to say." [Illustration] NEIGHBOR KING. BY COLLINS SHACKELFORD. When my husband, Micah Pyncheon, died he left me alone with our baby girl, the farm, an' the grasshoppers. It happened in Kansas, in '76. You don't mind my crying now, do you? 't seems as though I'd never get the tears all out of me. The time ain't so far away, nor me so old, but that those days spread out before me like a panorama, nat'ral as life. I can feel that hot summer sun, not a cloud in the sky, an' the smell of the bakin' earth movin' all the time in waves of heat until you got dizzy with the motion an' the scent. An' the grasshoppers! You can't know how they came a-flyin' by day an' by night in great brown clouds; how they crept an' crawled an' squirmed through the wheat an' the corn an' the grass, bitin' an' chewin' every green thing, leavin' nothin' but black an' dry shreds, an' the earth more desolate than if a fire had swept over it. They were everywhere out-of-doors; they came into the house--down the chimney when they couldn't get in through the door--an' I've picked their bony bodies out of my pockets many a time, an' knocked 'em off the table so as I might put down a dish. If you killed one, a thousand came to the funeral. All day an' all night you heard the click, click, click of their bodies as they walked about, jumped here an' there, or rubbed against one another. An' poor Micah's body under the blanket--they were all about it, an' I havin' to brush 'em away. Anybody would 'a' cried if they'd been in my place, such a dreary day was that--me an' baby all alone, with the village ten miles off, an' not a soul nearer than neighbor King, three miles away. Seems to me I don't know how Micah died, it was all so sudden like. All day he'd been out in the sun a-fightin' the hoppers, an' tryin' to work when he wasn't fightin'; an' he came in with his head a hangin' forward an' not a smile on his lips as he put up his hat an' rolled down his sleeves.