oor,
and towing me in behind her, shut it.

"Well, Mar, here we are," announced Miss Sellars. An enormously stout
lady, ornamented with a cap that appeared to have been made out of a
bandanna handkerchief, rose to greet us, thus revealing the fact
that she had been sitting upon an extremely small horsehair-covered
easy-chair, the disproportion between the lady and her support being
quite pathetic.

"I am charmed, Mr.--"

"Kelver," supplied Miss Sellars.

"Kelver, to make your ac-quain-tance," recited Mrs. Sellars in the tone
of one repeating a lesson.

I bowed, and murmured that the honour was entirely mine.

"Don't mention it," replied Mrs. Sellars. "Pray be seated."

Mrs. Sellars herself set the example by suddenly giving way and dropping
down into her chair, which thus again became invisible. It received her
with an agonised groan.

Indeed, the insistence with which this article of furniture throughout
the evening called attention to its sufferings was really quite
distracting. With every breath that Mrs. Sellars took it moaned wearily.
There were moments when it literally shrieked. I could not have accepted
Mrs. Sellars' offer had I wished, there being no chair vacant and no
room for another. A young man with watery eyes, sitting just behind me
between a fat young lady and a lean one, rose and suggested my taking
his place. Miss Sellars introduced me to him as her cousin Joseph
something or other, and we shook hands.

The watery-eyed Joseph remarked that it had been a fine day between
the showers, and hoped that the morrow would be either wet or dry; upon
which the lean young lady, having slapped him, asked admiringly of the
fat young lady if he wasn't a "silly fool;" to which the fat young lady
replied, with somewhat unnecessary severity, I thought, that no one
could help being what they were born. To this the lean young lady
retorted that it was with precisely similar reflection that she herself
controlled her own feelings when tempted to resent the fat young lady's
"nasty jealous temper."

The threatened quarrel was nipped in the bud by the discretion of Miss
Sellars, who took the opportunity of the fat young lady's momentary
speechlessness to introduce me promptly to both of them. They also,
I learned, were cousins. The lean girl said she had "erd on me," and
immediately fell into an uncontrollable fit of giggles; of which the
watery-eyed Joseph requested me to take no notice, explaining that she
a