th a pardonable superstition that it was not chance alone that
had guided her willful feet to the schoolhouse, and perhaps with a
complacent consciousness of the rare magnanimity of the act, he choked
back his dislike and went to McSnagley.

The reverend gentleman was glad to see him. Moreover, he observed
that the master was looking "peartish," and hoped he had got over the
"neuralgy" and "rheumatiz." He himself had been troubled with a dumb
"ager" since last conference. But he had learned to "rastle and pray."

Pausing a moment to enable the master to write his certain method
of curing the dumb "ager" upon the book and volume of his brain,
Mr. McSnagley proceeded to inquire after Sister Morpher. "She is an
adornment to ChrisTEWanity, and has a likely growin' young family,"
added Mr. McSnagley; "and there's that mannerly young gal--so well
behaved--Miss Clytie." In fact, Clytie's perfections seemed to affect
him to such an extent that he dwelt for several minutes upon them. The
master was doubly embarrassed. In the first place, there was an enforced
contrast with poor Mliss in all this praise of Clytie. Secondly, there
was something unpleasantly confidential in his tone of speaking of Mrs.
Morpher's earliest born. So that the master, after a few futile
efforts to say something natural, found it convenient to recall another
engagement, and left without asking the information required, but in his
after reflections somewhat unjustly giving the Rev. Mr. McSnagley the
full benefit of having refused it.

Perhaps this rebuff placed the master and pupil once more in the close
communion of old. The child seemed to notice the change in the master's
manner, which had of late been constrained, and in one of their long
postprandial walks she stopped suddenly, and mounting a stump, looked
full in his face with big, searching eyes. "You ain't mad?" said she,
with an interrogative shake of the black braids. "No." "Nor bothered?"
"No." "Nor hungry?" (Hunger was to Mliss a sickness that might attack
a person at any moment.) "No." "Nor thinking of her?" "Of whom, Lissy?"
"That white girl." (This was the latest epithet invented by Mliss, who
was a very dark brunette, to express Clytemnestra.) "No." "Upon your
word?" (A substitute for "Hope you'll die!" proposed by the master.)
"Yes." "And sacred honor?" "Yes." Then Mliss gave him a fierce little
kiss, and, hopping down, fluttered off. For two or three days after
that she condescended to