ley colored and started a little. This was one of his own
sayings in "Thoughts on the Universe." But the young man quoted it
without seeming to suspect its authorship.

"Where did you pick up that saying, Mr. Bradshaw?"

"I don't remember. Some paper, I rather think. It's one of those good
things that get about without anybody's knowing who says 'em. Sounds
like Coleridge."

"That's what I call a compliment worth having," said Byles Gridley to
himself, when he got home. "Let me look at that passage."

He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and got so much interested,
reading on page after page, that he did not hear the little tea-bell,
and Susan Posey volunteered to run up to his study and call him down to
tea.

CHAPTER V. THE TWINS.

Miss Suzan Posey knocked timidly at his door and informed him that tea
was waiting. He rather liked Susan Posey. She was a pretty creature,
slight, blonde, a little too light, a village beauty of the second or
third grade, effective at picnics and by moonlight,--the kind of girl
that very young men are apt to remember as their first love. She had a
taste for poetry, and an admiration of poets; but, what was better, she
was modest and simple, and a perfect sister and mother and grandmother
to the two little forlorn twins who had been stranded on the Widow
Hopkins's doorstep.

These little twins, a boy and girl, were now between two and three years
old. A few words will make us acquainted with them. Nothing had ever
been known of their origin. The sharp eyes of all the spinsters had
been through every household in the village and neighborhood, and not
a suspicion fixed itself on any one. It was a dark night when they were
left; and it was probable that they had been brought from another town,
as the sound of wheels had been heard close to the door where they were
found, had stopped for a moment, then been heard again, and lost in the
distance.

How the good woman of the house took them in and kept them has been
briefly mentioned. At first nobody thought they would live a day, such
little absurd attempts at humanity did they seem. But the young doctor
came and the old doctor came, and the infants were laid in cotton-wool,
and the room heated up to keep them warm, and baby-teaspoonfuls of milk
given them, and after being kept alive in this way, like the young of
opossums and kangaroos, they came to a conclusion about which they did
not seem to have made up their thinking-pulp