ant, who devours her dozen novels a week
for steady diet, and perhaps makes it a baker's dozen at this season of
the year, and who loves nothing so well as to be mystified by
labyrinthine plots and counterplots--Miss Cormorant is about to part
company with me at this point. She doesn't like this plain sailing. Now,
I will be honest with you, Miss Cormorant, all the more that I don't care
if you do quit. I will tell you plainly that to my mind the mystery lies
yet several chapters in advance, and that I shouldn't be surprised if I
have to pass out of my teens and begin to head with double X's before I
get to that mystery. Why don't I hurry up then? Ah! there's the rub. Miss
Cormorant and all the Cormorant family are wanting me to hurry up with
this history, and just so surely as I should skip over any part of the
tale, or slight my background, or show any eagerness, that other family,
the Critics--the recording angels of literature--take down their pens,
and with a sad face joyfully write: "This book is, so-so, but bears
evident marks of hurry in its execution. If the author shall ever learn
the self-possession of the true artist, and come to tell his stories with
leisurely dignity of manner--and so on--and so on--and so forth--he
will--well, he will--do middling well for a man who had the unhappiness
to be born in longitude west from Washington." Ah! well, I shrug my
shoulders, and bidding both Cormorant and Critic to get behind me, Satan,
I write my story in my own fashion for my gentle readers who are neither
Cormorants nor Critics, and of whom I am sincerely fond.

For instance, I find it convenient to turn aside at this point to mention
Dave Sawney, for how could I relate the events which are to follow to
readers who had not the happiness to know Katy's third lover--or
thirteenth--the aforesaid Dave? You are surprised, doubtless, that Katy
should have so many lovers as three; you have not then lived in a new
country where there are generally half-a-dozen marriageable men to every
marriageable woman, and where, since the law of demand and supply has no
application, every girl finds herself beset with more beaux than a
heartless flirt could wish for. Dave was large, lymphatic, and conceited;
he "come frum Southern Eelinoy," as he expressed it, and he had a
comfortable conviction that the fertile Illinois Egypt had produced
nothing more creditable than his own slouching figure and
self-complaisant soul. Dave Sawney had