cabin, exhausted his ingenuity in endeavoring to make his hospitality as
complete as possible. When Albert saw him standing by the ladder in the
morning, he had already shot some prairie-chickens, which he carefully
broiled. And after they had supped on wild strawberries and another night
had passed, they breakfasted on some squirrels killed in a neighboring
grove, and made into a delicious stew by the use of such vegetables as
the garden of the Inhabitant afforded. Charlton and the Poet got the
horse and buggy through the stream. When everything was ready for a
start, the Inhabitant insisted that he would go "a piece" with them to
show the way, and, mounted on his Indian pony, he kept them company to
their destination. Then the trapper bade Albert an affectionate adieu,
and gave a blushing, stammering, adoring farewell to Katy, and turned his
little sorrel pony back toward his home, where he spent the next few days
in trying to make some worthy verses in commemoration of the coming to
the cabin of a trapper lonely, a purty angel bright as day, and how the
trapper only wep' and cried when she went away. But his feelings were
too deep for his rhymes, and his rhymes were poorer than his average,
because his feeling was deeper. He must have burned up hundreds of
couplets, triplets, and sextuplets in the next fortnight. For, besides
his chivalrous and poetic gallantry toward womankind, he found himself
hopelessly in love with a girl whom he would no more have thought of
marrying than he would of wedding a real angel. Sometimes he dreamed of
going to school and getting an education, "puttin' some school-master's
hair-ile onter his talk," as he called it, but then the hopelessness of
any attempt to change himself deterred him. But thenceforth Katy became
more to him than Laura was to Petrarch. Habits of intemperance had crept
upon him in his isolation and pining for excitement, but now he set out
to seek an ideal purity, he abolished even his pipe, he scrupulously
pruned his conversation of profanity, so that he wouldn' be onfit to love
her any way, ef he didn' never marry her.

CHAPTER XV.

AN EPISODE.

I fear the gentle reader, how much more the savage one, will accuse me of
having beguiled him with false pretenses. Here I have written XIV
chapters of this story, which claims to be a mystery, and there stand the
letters XV at the head of this chapter and I have not got to the mystery
yet, and my friend Miss Cormor