preëminent qualities of the juggler’s mind and manners and morals affected his estimate. She laid great stress on the fact of the young man’s elaborate education, and was wont to toss her large head with a vertigo-provoking lightness as she averred, “Phemie warn’t a-spellin’ year in an’ year out ter marry one o’ these hyar Cove boys ez dunno B from bull-foot!” And Tubal Cain would sneer in sympathetic scorn, as if both he and his wife were not in precisely that sublime state of ignorance themselves. He shared her pride in a plan which the juggler had evolved to open a school in the little “church-house” when the crops should be laid by, and in the fact that this suggestion had met with the readiest acceptance for miles around, despite the prejudice touching his feats of magic. One night, Jane Ann Sims, with the dish-cloth in her hand, was alternately wiping the supper dishes in the shed-room and cheerfully wheezing breathless snatches of a most lugubrious hymn, while Royce and Euphemia sat on the steps of the passage, where the moon, now in her first quarter, drew outlines of the vines on the floor,--with here the similitude of a nest, whence now a wakeful, watching head protruded, and now a lifted wing, and now a downy, ball-like bulk; and here, with indistinct verges, a cluster of quivering trumpet-flowers, all dusky and blurring, like the smudging black-and-white study of some impressionist artist. Tubal Cain Sims, seeking company, was aware, as he entered his domicile, that he would find no welcome here, so he betook himself, with his pipe in hand, to the leisurely scene of his help-meet’s labors. There triumph awaited him, for Jane Ann Sims left the table and the dishes to the tallow dip and the candle-flies, to sink down in a chair and detail the fact that while he was gone to the blacksmith’s shop to get his team shod a wonderful event had happened. Parson Tynes had been here again! Tubal Cain Sims’s lower jaw dropped. Parson Tynes figured in his mind only as the troublous advocate of a dead-and-gone love, and he thought it a breach of the peace, in effect, to seek to disinter and resuscitate this ill-starred attachment. He growled adversely, but he did not reach the point of articulate remonstrance, for Jane Ann Sims majestically waved her limp dish-cloth at him as a signal to desist, and opened her mouth very wide to emit the cause of her prideful satisfaction in a loud and wheezy whisper,--which discreet demonstration came sibilantly to the ears of the young people outside, the only other human creatures within a mile, and occasioned them much unfilial merriment.