rned to me with the added
softness of distance. I went to the old village and had tea under the
same orchard trees at the same inn.

But the little maid of the inn did not show her face, and I took
occasion to enquire of her father as to her welfare and her whereabouts.

"Married, no doubt," I laughed, but with a strange feeling that clutched
at my heart.

"No, sir," replied the inn-keeper sadly, "not married--though she was
just going to be--but dead. She got a sunstroke in the hayfields, just a
few days after you were here, if I remember rightly, and she was gone
from us in less than a week."

SMITH: AN EPISODE IN A LODGING-HOUSE

"When I was a medical student," began the doctor, half turning towards
his circle of listeners in the firelight, "I came across one or two very
curious human beings; but there was one fellow I remember particularly,
for he caused me the most vivid, and I think the most uncomfortable,
emotions I have ever known.

"For many months I knew Smith only by name as the occupant of the floor
above me. Obviously his name meant nothing to me. Moreover I was busy
with lectures, reading, cliniques and the like, and had little leisure
to devise plans for scraping acquaintance with any of the other lodgers
in the house. Then chance brought us curiously together, and this fellow
Smith left a deep impression upon me as the result of our first meeting.
At the time the strength of this first impression seemed quite
inexplicable to me, but looking back at the episode now from a
stand-point of greater knowledge I judge the fact to have been that he
stirred my curiosity to an unusual degree, and at the same time awakened
my sense of horror--whatever that may be in a medical student--about as
deeply and permanently as these two emotions were capable of being
stirred at all in the particular system and set of nerves called ME.

"How he knew that I was interested in the study of languages was
something I could never explain, but one day, quite unannounced, he came
quietly into my room in the evening and asked me point-blank if I knew
enough Hebrew to help him in the pronunciation of certain words.

"He caught me along the line of least resistance, and I was greatly
flattered to be able to give him the desired information; but it was
only when he had thanked me and was gone that I realised I had been in
the presence of an unusual individuality. For the life of me I could not
quite seize and label the