were _en regle_. The play was "Faust." All allusions to the triumph of
religion over the devil; all insinuations on the part of Mephistopheles
in regard to the enviable escape of Martha's husband and of husbands in
general, from prating women in general; all invocations of virtue and
moral triumph, were greeted with bursts of applause. Between the acts
there was music, and the ushers distributed showers of printed
advertisements, which the audience fell at once to reading as though
they had nothing to talk about.

I heard only one hearty comment about the play: "That devil," said
Lorraine, as we walked home together, "was a corker!"

I have left until the last the two friends who held a place apart in
the household: the farmer and his wife, the old people of another
generation with whom we boarded. They had begun life together forty
years ago. They lived on neighbouring farms. There was dissension
between the families such as we read of in "Pyramus and Thisbe," "Romeo
and Juliet." The young people contrived a means of corresponding. An old
coat that hung in the barn, where nobody saw it, served as post-office.
Truman pleaded his cause ardently and won his Louisa. They fixed a day
for the elopement. A fierce snowstorm piled high its drifts of white,
but all the afternoon long the little bride played about, burrowing a
path from the garden to her bedroom window, and when night came and
brought her mounted hero with it, she climbed up on to the saddle by his
side and rode away to happiness, leaving ill nature and quarrels far
behind. Side by side, as on the night of their wedding ride, they had
traversed forty years together. Ill health had broken up their farm
home. When Truman could no longer work they came in to Perry to take
boarders, having no children. The old man never spoke. He did chores
about the house, made the fire mornings, attended to the parlour stove;
he went about his work and no one ever addressed a word to him; he
seemed to have no more live contact with the youth about him than
driftwood has with the tree's new shoots. He had lived his life on a
farm; he was a land captain; he knew the earth's secrets as a ship's
captain knows the sea's. He paced the mild wooden pavements of Perry,
booted, and capped for storm and wind, deep snow and all the inimical
elements a pioneer might meet with. His new false teeth seemed to shine
from his shaggy gray beard as a symbol of this new town experience in a
rough na