ould be
invaluable, and Miss Toothaker arose before him. She would no doubt
prove an excellent manager, and she was so unprepossessing in every way,
she would be unlikely to be appropriated by any widowed missionary. It
has been seen already that for Philip St. Leger to think and to act were
but quick, consecutive steps; it was so in this case. Upon his return to
Troy he called upon Madame X---- and explained his wishes. Miss
Toothaker was consulted, and accepted his proposition at once; she would
be on missionary ground at all events. True, she was conditionally
engaged to marry a Mr. Freeman Clarke, who was an itinerant preacher.
She had insisted that he should become a missionary. He had consented to
go as missionary to the Western frontiers. This did not meet Miss
Toothaker's views; foreign missionary or nothing. Mr. Clarke's
conscience did not send him to any Booriooboolah Gha, he said.

The engagement had been for some time in this state of contention, when
the proposal of going to Turkey as "assistant" put an end to it.

Miss Arethusa retired to her room triumphantly, and exultingly wrote to
her lover the facts in the case--except that she left him to infer that
she was going to Turkey, as she had always wished, a missionary's wife.

Now that Mr. Freeman Clarke's "blessing had taken its flight," it all at
once assumed that brightness of which the poet speaks. He would have
argued and urged, even consented to have gone to the ends of the earth,
but he saw from his lady's letter it was too late. He solaced himself
somewhat by replying to her dolorously, hoping that she might perceive
his heart was broken and be sorry. He closed loftily by saying: "You
advise me, my dear Arethusa--allow me to call you thus for the last
time--to find a heart worthier and better. It was unkind in you to urge
upon me an impossibility. None but Napoleon ever scorned the word
impossible."

Whether Mr. Freeman Clarke derived his inspiration for the itineracy
from his lady-love is not for us to decide; this much is certain: from
the day the "Atlantic" sailed for the Old World with Miss Toothaker on
board his zeal flagged, and soon gave out altogether. His love for
souls settled down upon one Annette Jones, the plain daughter of a plain
farmer, whom he married, and lived happily enough with upon a small,
rocky farm in the State of Vermont. In times of "revival," he became an
"exhorter," and very fervent in prayer. Upon one occasion he so