iss. Questioning Clytie on the subject, it appeared
that they had left the school together, but the willful Mliss had taken
another road. The afternoon brought her not. In the evening he called on
Mrs. Morpher, whose motherly heart was really alarmed. Mr. Morpher had
spent all day in search of her, without discovering a trace that might
lead to her discovery. Aristides was summoned as a probable accomplice,
but that equitable infant succeeded in impressing the household with his
innocence. Mrs. Morpher entertained a vivid impression that the child
would yet be found drowned in a ditch, or, what was almost as terrible,
muddied and soiled beyond the redemption of soap and water. Sick at
heart, the master returned to the schoolhouse. As he lit his lamp and
seated himself at his desk, he found a note lying before him addressed
to himself, in Mliss's handwriting. It seemed to be written on a
leaf torn from some old memorandum book, and, to prevent sacrilegious
trifling, had been sealed with six broken wafers. Opening it almost
tenderly, the master read as follows:

RESPECTED SIR--When you read this, I am run away. Never to come back.
NEVER, NEVER, NEVER. You can give my beeds to Mary Jennings, and my
Amerika's Pride [a highly colored lithograph from a tobacco-box] to
Sally Flanders. But don't you give anything to Clytie Morpher. Don't
you dare to. Do you know what my opinion is of her, it is this, she is
perfekly disgustin. That is all and no more at present from

Yours respectfully,

MELISSA SMITH.

The master sat pondering on this strange epistle till the moon lifted
its bright face above the distant hills, and illuminated the trail that
led to the schoolhouse, beaten quite hard with the coming and going
of little feet. Then, more satisfied in mind, he tore the missive into
fragments and scattered them along the road.

At sunrise the next morning he was picking his way through the palmlike
fern and thick underbrush of the pine forest, starting the hare from its
form, and awakening a querulous protest from a few dissipated crows, who
had evidently been making a night of it, and so came to the wooded ridge
where he had once found Mliss. There he found the prostrate pine and
tasseled branches, but the throne was vacant. As he drew nearer, what
might have been some frightened animal started through the crackling
limbs. It ran up the tossed arms of the fallen monarch and sheltered
itself in some friendly foliage. The m