.--"Looks like a wet hen," said Mr. Smith,
"but plucky! plucky!"--After that, our liking for him became quite
emphatic. Not that Old Chester liked his epithets or approved of his
approval of Miss Lydia's behavior (she bought kid gloves for her party,
if you please! and a blue-silk dress; and, worse than all, presents for
all Old Chester, of canary birds and pictures and what not, _all out of
our hundred dollars_!)--we did not like the laxity of Mr. Smith's
judgments upon the Grasshopper's conduct, but we did approve of his
building her chimney, because it saved us from putting our hands in our
own pockets again.

In the brown dusk of the September evening, Miss Lydia, watching her
landlord roll past in his carriage, gave him a friendly nod. "He's
nice," she said, "and so good-looking!" Her eyes followed him until, in
the shadows of the great trees of the driveway, she lost sight of him.
Then she fell to thinking about his daughter, a careless young creature,
handsome and selfish, with the Smith high color and black eyes, who was
engaged to be married to another handsome young creature, fatter at
twenty-three than is safe for the soul of a young man. Miss Lydia did
not mind Carl's fat because she had a heart for lovers. Apparently her
own serial and unhappy love affair had but increased her interest in
happier love affairs. To be sure, Mary's affair had had the zest of a
little bit of unhappiness--just enough to amuse older people. The boy
had been ordered off by his firm in Mercer, at a day's notice, to
attend to some business in Mexico, and the wedding, which was to have
been in April, had to be postponed for six months. Carl had been
terribly down in the mouth about it, and Mary, in the twenty-four hours
given them for farewells, had cried her eyes out, and even, at the last
minute, just before her young man started off, implored her father to
let them get married--which plea, of course, he laughed at, for the new
Mr. Smith was not the sort of man to permit his only daughter to be
married in such hole-and-corner fashion! As it happened, Carl got back,
quite unexpectedly, in September--but his prospective father-in-law was
obdurate.

"It won't hurt you to wait. 'Anticipation makes a blessing dear!'
December first you can have her," said the new Mr. Smith, much amused by
the young people's doleful sentimentality.

Miss Lydia, now, slapping the mosquitoes, and thinking about the
approaching "blessing," in friendly sat