for information, and that he could not read the newspapers. A letter--even if there were any remote presumption as to his address--would lie indefinitely in the mail, and find its way at last to the Dead Letter Office. Walter realized after a time that Justus intended to return no more--the woman he loved was his brother's wife. Justus had probably put the breadth of the State between them, Walter sneeringly concluded. He made haste to quarrel with his wife's mother, in his perverse relish of aught that might give Theodosia pain, and they quitted her home and took up their residence in the house in which Theodosia had once expected to live, the scene of the early struggles of "Fambly." Theodosia's beauty could hardly be said to fade; it disappeared in the overblowing. She grew very fat and unwieldy as the years wore on; her face broadened, her florid complexion degenerated into a mottled red and purple. She was no prettier than her mother had been when she ridiculed her lover's eulogy of her mother's spiritual beauty. She had a hard life with her drunken, idle, slothful husband, who habitually imputed to her agency every evil that had ever befallen him, holding it to excuse him from all exertion to better their very poor estate, and whose affection had been easily kindled by her beauty and as easily extinguished. * * * * * Justus, self-exiled from the mountains, tramped the valley roads, hardly caring whither, and drifted finally to the outskirts of one of the large manufacturing towns of Tennessee. He worked for some seasons doggedly, drudgingly, on a farm near by, but found a sort of entertainment in the sights and sounds within the city limits, as having no association with the past which his memory dreaded. He prospered in some sort, for although he was ignorant of all methods of skilled labor, fidelity is an art with so few proficients that friends and opportunities were not lacking. His progress was somewhat hampered, however, despite his evident intelligence, by a doubt which prevailed concerning his mental balance. He was often observed to stand and gaze smilingly, fondly, after any group of ragged, dirty children; he, although of the poorest, was profuse in gratuities to any callow beggar who did not know enough of the world's ways to expect nothing of such as he, as did the older ones. He could not read, but he bought newspapers from the smallest of the guild of newsboys, and meditatively turned the sheets in his hand, and then softly and slowly tore them to bits. And these things created a doubt of his sanity, for who could know how "Fambly" looked at him from the pinched face of every poor, and cold, and hungry child?