It is by some such only half-rational process that the most important questions of conduct are usually decided--sometimes luckily; in other cases, to the blighting of the whole life. Is it not rather a poor fist of a world after all, this in which we live, where the most critical and irrevocable decisions must be made while the inexperienced youth is tossed with gusts of passion and blinded by traditional prejudices or captivated by specious theories? The selection of wives and vocations, the two capital elements in human happiness and success, is generally guided by nothing higher than the caprice of those whose judgments are in the gristle. Often the whole course of life of the strong, clear-seeing man yet to come is changed forever by a boy's whim. The old allegorists painted the young man as playing chess with the devil; but chess is a game of skill. What the young man plays is often a child's game of pitch and toss, cross or pile, heads or tails, for stakes of fearful magnitude. Luckily for Hiram, as you and I know from our present acquaintance with Barbara, nothing more disastrous than disappointment was likely to happen to him from his inability to keep his mortifying resolves. The abandonment of them had simplified his feelings and brought him present relief. When he knocked on the jamb of the open front door of the Grayson farm-house, and was invited to come in by the mother, there was a wholeness in his feelings and purposes to which he had been a stranger for weeks. "Barb'ry," said Mrs. Grayson as she entered the kitchen, after giving Hiram a chair, "here's the master come to see you. I 'low he thought you mought be sick ur sumpin'." Barbara sat perched on the loom-bench, with her back to the web she had been weaving. Just now she was peeling, quartering, and coring summer apples to dry for winter stores. She untied her apron and went from the kitchen into the sitting-room, where Mason was looking about, as was his habit, in a quizzical, half-amused way. He had noted the wide stone fire-place, the blackness of whose interior was hidden by the bushy asparagus tops which filled it, and the wooden clock on the unpainted mantel-piece, which had a print of the death-bed of George Washington impaneled in its door. A stairway winding up in one corner gave picturesqueness to the room; diagonally across from this was a high post bed; there were some shuck-bottom chairs, a splint-bottom rocking-chair, and a bureau with a looking-glass on top. The floor was covered with a new rag-carpet, and the comfortable, home-like sentiment excited in Hiram's mind by the general aspect of the room was enhanced by a hearth cricket, which, in one of the crevices of the uneven flag-stones, was already emitting little vibrant snatches like the black fiddler that he was, tuning up for an evening performance.