returned placidly.

"And how in the world do you get servants up here?" demanded the other.

"We don't. We could get a Chinaman, but if we had him we'd have to amuse him, there's no one else for him to talk to, so we go without."

"Horrors!" ejaculated Mrs. Fabian with solemn repugnance. "And you live here alone!"

The hostess laughed at her tone. "Not enough of the year to dislike it. One learns a lot of things in these hills—bidding farewell to time, for instance. You see a man with a gun tramping through the valley and you rush to the door, and cry out, 'Hey, there, you with the gun, what day is this?' and the man turns and shouts back, 'You can't prove it by me!'"

Mrs. Sidney laughed again and her cousin shuddered.

[4]

[4]

"Thank God for civilization!" ejaculated the latter devoutly; then, as the window-glass sucked in and out with a cracking sound, "Give me my hat, Mary," she said, sitting up. "If we're going down the mountain-side, let's go decently and in order."

"For shame, you Maine woman!" was the laughing rejoinder. "Your sea-captains would call this 'a breeze o' wind!' That's all. That's another thing one becomes acquainted with up here: the wind. I didn't know anything about it when I came. You should be here some nights if you call this a storm! I used to set my dish-pans out at the door; but when a few had whirled down the mountain-side into the valley, I learned caution. One can't go around the corner here and buy a dish-pan."

"Mary," Mrs. Fabian eyed her with bewildered admiration, "you're wonderful! You didn't used to be wonderful," she added in an argumentative tone. "Once you'd have made just as much fuss about this as I would. You remember—if you try, you'll remember perfectly—that I warned you, more than twenty-five years ago, not to marry a mining engineer. I told you then it was just as bad as marrying an army officer. There would be no repose about[5] it, and no comfort. You see I was right. Here we are, to all intents and purposes, in a shrieking balloon, and you call it home!" The speaker kept a watchful eye on the rattling casement and drew herself up with renewed tension at each wind blast, but nevertheless she talked on.

[5]

"With it all you haven't as many lines in your 

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