hy ha'n't their
dogs? I suppose Mr. Westover here would say there wa'n't any certainty
about the Injuns themselves!"

"You know my weak point, Mr. Whitwell," the painter confessed. "But I
can't prove they haven't."

"Nor dogs, neither, I guess," said Whitwell, tolerantly. "It's curious,
though, if animals have got souls, that we ha'n't ever had any
communications from 'em. You might say that ag'in' the idea."

"No, I'll let you say it," returned Westover. "But a good many of the
communications seem to come from the lower intelligences, if not the
lower animals."

Whitwell laughed out his delight in the thrust. "Well, I guess that's
something so. And them old Egyptian devils, over there, that you say
discovered the doctrine of immortality, seemed to think a cat was about
as good as a man. What's that," he appealed to Mrs. Durgin, "Jackson said
in his last letter about their cat mummies?"

"Well, I guess I'll finish my supper first," said Mrs. Durgin, whose
nerves Westover would not otherwise have suspected of faintness. "But
Jackson's letters," she continued, loyally, "are about the best letters!"

"Know they'd got some of 'em in the papers?" Whitwell asked; and at the
surprise that Westover showed he told him how a fellow who was trying to
make a paper go over at the Huddle, had heard of Jackson's letters and
teased for some of them, and had printed them as neighborhood news in
that side of his paper which he did not buy ready printed in Boston.

Mrs. Durgin studied with modest deprecation the effect of the fact upon
Westover, and seemed satisfied with it. "Well, of course, it's
interestin' to Jackson's old friends in the country, here. They know he'd
look at things, over there, pretty much as they would. Well, I had to
lend the letters round so much, anyway, it was a kind of a relief to have
'em in the paper, where everybody could see 'em, and be done with it. Mr.
Whit'ell here, he fixes 'em up so's to leave out the family part, and I
guess they're pretty well thought of."

Westover said he had no doubt they were, and he should want to see all
the letters they could show him, in print and out of print.

"If Jackson only had Jeff's health and opportunities--" the mother began,
with a suppressed passion in her regret.

Frank Whitwell pushed back his chair. "I guess I'll ask to be excused,"
he said to the head of table.

"There! I a'n't goin' to say any more about that, if that's what you're
afraid of, Frank,