hide it in the grave dug there years before. And the gust that
shook her passed, and then, ah me! the rain.

A drop or two fell upon the curls of Carry, and she moved uneasily in
her sleep. But the woman soothed her again--it was SO easy to do it
now--and they sat there quiet and undisturbed, so quiet that they might
have seemed incorporate of the lonely silent house, the slowly declining
sunbeams, and the general air of desertion and abandonment, yet a
desertion that had in it nothing of age, decay, or despair.

Colonel Starbottle waited at the Fiddletown Hotel all that night in
vain. And the next morning, when Mr. Tretherick returned to his husks,
he found the house vacant and untenanted, except by motes and sunbeams.

When it was fairly known that Mrs. Tretherick had run away, taking Mr.
Tretherick's own child with her, there was some excitement and much
diversity of opinion, in Fiddletown. THE DUTCH FLAT INTELLIGENCER openly
alluded to the "forcible abduction" of the child with the same freedom,
and it is to be feared the same prejudice, with which it had criticized
the abductor's poetry. All of Mrs. Tretherick's own sex, and perhaps
a few of the opposite sex, whose distinctive quality was not,
however, very strongly indicated, fully coincided in the views of the
INTELLIGENCER. The majority, however, evaded the moral issue; that
Mrs. Tretherick had shaken the red dust of Fiddletown from her dainty
slippers was enough for them to know. They mourned the loss of the fair
abductor more than her offense. They promptly rejected Tretherick as
an injured husband and disconsolate father, and even went so far as to
openly cast discredit on the sincerity of his grief. They reserved an
ironical condolence for Colonel Starbottle, overbearing that excellent
man with untimely and demonstrative sympathy in barrooms, saloons,
and other localities not generally deemed favorable to the display
of sentiment. "She was alliz a skittish thing, Kernel," said one
sympathizer, with a fine affectation of gloomy concern and great
readiness of illustration; "and it's kinder nat'ril thet she'd get away
someday, and stampede that theer colt: but thet she should shake YOU,
Kernel, diet she should jist shake you--is what gits me. And they do
say thet you jist hung around thet hotel all night, and payrolled them
corriders, and histed yourself up and down them stairs, and meandered
in and out o' thet piazzy, and all for nothing?" It was another ge