ible tokens of the comforting ministrations of nicotine to violate
the eye of etiquette. It is an art of Plattville.

Suddenly there was a hum and a stir and a buzz of whispering in the
room. Two gray old men and two pretty young women passed up the aisle to
the platform. One old man was stalwart and ruddy, with a cordial eye
and a handsome, smooth-shaven, big face. The other was bent and trembled
slightly; his face was very white; he had a fine high brow, deeply
lined, the brow of a scholar, and a grandly flowing white beard that
covered his chest, the beard of a patriarch. One of the young women
was tall and had the rosy cheeks and pleasant eyes of her father, who
preceded her. The other was the strange lady.

A universal perturbation followed her progress up the aisle, if she had
known it. She was small and fair, very daintily and beautifully made;
a pretty Marquise whose head Greuze should have painted. Mrs. Columbus
Landis, wife of the proprietor of the Palace Hotel, conferring with a
lady in the next seat, applied an over-burdened adjective: "It ain't so
much she's han'some, though she is, that--but don't you notice she's got
a kind of smart look to her? Her bein' so teeny, kind of makes it more
so, somehow, too." What stunned the gossips of the windows to awed
admiration, however, was the unconcerned and stoical fashion in which
she wore a long bodkin straight through her head. It seemed a large
sacrifice merely to make sure one's hat remained in place.

The party took seats a little to the left and rear of the lecturer's
table, and faced the audience. The strange lady chatted gaily with the
other three, apparently as unconscious of the multitude of eyes fixed
upon her as the gazers were innocent of rude intent. There were pretty
young women in Plattville; Minnie Briscoe was the prettiest, and, as the
local glass of fashion reflected, "the stylishest"; but this girl
was different, somehow, in a way the critics were puzzled to
discover--different, from the sparkle of her eyes and the crown of her
trim sailor hat, to the edge of her snowy duck skirt.

Judd Bennett sighed a sigh that was heard in every corner of the room.
As everybody immediately turned to look at him, he got up and went out.

It had long been a jocose fiction of Mr. Martin, who was a widower of
thirty years' standing, that he and the gifted authoress by his side
were in a state of courtship. Now he bent his rugged head toward her
to whisper: "I