in
mo'nin'_?

"No, indeedy! I gwine leave Pete home ter take keer dem chillen, an' I
done set him a good job o' whitewashin' to do while I'm gone, too. De
principles' weddin'-present I gwine fetch Pete is a fiddle. Po' Pete
been wantin' a good fiddle all his life, an' he 'ain't nuver is had one.
But, of co'se, I don't 'low ter let him play on it tell de full year of
mo'nin' is out."

AN OPTICAL DILEMMA

Elder Bradley had lost his spectacles, and he was in despair. He was
nearly blind without them, and there was no one at home to hunt them for
him. His wife had gone out visiting for the afternoon; and he had just
seen Dinah, the cook, stride gleefully out the front gate at the end of
the lane, arrayed in all her "s'ciety uniform," on her way to a church
funeral. She would not be home until dark.

It was growing late in the afternoon, and the elder had to make out his
report to be read at the meeting of the session this evening. It _had
to be done_.

He could not, from where he sat, distinguish the pink lion's head from
the purple rose-buds on the handsome new American Brussels rug that his
wife had bought him as a Christmas gift--to lay under her
sewing-machine--although he could put out his boot and touch it. How
could he expect to find anything so small as a pair of spectacles?

The elder was a very old man, and for years his focal point had been
moving off gradually, until now his chief pleasures of sight were to be
found out-of-doors, where the distant views came gratefully to meet him.

He could more easily distinguish the dark glass insulators from the
little sparrows that sometimes came to visit them upon the telegraph
pole a quarter of a mile away than he could discriminate between the
beans and the pie that sometimes lay together on his dinner plate.

Indeed, when his glasses stayed lost over mealtimes, as they had
occasionally done, he had, after vainly struggling to locate the various
viands upon his plate and suffering repeated palatal disappointments,
generally ended by stirring them all together, with the declaration that
he would at least get one certain taste, and abide by it.

This would seem to show him to have been an essentially amiable man,
even though he was occasionally mastered by such outbursts of impatience
as this; for, be it said to his credit, he always left a clean plate.

The truth is, Elder Bradley was an earnest, good man, and he had tried
all his life, in a modest, un