There was laughter, naturally, over the Showman's absurd, yet not altogether unsentimental story and, after its recital he stood, undoubtedly, more nearly on a social footing with the others. There were his clothes, of course, and another excrudescence or two, but these were incidentals. The wayfarers did not even yawn, but looked inquiringly at the beaming and bestowed-by-Providence Colonel. After all, it is doubtful if there be anything better in the world than a spinster--if she be of the right sort. Of course all spinsters are not of the right sort; few of us are. When this one especially fine spinster was called upon by the Colonel she did not know exactly what to do. She should have been as perfectly at ease and as possessed of aplomb as any voluptuously beautiful poser in a ball-room, yet she was somewhat embarrassed. She should not have been. She was an exquisitely beautiful woman, in the view of those who know things. With her thin nose and thin lips and general expression of cultivation and eyes in which showed loving regard and thinking, she was adorable to those upon whose eyes had been rubbed the great ointment of perception. Her one hundred and twenty-five pounds of existing womanhood, neat and good, was worth far more than its weight in gold or any other metal. When called upon this is what the spinster said most bravely: "Colonel Livingstone, there is but one untold story of which I know and I wish I were capable of explaining to all of you how full of real life it was. Yet it seems so simple and silly that it is commonplace, though it isn't. Do you remember, Colonel, about the great tower of the Campanile, in Venice and the square down upon the pavements of which the pigeons flutter to be fed? Well this is a story--a true one--of something like those same pigeons and the Doge who first instituted the feeding of them, five hundred years ago, or something like that, only the scene and time are different. As you know, Colonel, I live in Chicago, and this is but the story of the pigeons of St. Mark's transferred to the corner of Clark and Madison streets in a city in another hemisphere. And, as I said, it is all true. This is what actually happened." A LITERARY LOVE AFFAIR This is a love story of two of the class who know things. Margaret Selwyn was a graduate of one of the bluest women's colleges between the two seas, and, more than that, she had a background of home culture and refinement, having parents of brains. She came from college with those acquirements, which shine exteriorly, and had an incurved back, and was "tailor made" from head to heel, yet having within her all that gentleness and greatness of heart which make a woman better than anything else, not even excluding the strawberry upon which the Right Reverend Bishop pronounced such a sincere eulogy.