opriety's sake) in the place of a parting kiss understood; and
Leslie sprung into his car and was whirled away Northward towards the
Mecca of American summer-tourists; while the young girl went up to "do"
Utica in a bird's-eye view from the window of her room, and to await the
four o'clock that was to bear her away in the lumbering stage to West
Falls. Perhaps Tom Leslie felt at that moment that he would have been
glad of any excuse or any shadow of invitation to accompany her to that
rustic paradise, instead of going away alone to any paradise named in
Bible or Koran; and perhaps Joe Harris had the faintest suspicion of a
heavy and lonely feeling at her heart, at parting with the "eyes" and
the merry brain that lay behind them, so suddenly flung as an element
into her own existence.

Henceforward, for the present, the business of this narration only
requires that the course of Miss Josephine Harris shall be traced,
leaving the "other half" of her incomplete "pair of scissors" to be
picked up hereafter.

No one who has ever travelled among the mountains or through any of the
Northern hill-sections, needs any description of the heavy lumbering
"Concord coach" in which the young girl and her stage-companions were
slowly dragged up Genesee Street, Utica, by four horses of lymphatic
temperament, on that sultry July afternoon with occasional sprinkles of
shower thrown in to make it endurable. They are all alike--those heavy
coaches--except as to paint and upholstery, wherever we meet
them,--whether they drag us up the Cattskills, bear us over from Moreau
to Lake George, dash down with us through the gorges of the White
Mountains, or jog us heavily along the rough roads that thread the
Alleghanies. The same half cord of wood in each of the curved
bodies--the same complication of sole-leather in the swinging jacks
which serve in the place of springs--the same cumbrous weight of wheel,
suggesting that a mill may have gone out on its travels, locomoted on
its running-gear. And yet there is no conveyance so safe or so easy for
the mountain; and some of us have enjoyed pleasant hours lounging back
upon those polished leather cushions within, or shouting out
enthusiastic admiration of scenery from the pokerish seats on the top.

It is a pleasant ride, at any season of the year--that from Utica over
the range of hills which lies westward, to the Oneida Valley which
nestles down a few miles beyond. And it was especially pleasant an