to-day. A plague take
the moon, I say, and all the ills it brings with its monkeyshines!"

* * * * * *

Along the pathway across the meadow meandered three feminine figures
attired in the quaint raiment of those remote Colonial times--Mistress
Carter, her daughter Mistress Fairfax, and another neighbor, the
antique and angular Miss Dorcas Culpeper, spinster. At sight of
Lawrence they groaned, and Miss Culpeper found it necessary to hold her
big velvet bag before her face to conceal the blushes of indignation
which she felt suffusing her venerable features when she beheld the
horrid author of a kind of trouble to which, on account of her years
and estate, she could never hope to contribute save as a party of the
third part. And oh! how guilty Lawrence looked and how guilty he felt,
too, as he sat under his fig tree just then. He dropped his face into
his hands and ground his elbows into his knees and indulged in bitter
thoughts against the feminine sex in general and against the moon and
Miss Dorcas Culpeper, spinster, in particular.

So absorbing were these bitter reflections that, although Lawrence had
posted himself under the fig tree for the sole purpose of discovering
and of heralding the approach of a certain expected visitor, he was not
aware of Dr. Parley's arrival until that important personage had issued
from the oak grove, had traversed the brown road, and was dignifiedly
stalking his flea-bitten mare through the gateway. Then Lawrence
looked up, gave a sickly smile, and bade the doctor an incoherent
good-morning. Dr. Parley was sombre and impressive. He seldom smiled.
An imperturbable gravity possessed him from the prim black-satin
cockade on his three-cornered hat to the silver buckles on his
square-toed shoes. In his right hand he carried a gold-headed cane
which he wielded as solemnly as a pontiff might wield a sceptre, and as
he dismounted from his flea-bitten mare and unswung his ponderous
saddlebags he never once suffered the gold head of his impressive cane
to lapse from its accustomed position at his nostrils.

"Go right into the house, doctor," said Lawrence, feebly, "_I 'll_ look
after the mare. You have n't come any too soon--Mary 's taking on
terrible."

It was mean of Dr. Parley, but at this juncture he _did_ really
smile--yes, and it was a smile which combined so much malevolent pity
and scorn and derision that poor Lawrence felt himself shrivelling