e
her a better thought of me, and, that night, after such a climax of ill
luck, well--I had need of prayer for a wayward tongue. I sent home a
good account of my prospects. I could not bring myself to report failure
or send for more money. I would sooner have gone to work in a scullery.

Meanwhile my friends at the chalet were enough to keep me in good cheer.
There were William McClingan, a Scotchman of a great gift of dignity and
a nickname inseparably connected with his fame. He wrote leaders for a
big weekly and was known as Waxy McClingan, to honour a pale ear of wax
that took the place of a member lost nobody could tell how. He
drank deeply at times, but never to the loss of his dignity or self
possession. In his cups the natural dignity of the man grew and
expanded. One could tell the extent of his indulgence by the degree
of his dignity. Then his mood became at once didactic and devotional.
Indeed, I learned in good time of the rumour that he had lost his ear in
an argument about the Scriptures over at Edinburgh.

I remember he came an evening, soon after my arrival at the chalet,
when dinner was late. His dignity was at the full. He sat awhile in grim
silence, while a sense of injury grew in his bosom.

'Mrs Opper,' said he, in a grandiose manner and voice that nicely
trilled the r's, 'in the fourth chapter and ninth verse of Lamentations
you will find these words--here he raised his voice a bit and began
to tap the palm of his left hand with the index finger of his right,
continuing: "They that be slain with the sword are better than they that
be slain with hunger. For these pine away stricken through want of the
fruits of the field." Upon my honour as a gentleman, Mrs Opper, I was
never so hungry in all my life.'

The other boarder was a rather frail man with an easy cough and a
confidential manner, lie wrote the 'Obituaries of Distinguished Persons'
for one of the daily papers. Somebody had told him once, his head
resembled that of Washington. He had never forgotten it, as I have
reason to remember. His mind lived ever among the dead. His tongue was
pickled in maxims; his heart sunk in the brine of recollection; his
humour not less unconscious and familiar than that of an epitaph; his
name was Lemuel Framdin Force. To the public of his native city he had
introduced Webster one fourth of July--a perennial topic of his lighter
moments.

I fell an easy victim to the obituary editor that first evening in the