after a tardy setting forth than would have been possible if we had set out on time, is ignored. But John was dreadfully prompt. By the very next mail came his second epistle.

"MY DEAR ARCHITECT: There's the maps and here's the explanation: A is the house, B is the barn, C the garden, D the well, and E a fine old white-oak tree that I wouldn't sell for its weight in silver. It is the only reliable and interesting vegetable on the premises, the only one that prospers and bringeth forth fruit in its season. There is a double row of maples along the street, and the remnants of an apple orchard behind the house and near the north line, but neither of them count, for everybody has maples, which seem to belong to the public; and the apple trees are hardly worth the ground they cover. Once in three or four years they groan under their burden of fruit, but when there is an active demand for mince pies and sweet cider they are certain to bear nothing but leaves. It seems almost wicked to cut down a fruit tree, even when it produces nothing but caterpillars and rose-bugs, and I should like to keep a few for conscience' sake, but don't let them interfere with your plan. Everything else on the place is movable.

"The gate is now in the centre of the front line. We drive up near the southeast corner of the house, and thence on toward the barn, which isn't convenient, because, unless we go quite out to that building, there is no chance to turn around without driving over the turf. I am bounded on the south by Mr. Job Smith, on the north by Mrs. Willoughby, east by Main Street, and west by a meadow that will remain a meadow; that is to say, it will not be devoted to 'ornamental' purposes; in fact, it will be used as a pasture after haying, and must be separated from the home lot by a fence of some sort. The ground where the house stands is about four feet higher than the street, descending a little toward the south and rising in the rear. I never graded the surface, which is just as the flood left

it, except for the general leveling tendencies of age and agriculture.

"I'm not good at reporting my neighbors' doings, but imagine that Mrs. Smith has aspirations somewhat above those of the common herd.' I know the house is very tall and white. The walk to the front door is as 'straight as a string,' paved with bricks-which is reckoned a great extravagance in the country-and bordered in summer by parallel rows of rare and radiant house plants.' There are a dozen evergreen trees, that look like solid blocks of wood turned in a lathe and painted green, symmetrically stuck up near the house, and a row of the same sort just inside of the street fence. Spattered over the lawn at regular distances are flowering shrubs, also pruned with great propriety; bunches of dahlias tied to green stakes, and two flaming red flower-pots on a pair of stumps. The last-named articles stand one at each side of the walk, about half way from the house to the street. There is also a tripod of red poles suspending a vermilion iron pot; from all of which you will perceive that Mrs. Smith is 'well up' in the latest styles of out-door art.

"Mrs. Willoughby's house, on the north, is an old one, homely, but good looking. It stands on the topmost of two little terraces, and the yard contains bunches of oldfashioned red peonies, some lilacs and cinnamon roses, green grass and maple trees. The three houses toe the same mark, and face the street squarely.

"My southern neighbor generously built a fence between our domains at his own expense, in order to have it uniform with his other visible boundaries. It is a white picket. Separating my lot from Mrs. Willoughby's is an old tight board fence that must be replaced by something better, and what shall I do for a fence along the street?

"I wear number eleven boots, French heels and box toes. Ten steps carry me just twenty-six feet and threequarters of an inch inclusive. Is that sufficiently accurate? Yours, JOHN."

I. A MAN-TRAP IS SPRUNG.

“BLAMED if I don't feel just like Job!" said Mr. Silas Dickison, addressing himself suddenly and energetically to Mrs. Silas Dickison.

The flushed face, bristling hair, snapping eyes, and general air of irateness about the speaker so completely excluded all idea of meekness as the parallel between her husband and the man of Uz, that it was quite natural Mrs. Dickison should ask, with wifely solicitude: "Boily, dear ?"

Now, it is a well-established fact in sociology that when a man has reached that pitch of exasperation which requires but one more feathery addition to carry him beyond the limits of possible self-control, he is apt to discover that final feather in whatsoever expression his wife may use to convey sympathy, curiosity or interest. Let her formulate her utterances never so discreetly, they will but act as so much fuel to a fire under certain circumstances.

This is the only solution that can be offered in explanation of the fact that Mr. Dickison's face grew a shade redder, his hair bristled a trifle higher, his eyes snapped with more vicious energy, as he roared:

"Boily! No, madam! By Jove, I have not a drop of boily blood in my veins! Do I look boily ? do I walk boily? do I sleep boily?"

