? I think I can. I
have a weakness for boiled beef and cabbage. The meat is healthful
enough, but, as every one knows, or ought to know, cabbage, although
one of the most digestible kinds of food when raw, is just the opposite
in a boiled state. I knew the consequences of eating it, but in the
absence of my good wife that day I disposed of so much that I deserved
the oppressive indigestion that followed.

That fact, I am convinced, fully explains the dreadful "presentiment"
which made me so miserable all the afternoon.

On our way home we passed the house of Mrs. Clarkson. I could not
forbear stopping and ringing her bell. She answered it in person.

"Mrs. Clarkson, Bob is on his way home from swimming, and I thought I
would let him hear about that wonderful dream--"

But the door was slammed in my face.

I said at the opening of this sketch that I "had" a boy named Bob. God
be thanked, I have him yet, and no lustier, brighter, or more manly
youth ever lived, and my prayer is that he may be spared to soothe the
declining years of his father and mother, whose love for him is beyond
the power of words to tell.

A FOOL OR A GENIUS.

CHAPTER I.

Josiah Hunter sat on his porch one summer afternoon, smoking his pipe,
feeling dissatisfied, morose and sour on account of his only son Tim,
who, he was obliged to confess to himself, gave every indication of
proving a disappointment to him.

Mr. Hunter was owner of the famous Brereton Quarry & Stone Works,
located about a mile above the thriving village of Brereton, on the
eastern bank of the Castaran river, and at a somewhat greater distance
below the town of Denville. The quarry was a valuable one and the
owner was in comfortable circumstances, with the prospect of acquiring
considerable more of a fortune out of the yield of excellent building
stone. The quarry had been worked for something like ten years, and
the discovery that he had such a fine deposit on his small farm was in
the minds of his neighbors equivalent to the finding of a gold mine,
for as the excavation proceeded, the quality of the material improved
and Mr. Hunter refused an offer from a company which, but for the
stone, would have been a very liberal price for the whole farm.

Mr. Hunter had been a widower ever since his boy was three years old,
and the youth was now fourteen. His sister Maggie was two years his
senior, and they were deeply attached to each other. Maggie was a
daugh