retful queer. He
would walk along for quite a spell, payin' no attention to anybody
seemin'ly, when all at once he would dart up clost to some young girl,
and look sharp at her, and then slink back agin into his old gait.

Thinkses I is he crazy or is he some old fool that's love sick. But
his actions didn't seem to belong to either of the classes named. And
finally right under a lamp post he stopped to foller with his eager
eyes a graceful, slim young figger that turned down a cross street and
we come face to face with him.

It wuz Elder Wessel--it wuz the figger I had seen at the morgue--but,
oh, the change that had come over the poor creeter! Hair, white as
snow; form, bowed down; wan, haggard face; eyes sunken; lookin' at us
with melancholy sombry gaze that didn't seem to see anything. Josiah
stepped up and held out his hand, and sez: "Elder, I'm glad to see
you, how do you do? You don't look very rugged."

He didn't notice Josiah's hand no more than if it wuz moonshine. He
looked at us with cold, onsmilin', onseein', mean, some like them same
moonbeams fallin' down on dark, troubled waters, and I hearn him
mutter:

"I thought I had found her! Where is Lucia?" sez he.

The tears run down my face onbeknown to me, for oh the hunted, haunted
look he wore! He wuz a portly, handsome man when we see him last, with
red cheeks, iron-gray hair and whiskers and tall, erect figger. Now he
had the look of a man who had kep' stiddy company with Death,
Disgrace, Agony and Fear--kep' company with 'em so long that he wuz a
stranger to anybody and everybody else.

He hurried away, sayin' agin in them same heart-breakin' axents:
"Where is Lucia?"

Arvilly turned round and looked after him as he shambled off.

"Poor creeter!" sez she. Her keen eyes wuz full of tears, and I knowed
she would never stir him up agin with the sharp harrer of her irony
and sarcasm if she had ever so good a chance. Josiah took out his
bandanna and blowed his nose hard. He's tender-hearted. We knowed
sunthin' how he felt; wuzn't we all, Dorothy, Miss Meechim, Arvilly,
Robert Strong, Josiah and I always, always looking out for a dear
little form that had been wrenched out of our arms and hearts, not by
death, no, by fur worse than death, by the two licensed Terrors whose
black dretful shadders fall on every home in our land, dogs the steps
of our best beloved ready to tear 'em away from Love and from Safety
and Happiness.

From Paris we went to Ber