chief over her head, and stepped out at the back door.

What with her coal-black hair, so streaked with red, her black eyes,
flashing in the starlight, and her glowing cheeks, she looked
bewitching.

And, thus armed for conquest, wily, yet impassioned, she stole out, with
noiseless foot and beating heart, to her appointment with her imprudent
master.

BAD SYMPTOMS.

Mons. Alphonse Karr writes as follows in his _Les Femmes_:--"When I wish
to become invisible, I have a certain rusty and napless old hat, which I
put on as Prince Lutin in the fairy tale puts on his chaplet of roses; I
join to this a certain coat very much out at elbows: _eh bien_! I become
invisible! Nobody on the street sees me, nobody recognizes me, nobody
speaks to me."

And yet I do not doubt that the majority of M. Karr's friends and
acquaintances, as is the case with the friends and acquaintances of
nearly every one else, are well-disposed, good-hearted, average persons,
who would be heartily ashamed, if it could be brought home to them, of
having given him the go-by under such circumstances. What, then, was the
difficulty? In what consisted this change in the man's appearance, so
signal that he trusted to it as a disguise? What was there in hat and
coat thus to eclipse the whole personality of the man? There is a
certain mystery in the philosophy of clothes too deep for me to fathom.
The matter has been descanted upon before; the "Havamal, or High Song of
Odin," the Essays of Montaigne, the "Sartor" of Thomas Carlyle, all
dwell with acuteness upon this topic; but they merely give instances,
they do not interpret. I am continually meeting with things in my
intercourse with the world which I cannot reconcile with any theories
society professes to be governed by. How shall I explain them? How, for
example, shall I interpret the following cases, occurring within my own
experience and under my own observation?

I live in the country, and am a farmer. If I lived in the city and
occupied myself with the vending of merchandise, I should, in busy
times at least, now and then help my clerks to sell my own goods,--if I
could,--make up the packages, mark them, and attend to having them
delivered. Solomon Gunnybags himself has done as much, upon occasion,
and society has praised Solomon Gunnybags for such a display of devotion
to his business. But I am a farmer, not a merchant; and, though not able
to handle the plough, I am not above my business.