nto the state-room.
After which he went to his place on the lower deck with a great
thankfulness throbbing in his heart and an inchoate resolve shaping
itself in his brain.

Late that night, when the _Belle Julie_ was well on her way up the great
river, he flung himself down upon the sacked coffee on the engine-room
guard to snatch a little rest between landings, and the resolve became
sufficiently cosmic to formulate itself in words.

"I'll call it an oracle," he mused. "One place is as good as another,
just so it is inconsequent enough. And I am sure I've never heard of
Wahaska."

Now Griswold the social rebel was, before all things else, Griswold the
imaginative literary craftsman; and no sooner was the question of his
ultimate destination settled thus arbitrarily than he began to prefigure
the place and its probable lacks and havings. This process brought him
by easy stages to pleasant idealizings of Miss Charlotte Farnham, who
was, thus far, the only tangible thing connected with the
destination-dream. A little farther along her personality laid hold of
him and the idealizings became purely literary.

"She is a magnificently strong type!" was his summing up of her, made
while he was lying flat on his back and staring absently at the flitting
shadows among the deck beams overhead. "Her face is as readable as only
the face of a woman instinctively good and pure in heart can be. Any man
who can put her between the covers of a book may put anything else he
pleases in it and snap his fingers at the world. If I am going to live
in the same town with her, I ought to jot her down on paper before I
lose the keen edge of the first impression."

He considered it for a moment, and then got up and went in search of a
pencil and a scrap of paper. The dozing night clerk gave him both, with
a sleepy malediction thrown in; and he went back to the engine-room and
scribbled his word-picture by the light of the swinging incandescent.

"Character-study: Young woman of the type Western Creole; not the
daughter of aliens, but born in the West, of parents who have migrated
from one of the older States. (I'll hazard that much as a guess.)

"_Detail_: Titian blonde, with hair like spun bronze; the complexion
which neither freckles nor tans; cool gray eyes with underdepths in them
that no man but her lover may ever quite fathom; a figure which would
be statuesque if it were not altogether human and womanly; features cast
in the Purit