s languid
deliberation was particularly noticeable in her reading aloud, and
gave the studied and measured rhetoric a charm of which her careless
colloquial speech was incapable. Even the "Fifth Reader," with its
imposing passages from the English classics carefully selected with a
view of paralyzing small, hesitating, or hurried voices, in Cressy's
hands became no longer an unintelligible incantation. She had quietly
mastered the difficulties of pronunciation by some instinctive sense of
euphony if not of comprehension. The master with his eyes closed hardly
recognized his pupil. Whether or not she understood what she read he
hesitated to inquire; no doubt, as with her other studies, she knew
what attracted her. Rupert Filgee, a sympathetic if not always a correct
reader, who boldly took four and five syllabled fences flying only to
come to grief perhaps in the ditch of some rhetorical pause beyond,
alone expressed his scorn of her performance. Octavia Dean, torn between
her hopeless affection for this beautiful but inaccessible boy, and
her soul-friendship for this bigger but many-frocked girl, studied the
master's face with watchful anxiety.

It is needless to say that Hiram McKinstry was, in the intervals of
stake-driving and stock-hunting, heavily contented with this latest
evidence of his daughter's progress. He even intimated to the master
that her reading being an accomplishment that could be exercised at home
was conducive to that "kam" in which he was so deficient. It was also
rumored that Cressy's oral rendering of Addison's "Reflections in
Westminster Abbey" and Burke's "Indictment of Warren Hastings," had
beguiled him one evening from improving an opportunity to "plug" one of
Harrison's boundary "raiders."

The master shared in Cressy's glory in the public eye. But although Mrs.
McKinstry did not materially change her attitude of tolerant good-nature
towards him, he was painfully conscious that she looked upon her
daughter's studies and her husband's interests in them as a weakness
that might in course of time produce infirmity of homicidal purpose and
become enervating of eye and trigger-finger. And when Mr. McKinstry got
himself appointed as school-trustee, and was thereby obliged to mingle
with certain Eastern settlers,--colleagues on the Board,--this possible
weakening of the old sharply drawn sectional line between "Yanks" and
themselves gave her grave doubts of Hiram's physical stamina.

"The old m