uge
omnibus which he had hired, and drove off with them, leaving us
disconsolate. He smiled so broadly you could see his teeth in the dark.

This, as I have said, capped the climax.

"That settles it," said Burnham. "I'm going to New York for a rest.
These Dumfries Corners girls needn't think they're the only women in the
world. There are others."

"I'm going to stay and stick it out," said I. "I've got my sister left.
She'll never succumb to the Wilkins influence." But alas! I leaned upon
a broken reed. My sister is a sensible girl, but she is "literary." She
had a joke in _Life_ once, and since that time she has neglected almost
everything but writing and her brother. She doesn't neglect me, and
altogether I'm glad she writes, since it fills her with enthusiasm until
the articles come back, and up to now she had not written poetry. But,
as I say, I leaned upon a broken reed, for when, the next day, I asked
her what she was writing, she laughed and showed me a sonnet.

"Poetry, eh?" I said, disapprovingly, as I looked over her manuscript.

"Yes," she answered, modestly. "A sonnet."

And I read, "To S.W."

"Who's 'S.W.?'" I asked, with a frown, although I little suspected what
her answer would be.

"Sam Wilkins," she replied.

I then realized the full force of Caesar's "Et tu, Brute?" and fled.

Meanwhile Wilkins was becoming insufferable. If Bunthorne was an ass, he
was at least clever, but this Wilkins--he was a whole drove of asses,
and not a redeeming feature to the lot. He could no more account for
his sudden popularity than we could, but he could not help realizing it
after a week or two, and then, for the first time in his life, he began
to take notice. We men all wanted to thrash him, and I think Burnham
would have done it if the rest of us hadn't prevented him.

"He needed a licking before this," said Harry, "but now he's worse than
ever. It isn't conscious rectitude now, it's triumphant virtue. He makes
me tired. He was telling me the other day that while girls might be
captivated by flippant, superficial, prancing dudes for a while, in the
end solid worth would win, and then he went on to say that the youth of
modern times cultivated his feet to the exclusion of his head, and that
while he had, of course, learned to dance, he had not devoted all his
time to it, and regarded it, after all, as a very minor sort of an
attraction as far as women are concerned. 'I don't rely on my dancing,
Burnham,' h