ece in the parlor, then started for the trolley
again. Outside the house we encountered a double rank of twenty or
thirty of Miss Porter's young ladies arriving from a walk, and we stood
aside, ostensibly to let them have room to file past, but really to look
at them. Presently one of them stepped out of the rank and said:

"You don't know me, Mr. Twichell; but I know your daughter, and that
gives me the privilege of shaking hands with you."

Then she put out her hand to me, and said:

"And I wish to shake hands with you too, Mr. Clemens. You don't remember
me, but you were introduced to me in the arcade in Milan two years and a
half ago by Lieutenant H."

What had put that story into my head after all that stretch of time?
Was it just the proximity of that young girl, or was it merely an odd
accident?

THE INVALID'S STORY

I seem sixty and married, but these effects are due to my condition and
sufferings, for I am a bachelor, and only forty-one. It will be hard for
you to believe that I, who am now but a shadow, was a hale, hearty man
two short years ago, a man of iron, a very athlete!--yet such is the
simple truth. But stranger still than this fact is the way in which I
lost my health. I lost it through helping to take care of a box of guns
on a two-hundred-mile railway journey one winter's night. It is the
actual truth, and I will tell you about it.

I belong in Cleveland, Ohio. One winter's night, two years ago, I
reached home just after dark, in a driving snow-storm, and the first
thing I heard when I entered the house was that my dearest boyhood
friend and schoolmate, John B. Hackett, had died the day before, and
that his last utterance had been a desire that I would take his remains
home to his poor old father and mother in Wisconsin. I was greatly
shocked and grieved, but there was no time to waste in emotions; I must
start at once. I took the card, marked "Deacon Levi Hackett, Bethlehem,
Wisconsin," and hurried off through the whistling storm to the railway
station. Arrived there I found the long white-pine box which had been
described to me; I fastened the card to it with some tacks, saw it put
safely aboard the express car, and then ran into the eating-room
to provide myself with a sandwich and some cigars. When I returned,
presently, there was my coffin-box back again, apparently, and a young
fellow examining around it, with a card in his hands, and some tacks and
a hammer! I was astonish