humor.

Finally the question was decided, and the new boarder came, and
was duly installed in the family; and thence commenced a new era
in Sadie's life. Merry clerks and schoolboys she counted among her
acquaintances by the score. Grave, dignified, slightly taciturn men of
the Dr. Van Anden stamp she numbered also among her friends; but never
one quite like Dr. Douglass. This easy, graceful, courteous gentleman,
who seemed always to have just the right thing to say or do, at just
the right moment; who was neither wild nor sober; who seemed the
furthest possible remove from wicked, yet who was never by any chance
disagreeably good. His acquaintance with Sadie progressed rapidly. A
new element had come to mix in with her life. The golden days wherein
the two sisters had been much together, wherein the Christian sister
might have planted much seed for the Master in Sadie's bright young
heart, had all gone by. Perchance that sleeping Christian, nestled so
cosily among the cushions in Cousin Abbie's morning-room, might have
been startled and aroused, could she have realized that days like
those would never come back to her; that being misspent they had
passed away; that a new worker had come to drop seed into the
unoccupied heart; that never again would Sadie be as fresh, and as
guileless, and as easily won, as in those days which she had let slip
in idle, aye, worse than idle, slumber.

Sadie sealed and directed a letter to Ester and ran with it down
stairs. Dr. Douglass stood in the doorway, hat in hand.

"Shall I have the pleasure of being your carrier?" he said
courteously.

"Do you suppose you are to be trusted?" Sadie questioned, as she
quietly deposited the letter in his hat.

"That depends in a great measure on whether you repose trust in me.
The world is safer in general than we are inclined to think it. Who
lives in that little birdsnest of a cottage just across the way?"

"A dear old gentleman, Mr. Vane," Sadie answered, her voice taking
a tender tone, as it always did when any chance word reminded her of
Florence. "That is he standing in the gateway. Doesn't he look like a
grand old patriarch?"

As they looked Dr. Van Anden drove suddenly from around the corner,
and reined in his horses in front of the opposite gateway. They could
hear his words distinctly.

"Mr. Vane, let me advise you to avoid this evening breeze; it is
blowing up strongly from the river."

"Is Dr. Van Anden the old gentleman's nur