st one.

Bro, who could not see her from where he stood, waited a moment or two,
shuffled his feet to and fro on the sand, and noiselessly drummed on the
sill with his long fingers; then he went slowly down to the shore, where
his boat was drawn up, and rowed himself across to the saw-mill. He felt
a sort of guilt about that pink balsam, as though he had not perhaps
taken enough care of it; but, in truth, he had watched every
hair's-breadth of its limp, reluctant growth, knew its moist veining
accurately, and even the habits and opinions, as it were, of two minute
green inhabitants, with six legs, of the size, taken both together, of a
pin's point, who considered the stalk quite a prairie.

When she was eighteen and nineteen years old, Marion Manning had refused
several suitors, giving as a reason to her mother that they were all
detestable; since then, she had not been troubled with suitors to
refuse. There were girls with more coloring and brighter eyes in
Wilbarger, and girls with warmer hearts: so said the gossips. And,
certainly, the calm reserve, the incisive words, and clear gray eyes
that looked straight at you of Marion Manning were not calculated to
encourage the embarrassed but at the same time decidedly
favor-conferring attentions of the youths of the town. Mrs. Manning, in
the course of the years they had been together, had gradually taken Bro
as a humble confidant: he knew of the offers and refusals; he knew of
the succeeding suitorless period which Mrs. Manning, a stanch believer
in love and romance, bewailed as wasted time. "_I_ could never have
resisted young Echols," she said, "sitting there on the door-step as he
used to, with the sun shining on his curly hair. But there! I always had
a fancy for curls." Bro received these confidences with strict
attention, as valuable items. But one peculiarity of his mind was that
he never generalized; and thus, for instance, instead of taking in the
fact that curly hair plays a part in winning a heart, he only understood
that Mrs. Manning, for some reason or other, liked kinks and twists in
the covering of the head; as some persons liked hempen shoestrings,
others leathern.

"But Miss Marion is happy," he said once, when the suitorless period was
two years old, and the mother lamenting.

"Yes; but we can not live our lives more than once, Bro, and these years
will never come back to her. What keeps _me_ up through all the
privations I have suffered but the memo