astounding change was taking place in Miranda. She leaned over the corpse, her eyes dilated and her small body tense. Her breast was heaving and she shook like an aspen. I would have picked her up and carried her to her mother, but I was fascinated by her face, and moreover, I wanted to see what would happen. The true Scientist must ever sacrifice his emotions to his reason.

Gradually, the entire expression of her face altered. The eerie, wild look had vanished completely, and in its place was a very normal fright. “Tum!” she shrieked. “Baby ’fraid!”

I took up the Little Sister of the Woods and ran into the hotel, rejoicing in my heart that the child was cured. That evening, I proposed marriage to Mrs. Kirsten, who was overjoyed at her child’s sudden recovery, but my hopes were felled to earth as suddenly as Snoof had been that very afternoon.

“The bigamy laws are very strict,” she sighed, meditatively. “Do you not find them so?”

“What,” I gasped, “is your husband alive?”

“Yes,” she returned, “if he hasn’t drunk himself to death since we came here. If Miranda had only been able to charm Snakes,” she continued, “we could have lived very happily with her Pa.”

KITCHI-KITCHI

Strangely enough, this episode made me very weary of the Yellowstone. Mrs. Kirsten and the cured Miranda departed by the first train, leaving a formal farewell for me with the hotel clerk, who grinned sheepishly as he delivered the message. Republics are said to be proverbially ungrateful, and women are proverbially uncertain. I concluded to trust them no more, but to go back to one of my lodges in the vast wilderness and spend the remainder of the Summer far from maddening woman’s ignoble wiles.

I paid my William at the hotel—I have too much respect for it to call it a bill—and returned to my hermitage by the river and the little stream, where Jagg lay buried. As before, I found that my cabin had recently been occupied.

Human belongings were strewn upon my cot, and a kettle, hung in gypsy fashion, sang merrily over my camp-fire. I was righteously incensed, and I determined to make Ab understand, once for all, that my possessions were not to be trifled with. He had poisoned my pet, the principle remaining the same even though I was anxious to rid myself of that selfsame pet, and had made himself obnoxious in every possible way. With every heart-beat my ire grew 

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