ad no hesitation which direction to take, being guided by the sound of
voices and wafts of penetrating odors.

It was a fortunate direction, for I discovered on the way my lost apparel
artfully concealed under a small melodeon, and, strangely enough, I was
again brought face to face with my deserted couch and the weeping lady on
the wall. She held me a moment with the old fascination. As I put up my
glasses, I thought I detected in her face a hitherto unnoticed buoyancy
of expression and not having wholly escaped in my life from ideas of a
worldly nature, I reflected that, probably, her regretted consort had
left her with a sufficient number of thousands.

In this same connection, I was reminded that I, myself, had started out
on an independent career, and wondered if it would be unkind or undutiful
in me to start a private bank account of my own. I concluded that it
would not.

When I entered the little room where the Keeler family was assembled:--

"Why, here's our teacher!" exclaimed Grandma Keeler in accents of
delight, and came to meet me with outstretched arms. "We couldn't abear
to wake ye up, dearie," she went on, "knowin' ye was so tired this
mornin'; and there's plenty o' time--plenty o' time. My Casindana come
home!" she murmured, with a smile and a tremble of the lips, and a
far-away look, for the instant, in her gentle eyes.

In fact, the whole Keeler family received me with outstretched arms. If I
had been a long-lost child, or a friend known and loved in days gone by,
I could not have been more cordially and enthusiastically welcomed.

The best chair was set for me; glances of eager and inquiring interest
were bent upon me.

I accepted it all coolly, though not without a certain air of affability,
too, for I had a natural desire to make myself agreeable to people, when
it wasn't too much trouble; but I was quite firm, at this time, in the
conviction that there was little or no faith to be put in human nature.
On the whole I was much entertained and interested.

The two children came to climb into my lap, but this part of the
acquaintance did not progress very fast. I thought they must have been
struck by something in my eye (I was merely wondering abstractedly if
their heads were not out of proportion to the rest of their bodies), for
they paused, and Mrs. Philander called them away sharply.

Mrs. Philander was a frail little woman,--she could not have been over
thirty or thirty-two years old,--n