s I have seen a
young man like this one in his company. Who knows?

Affectionately yours, etc.

DR. BUTTS TO MRS. BUTTS.

MY BELOVED WIFE,--This letter will tell you more news than you would have
thought could have been got together in this little village during the
short time you have been staying away from it.

Lurida Vincent is engaged! He is a clergyman with a mathematical turn.
The story is that he put a difficult problem into one of the mathematical
journals, and that Lurida presented such a neat solution that the young
man fell in love with her on the strength of it. I don't think the story
is literally true, nor do I believe that other report that he offered
himself to her in the form of an equation chalked on the blackboard; but
that it was an intellectual rather than a sentimental courtship I do not
doubt. Lurida has given up the idea of becoming a professional
lecturer,--so she tells me,--thinking that her future husband's parish
will find her work enough to do. A certain amount of daily domestic
drudgery and unexciting intercourse with simple-minded people will be the
best thing in the world for that brain of hers, always simmering with
some new project in its least fervid condition.

All our summer visitors have arrived. Euthymia Mrs. Maurice Kirkwood and
her husband and little Maurice are here in their beautiful house looking
out on the lake. They gave a grand party the other evening. You ought
to have been there, but I suppose you could not very well have left your
sister in the middle of your visit: All the grand folks were there, of
course. Lurida and her young man--Gabriel is what she calls him--were
naturally the objects of special attention. Paolo acted as major-domo,
and looked as if he ought to be a major-general. Nothing could be
pleasanter than the way in which Mr. and Mrs. Kirkwood received their
plain country neighbors; that is, just as they did the others of more
pretensions, as if they were really glad to see them, as I am sure they
were. The old landlord and his wife had two arm-chairs to themselves,
and I saw Miranda with the servants of the household looking in at the
dancers and out at the little groups in the garden, and evidently
enjoying it as much as her old employers. It was a most charming and
successful party. We had two sensations in the course of the evening.
One was pleasant and somewhat exciting, the other was thrilling and of
strange and startling interest.

You r