in store clothes that
look a little too fine,--outside. Wait till washing-day comes!"

The good lady had her own standards for testing humanity, and they were
not wholly unworthy of consideration; they were quite as much to be
relied on as the judgments of the travelling phrenologist, who sent his
accomplice on before him to study out the principal personages in the
village, and in the light of these revelations interpreted the bumps,
with very little regard to Gall and Spurzheim, or any other authorities.

Even with the small amount of information obtained by the search among
his papers and effects, the gossips of the village had constructed
several distinct histories for the mysterious stranger. He was an agent
of a great publishing house; a leading contributor to several important
periodicals; the author of that anonymously published novel which had
made so much talk; the poet of a large clothing establishment; a spy of
the Italian, some said the Russian, some said the British, Government; a
proscribed refugee from some country where he had been plotting; a
school-master without a school, a minister without a pulpit, an actor
without an engagement; in short, there was no end to the perfectly
senseless stories that were told about him, from that which made him out
an escaped convict to the whispered suggestion that he was the eccentric
heir to a great English title and estate.

The one unquestionable fact was that of his extraordinary seclusion.
Nobody in the village, no student in the University, knew his history.
No young lady in the Corinna Institute had ever had a word from him.
Sometimes, as the boats of the University or the Institute were returning
at dusk, their rowers would see the canoe stealing into the shadows as
they drew near it. Sometimes on a moonlight night, when a party of the
young ladies were out upon the lake, they would see the white canoe
gliding ghost-like in the distance. And it had happened more than once
that when a boat's crew had been out with singers among them, while they
were in the midst of a song, the white canoe would suddenly appear and
rest upon the water,--not very near them, but within hearing
distance,--and so remain until the singing was over, when it would steal
away and be lost sight of in some inlet or behind some jutting rock.

Naturally enough, there was intense curiosity about this young man. The
landlady had told her story, which explained nothing. There was nobody
t