rd every word. As I turned, dizzy and confused, I saw his
smiling, insolent face. Enraged, unhappy, and embarrassed by his
grieving triumph, I hastily turned to retreat into the pantry!
Unfortunately, there were two doors close together, one leading to the
pantry, the other to the cellar. In my blind embarrassment I mistook
them; and the next moment the whole company were startled by a loud
bump--bumping, a crash, and a woman's scream.

There was a barrel of soft-soap at the foot of the cellar-stairs, and
I fell, head first, into that.

CHAPTER XIX.

DRIVEN FROM HIS LAST DEFENCE.

Susie was Mrs. Todd before I recovered from the effects of my
involuntary soap-bath.

"Smart trick!" cried my father when he fished me out of the barrel.

I thought it _was_ smart, sure enough, by the sensation in my eyes.
But I have drawn a veil over that bit of my history. I know my
eyesight was injured for all that summer. I could not tell a piece of
silk from a piece of calico, except by the feeling; so I was excused
from clerking in the store, and sat round the house with green goggles
on, and wished I were different from what I was. By fall my eyesight
got better. One day father came in the parlor where I was sitting
moping, having just seen Tom Todd drive by in a new buggy with his
bride, and said to me:

"John, I am disappointed in you."

"I know it," I answered him meekly.

"You look well enough, and you have talent enough," he went on; "but
you are too ridiculously bashful for an ostrich."

"I know it," I again replied. "Oh, father, father, why did they take
that caul from my face?"

"That--what?" inquired my puzzled sire.

"That caul--wasn't I born with a caul, father?"

"Now that I recall it, I believe you were," responded father, while
his stern face relaxed into a smile, "and I wish to goodness they had
left it on you, John; but they didn't, and that's an end of it. What I
was going to say was this. Convinced that you will never succeed as my
successor--that your unconquerable diffidence unfits you for the
dry-goods trade--I have been looking around for some such situation as
I have often heard you sigh for. The old light-house keeper on
Buncombe Island is dead, and I have caused you to be appointed his
successor. You will not see a human being except when supplies are
brought to you, which, in the winter, will be only once in two months.
Even then your peace will not be disturbed by any sight of one of t