a smoking set--a nice lava one--and I want a set of them fine
overhauls like them that Mis Pope give Mr. Pope that time I said
she was too extravagant, and if they's any money left over I want
some nice tobacco, the best. I want all the price of the ice-set
took up even to them affectionate words they never put on.

"Your affectionate and loving wife,

"KITTY."

When Ephraim put the little note back in his pocket, he took out his
handkerchief and wiped his eyes.

Her good neighbors and friends, even as far as Simpkinsville and
Washington, had their little jokes over Mis' Trimble's giving her
splendor-despising husband a swinging ice-pitcher, but they never knew
of the two early trips of the twin pitcher, nor of the midnight comedy
in the Trimble home.

But the old man often recalls it, and as he sits in his front hall
smoking his silver-mounted pipe, and shaking its ashes into the lava
bowl that stands beside the ice-pitcher at his elbow, he sometimes
chuckles to himself.

Noticing his shaking shoulders as he sat thus one day his wife turned
from the window, where she stood watering her geraniums, and said:

"What on earth are you a-laughin' at, honey?" (She often calls him
"honey" now.)

"How did you know I was a-laughin'?" He looked over his shoulder at her
as he spoke.

"Why, I seen yo' shoulders a-shakin'--that's how." And then she added,
with a laugh, "An' now I see yo' reflection in the side o' the
ice-pitcher, with a zig-zag grin on you a mile long--yo' smile just
happened to strike a iceberg."

He chuckled again.

"Is that so? Well, the truth is, I'm just sort o' tickled over things in
general, an' I'm a-settin' here gigglin', jest from pure contentment."

A MINOR CHORD

I am an old bachelor, and I live alone in my corner upper room of an
ancient house of _Chambres garnies_, down on the lower edge of the
French quarter of New Orleans.

When I made my nest here, forty years ago, I felt myself an old man, and
the building was even then a dilapidated old rookery, and since then
we--the house and I--have lapsed physically with the decline of the
neighborhood about us, until now our only claims to gentility are
perhaps our memories and our reserves.

The habit of introspection formed by so isolated an existence tends to
develop morbid views of life, and throws one out of sympathetic
relations with the world of progress, we are told; but is there not some
compen