specimens which he had shipped as freight from New Orleans just previous to his own departure, but which for two months he had mourned over as lost. It dowered him with an embarrassment of riches. During a week his bed, sofa, table, wash-stand, chairs and floor were littered with the scraps of paper and tufts of cotton and of Spanish moss which had served as wrappers, and with hundreds of crystals, ores and other minerals. Over this confusion the Doctor domineered with a face wrinkled by happy anxiety, laying down one queer-colored pebble to pick up another, pronouncing this a Smithite and that a Brownite trying his blowpipe on them and then his hammer, and covering all the furniture with a layer of learned smudge and dust and gravel. "Papa, you have puckered your forehead up till it is like a baked apple," Lillie would remonstrate. "You look more than five thousand years old; you look as though you might be the grandfather of all the mummies. Now do leave off bothering those poor Smithites and Hivites and Amelekites, and come and take a walk." "My dear, you havn't the least idea how necessary it is to push one's discoveries to a certainty as quickly as possible," would answer the Doctor, meanwhile peering at a specimen through his magnifying glass. "The world won't wait for me to take your time. If I don't work fast enough in my researches, it will set somebody else at the job. It makes no allowance for Louisiana ideas of leisure and,"--here he suddenly breaks off his moralizing and exclaims, "My dear, this is _not_ a Brownite; it is a Robinsonite--a most unquestionable and superb Robinsonite." "Oh papa! I wish I was an unquestionable Robinsonite; then you would take some sort of interest in me," says Miss Lillie. But the Doctor is lost in the ocean of his new discovery, and for fifteen minutes has not a word to say on any subject comprehensible to the young lady. Two hours of every afternoon were devoted by father and daughter to a long walk in company, sometimes a mere shopping or calling tour, but generally an excursion into the pure country of fields and forest as yet so easily reached from the centre of New Boston. The Doctor preserved a reminiscence of his college botany, and attempted to impart some of his knowledge of plants to Lillie. But she was a hopeless scholar; she persisted in caring for little except human beings and such literature as related directly to them, meaning thereby history, biography, novels and poetry; she remained delightfully innocent of all the ologies. "You ought to have been born four thousand years ago, Lillie," he exclaimed in despair over some new instance of her incapacity to move in his favorite grooves. "So far as you are concerned, Linnæus, Humboldt, Lyell, Faraday, Agassiz and Dana might as well not have lived. I believe you will go through life without more knowledge of science than just enough to distinguish between a plant and a pebble."