"Not at all, dear," Mrs. Dickison hastens to assert in her most soothing tones of apology, "only"

"Only !" Her husband catches the word in mid-air, like an expert base-baller. "Only it is no trial to a man's patience, I suppose, none at all, to be overflowed ten feet deep; to see his orchards, that he has been half a lifetime bringing to perfection, killed in a week; to hear one day that his carriage-horses have broken through the floor of the coop they 're penned up in like bantam chickens, and broken their infernal legs; to hear, the next day, that three of his very best mules are drowned; the day after, that his Alderneys are starving to death on Spanish moss; that his gin-house has been washed away; that wreck and ruin stare him in the face on every side; but next his son, his only son (only sons, you know, are generally regarded as props and stays and comforters, and all that sort of bosh), must try his hand to see what he can do to add to the general peace and comfort of the establishment !"

"What has Lewis done now?" Mrs. Dickison asks with a languid interest born of staleness; for Lewis, his deeds and misdeeds, his sins of omission and commission, his predestination to the gallows or the dogs, were more than thrice-told tales in that family circle.

"Nothing but drowned himself," Mr. Dickison says, with a faint gleam of satisfaction displacing the anger in his eyes.

"Lewis drowned !" three women shriek in chorus. "Our precious boy dead!”

"Not that I know of," says the ogre, who has thrown this bomb into the domestic camp with malice prepense. "But you said so, father," two girlish voices insist reproachfully, vice Mrs. Dickison, removed, who had left under full head of steam to satisfy her maternal fears by ocular demonstration that Lewis was not drowned.

"Said that Lewis was dead?" Mr. Dickison asks,

growing amiably cool in proportion as the feminine element waxed hot.

"Said he was drowned, and—”

"Well, a person need not necessarily remain drowned, need he? Lewis was drowned-fell out of the dug-out into ten feet of water out yonder by the gin-slough. Fortunately Moses and Bob were at the gin getting cotton-seed to feed the calves on, and saw him go down. They pulled to the place as fast as they could, and fished him out, with apparently not a breath of life left in his scampish young body. Oh, that boy! Well, he was brought to old Rachel's cabin as dead as a door-nail, to all appearances. They sent for me to come there quick, and by myself, wanting me, I suppose, to break the sad news to your mother gradually. We worked on him for about two hours, rolling him over, holding him up by the heels, rubbing him with hot flannels, and brought him round at last. He's all right now-all the better, I expect, for the scare he's had. He is sound asleep in his own room, as snug as toast, and I had just come in here to tell your mother about it quietly, when she flew off, as usual, into one of those nervous excitements of hers, which make a calm discussion of any matter almost an impossibility in this house."

Mr. Dickison paused to wipe his forehead with an injured air, and his wide-spread handkerchief veiled from him a glance of mutual understanding and congratulation which passed from Miss Sophie Dickison over to Miss Annie Dickison-two young women in the early flush of beauty, and who, their father was in the habit of declaring, by turns were his torment and delight.

It was warm weather, and the Dickison ladies had all been clustered on the front gallery when Mr. Dickison had disturbed their equanimity by the startling announcement that Lewis was drowned. And a most remarkable-looking front gallery it was, considering that the Dickison mansion was a handsome frame building. capacious and comfortable, with broad galleries front and rear, and that Mrs. Dickison was a notably neat housekeeper. But the flood was at its height, and every house and cabin of slighter elevation than the mansion-house was entirely submerged, so that the broad verandahs and the noble central hall had been dedicated to strange uses. The cooking-stove was on the back gallery, together with all the rest of the kitchen furniture. The hall was appropriated to the storage of barrels, boxes and casks of every imaginable size and description, and on the front gallery was a miscellaneous collection of everything for which no other place could be found. The family barouche reposed in exalted leisure in one corner. Bales of hay and sacks of oats crowded another. Tubs and boxes and pots of such plants and shrubs as were deemed too precious to be yielded to the waters, were standing about in irregular confusion. The Irish setter's kennel had been promoted to this social eminence. Lewis' now useless bicycle impressed its presence disagreeably upon encroaching shins. One hen of foreign extraction, the élite of the poultry-yard, was being permitted to rear her tender and ill-timed progeny as best she could amid such unfamiliar surroundings. And on this gallery all the family took their daily constitutionals, finding it more than ever before necessary to be as

wise as serpents (in the matter of sinuosity) and as harmless as doves.

It is more than probable that having to wind in and out of such a variety of misplaced articles-meandering between two bales of hay only to bring up suddenly against a big tub with a bigger oleander in it; steering clear of the barouche wheels for the apparent purpose of mashing a baby-chicken to death under his bewildered heels; assuaging his anguished remorse thereat by kicking the Irish setter into the nest of a setting turkey-had resulted in some of the general crookedness of things getting into Mr. Dickison himself; for although quick in temper, he was generally regarded as one of the most thoroughly good-hearted men in the world.

