where the sun could shine. Mrs. Moss would lose[36] a good, quiet boarder, it is true; but my consideration for Mrs. Moss's feelings would not cause me to sacrifice myself. Some one else would come and take the room which had been mine for ten years, and I would soon be forgotten.

[36]

The revelation which I had experienced put me in such high spirits at the glorious prospects before me that I could not think of going to bed when eleven o'clock sounded from the mantel-tree. Instead, I believe I actually chuckled, as I slipped my hand into the pocket of my dressing-gown for my tobacco-pouch, and proceeded to fill my pipe again. Method had always been the rule of my life, but that night I put it by for a space. The question paramount was—where should I go? Certainly most any farm housewife would give me a room upstairs for a small money consideration a month, but I was[37] a little particular, and wanted to live and move among folks, for which I was fitted by birth and education. I knew that blood as blue and as genteel flowed through country veins as through city arteries; but how was I to find these people out? I didn't know a dozen persons in Louisville outside of my boarding-house. The hands of the clock were getting dangerously near together at the top of the dial before a solution came.

[37]

Suddenly I bethought me of Reuben Walker, that staid, long-headed fellow who had graduated with me back in forty. The nearest approach I ever had to a friend. He had gone to practise law in Springfield, down there in Washington County, and had made something of a name for himself, too. I hadn't seen him since forty-five, hadn't written to him since fifty, but he was the only man living I knew who[38] could help me. So I forthwith indited a note to Reuben Walker, Esq., Attorney-at-Law, reminding him of our former intimacy, regretting that we had allowed ourselves to drift apart, and asking if he knew of a quiet country home where I might spend the summer. I reasoned that it was a country lawyer's business to know everybody in his county, and I hoped that Reuben remembered me well enough to refer me only to the kind with whom I would care to affiliate. I did not write letters often, my correspondence averaging perhaps a half dozen epistles a year, and so I signed my name to this one before reading it over. Then I recollected one of the earliest injunctions of my father: "Be very careful what you sign your name to," so I deliberately reread the missive before me. It was all right; I had said all that was necessary, but just as I was[39] bending the sheet to fold it I 

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