ranger, with the same reflective
seriousness. "You see, it wasn't just the rhymin' o' them verses,--and
they kinder sing themselves to ye, don't they?--it wasn't the chyce o'
words,--and I reckon they allus hit the idee in the centre shot every
time,--it wasn't the idees and moral she sort o' drew out o' what she
was tellin',--but it was the straight thing itself,--the truth!"

"The truth?" repeated the editor.

"Yes, sir. I've bin there. I've seen all that she's seen in the
brush--the little flicks and checkers o' light and shadder down in
the brown dust that you wonder how it ever got through the dark of the
woods, and that allus seems to slip away like a snake or a lizard if you
grope. I've heard all that she's heard there--the creepin', the sighin',
and the whisperin' through the bracken and the ground-vines of all that
lives there."

"You seem to be a poet yourself," said the editor, with a patronizing
smile.

"I'm a lumberman, up in Mendocino," returned the stranger, with sublime
naivete. "Got a mill there. You see, sightin' standin' timber and
selectin' from the gen'ral show of the trees in the ground and the lay
of roots hez sorter made me take notice." He paused. "Then," he added,
somewhat despondingly, "you don't know who she is?"

"No," said the editor, reflectively; "not even if it is really a WOMAN
who writes."

"Eh?"

"Well, you see, 'White Violet' may as well be the nom de plume of a man
as of a woman, especially if adopted for the purpose of mystification.
The handwriting, I remember, WAS more boyish than feminine."

"No," returned the stranger doggedly, "it wasn't no MAN. There's ideas
and words there that only come from a woman: baby-talk to the birds, you
know, and a kind of fearsome keer of bugs and creepin' things that don't
come to a man who wears boots and trousers. Well," he added, with a
return to his previous air of resigned disappointment, "I suppose you
don't even know what she's like?"

"No," responded the editor, cheerfully. Then, following an idea
suggested by the odd mingling of sentiment and shrewd perception in
the man before him, he added: "Probably not at all like anything you
imagine. She may be a mother with three or four children; or an old maid
who keeps a boarding-house; or a wrinkled school-mistress; or a chit
of a school-girl. I've had some fair verses from a red-haired girl of
fourteen at the Seminary," he concluded with professional coolness.

The stranger regard