th the spare sense of humor that sometimes revealed itself in her.

"Well, I guess that's something so," her father candidly admitted.
But the next time he consulted the helpless planchette as hopefully as
before. "You can't tell, you can't tell," he urged.

"The trouble seems to be that planchette can't tell," said Mrs. Durgin,
and they all laughed. They were not people who laughed a great deal, and
they were each intent upon some point in the future that kept them from
pleasure in the present. The little Canuck was the only one who suffered
himself a contemporaneous consolation. His early faith had so far
lapsed from him that he could hospitably entertain the wild psychical
conjectures of Whitwell without an accusing sense of heresy, and he
found the winter of northern New England so mild after that of Lower
Canada that he experienced a high degree of animal comfort in it, and
looked forward to nothing better. To be well fed, well housed, and well
heated; to smoke successive pipes while the others talked, and to catch
through his smoke-wreaths vague glimpses of their meanings, was enough.
He felt that in being promoted to the care of the stables in Jackson's
absence he occupied a dignified and responsible position, with a
confidential relation to the exile which justified him in sending
special messages to him, and attaching peculiar value to Jackson's
remembrances.

The exile's letters said very little about his health, which in the
sense of no news his mother held to be good news, but they were full
concerning the monuments and the ethnological interest of life in Egypt.

They were largely rescripts of each day's observations and experiences,
close and full, as his mother liked them in regard to fact, and
generously philosophized on the side of politics and religion for
Whitwell. The Eastern question became in the snow-choked hills of New
England the engrossing concern of this speculative mind, and he was
apt to spring it upon Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia at mealtimes and other
defenceless moments. He tried to debate it with Jombateeste, who
conceived of it as a form of spiritualistic inquiry, and answered
from the hay-loft, where he was throwing down fodder for the cattle
to Whitwell, volubly receiving it on the barn floor below, that he
believed, him, everybody got a hastral body, English same as Mormons.

"Guess you mean Moslems," said Whitwell, and Jombateeste asked the
difference, defiantly.

The letters which