rned suddenly to the hostess, putting up
his note-book, and throwing a silver dollar on the table to be changed.
"Married man myself, you know."

"I guess I hain't mentioned any names," said the woman in high glee. Her
husband went back to the kitchen, and she took the dollar away to a desk
in the corner of the room, and brought back the change.

"Who'd be a good person to talk with about the labor situation here?"
the young man asked, in pocketing his money.

"I d' know as I could hardly tell," said the hostess thoughtfully.
"There's Colonel Marvin, he's got the largest shoe-shop; and some the
hat-shop folks, most any of 'em would do. And then there's Mr.
Wilmington that owns the stocking mills; him or Mr. Jack Wilmington,
either one'd be good. Mr. Jack'd be the best, I guess. Or I don't
suppose there's anybuddy in the place 'd know more, if they'd a mind to
talk, than Mrs. Wilmington; unless it was Mis' Docter Morrell."

"Is Mr. Jack their son?" asked the reporter.

"Land! Why she ain't a day older, if she's that. He's their nephew."

"Oh, I see: second wife. Then _he's_ the young man, heigh!"

The hostess looked at the reporter with admiration. "Well, you do beat
the witch. If he hain't, I guess he might 'a' b'en."

The reporter said he guessed he would take another piece of that pie,
and some more coffee if she had it, and before he had finished them he
had been allowed to understand that if it was not for his being Mrs.
Wilmington's nephew Mr. Jack would have been Miss Northwick's husband
long ago; and that the love lost between the two ladies was not worth
crying for.

The reporter, who had fallen into his present calling by a series of
accidents not necessarily of final result in it, did not use arts so
much as instincts in its exercise. He liked to talk of himself and his
own surroundings, and he found that few men, and no women could resist
the lure thrown out by his sincere expansiveness. He now commended
himself to the hostess by the philosophical view he took of the popular
belief that Mrs. Wilmington was keeping her nephew from marrying any one
else so as to marry him herself when her husband died. He said that if
you were an old man and you married a young woman he guessed that was
what you had got to expect. This gave him occasion to enlarge upon the
happiness to be found only in the married state if you were fitly mated,
and on his own exceptional good fortune in it.

He was in the full flow o