"Indeed he is!" said mamma, reading his rambling sentences very slowly: "I should judge him to be perfectly insane, and I only hope he will not come out here to pay his _fiancee_ a visit." "You know he requests me to send him funds to defray his expenses, Aunt Esther," said Ida quietly; "perhaps the lack of money will avert such a calamity." "What an unromantic conclusion to a love-letter!" said Gabrielle scornfully. The conversation turned to the depredations of the neighbors and neighbors' children upon the property. "Mr. Greeley's place" had always been looked upon in the light of public property, and intruders walked and drove through the grounds quite as a matter of course, and helped themselves freely to whatever they liked in the floral, fruit, or vegetable line. The young ladies, however, decided that they had submitted to such conduct quite long enough, and we sent to Sing Sing for some printed handbills warning trespassers off the place. Two or three days passed, and we had entirely forgotten Ida's erratic admirer, when Gabrielle returned from a morning walk with the information that an intoxicated man was sitting upon the steps of the side-hill house. She met mamma and Ida starting for a little stroll, and communicated this unpleasant news to them. Mamma, however, is not timid, and she walked on with Ida, determined to view the invader from afar, and then summon Bernard to dismiss him. A figure was sitting, as Gabrielle said, upon the piazza of the new house, but was so motionless that Ida exclaimed laughingly: "It is a scarecrow placed there by some one in retaliation for our notice to trespassers to keep off the grounds." As they passed it, however, the scarecrow slowly lifted its head and addressed them with: "Is this Mr. Greeley's place?" "Yes," said mamma. "And is this young lady Miss Ida?" "Yes." "You have received, I believe, a few letters from me, Miss Ida: my name is Hudson." Fortunately our family are not of a fainting disposition, for a _tete-a-tete_ with a lunatic was a situation requiring some nerve and perfect self-control; so, although mamma and Ida were much alarmed upon learning the name of their visitor, they neither screamed nor fainted, and mamma invited him quite courteously to walk up to the house. Mr. Hudson was a tall, powerful man, with cunning, restless, gray eyes, was well dressed, and wore a linen duster. He had come, he said, seven hundred miles to see Ida. Upon reaching the house, he followed mamma into the dining-room where Marguerite, Gabrielle, and I were sitting at work. "Ah, Miss Gabrielle!" he said, "I supposed you were at school." One or two other rational remarks of the sort, and mamma's perfect _sang-froid_ so deceived me that I decided the supposed lunatic must be perfectly sane. In a moment, however, he looked somewhat uneasy, and said: "I have a long story to tell your niece, ma'am, but I feel a little bashful about speaking before so many young ladies."