Trading upon this well-established fact, Miss Sophie Dickison now steered her way cautiously among the impedimenta, and seating herself sociably beside him on the bale of hay, where he had thrown himself for refuge, said soothingly, while her designing little hand roved in and out of his thick gray hair:

"Things do look pretty rough just now, papa, don't they? And you say the Alderneys are dying ?" "Fast as poisoned roaches !"

"But Lewis is spared us," Annie sighs demurely, as, with arms crossed patiently over her plump bosom, she promenades in zig-zag fashion toward and from them. "Just to think, that dear child might have been drowned sure enough! He really ought to be in some city, going to school every day. He needs civilized surroundings. A plantation is the last place on earth to rear a boy. Don't you think so, papa ?"

"Hang Lewis, he 's all right !" Mr. Dickison growls, looking out with a moody brow over the dead, muddy level of the waters.

"Well," says Sophie, cheerfully, "I expect it will eventuate in that. As this is the third effort he has made at drowning, I suppose he is being reserved by Providence for hanging. I feel morally convinced that Lewis is destined to make the name of Dickison famous in some fashion or other."

"Or infamous," Annie suggests.

"He is undoubtedly capable of committing as much rascality in a given space of time as any boy of his limited chances that I ever saw," Mr. Dickison grunted, rising from his seat on the hay to go and measure the depth of the water for the tenth time that morning.

It was evident that the whole family were banded together temporarily in that state of irritation against Lewis which generally succeeds to active but causeless

alarm.

"What a pity about the orchard," says Sophie. "Imagine this long hot summer without a particle of fruit. Horrible !"

"Or milk, either, if the cows continue to drop off like poisoned roaches," Annie adds, industriously seconding her sister's best efforts to paint their home life in all its existing hideousness. "In fact, I can't imagine what we are going to live on. There is not a hog nor a sheep left in the country. Poultry of all kinds will be so scarce that no one will kill. They will be saving it all for a fresh start. Gardens all destroyed."

"Plenty of pickled pork left in Cincinnati and St. Louis," Mr. Dickison says, coming back from his water mark, wiping his wet hands on his handkerchief; “you can live on that."

"We can die on it !" Sophie asserts desperately. "And of course we will be too poor this year to take ice."

66 Pretty rough outlook, children, and no mistake." "Well, sir ?" turning with an air of wrathful expecta

tion upon an anxious-looking freedman, who has just paddled his canoe through the front gate over the garden paths and up to the gallery steps.

"I come to tell you, boss, that w'en we went to de mound fur to feed de cattle we found dat de Alderney bull, which we had tied by de lef" hin' leg to a log uv wood, 'cordin' to yo' directions, to keep him from swim min' away, had tangled hisself all up in de rope, and broke his neck a strugglin' to git free.”

Mr. Dickison sat suddenly down on a sack of oats and groaned.

66

Papa," said both girls in pathetic chorus, "let's move off this horrid plantation. There is nothing but disappointment and misery on it from one year's end to the other. I don't care how hard you work, you are never sure of anything. You are getting old enough now to begin to take your case. If Lewis don't get killed here he will grow up a disgrace to the family. We'll all die, anyhow," they added logically, “living on pickled pork this summer; no ice, no fruit, no vegetables."

"I'll do it!" Mr. Dickison says hastily, extending a ratifying hand to each conspirator, falling irrevocably into a trap that had been set for him years before.

Thus circumstances played into the hands of the Misses Dickison. And this is how Silas Dickison, at the mature age of sixty-five, came to turn his back on the old plantation and seek the haunts of men, or, as he himself afterwards said more concisely, "played the fool."

II.-LED TO THE STAKE.

A REMOVAL from one habitation to another is airily called "flitting" in Scottish and provincial English-a term which could be but poorly applied to the process of removing the Dickisons. The time, the day, the hour finally arrived for Mr. Silas Dickison to put into execution the rash promise he had made to his daughters under the final culmination of all his woes in the loss of his thousand-dollar bull, and remove his family from their watery surroundings to the dry and breezy bluffs of Memphis.

Secretly he had long since repented of that promise, but he was not the man to stultify himself even in the domestic circle, nor were the Misses Dickison likely to abate one jot or one tittle of their hardlyearned advantage over him. The only crumb of comfort he could extract from the situation-and that was simply of an anticipatory character-was in assuring the venturesome element of the household that “they would be sick enough of this tomfoolery before the year was out, and be thankful enough to take shelter in the old nest"-a sentiment he took especial delight in enunciating with every blow of the hammer that drove a fresh nail home in one of a multitude of chests and boxes wherein were stored the Lares and Penates of the Dickison family.

So in the dusk of a chill April evening the Dickisons flitted from the old homestead, that looked drearier than ever in its abandonment to the water and the frogs, to a strip of levee on the river bank, two miles from the residence, to await in patient discomfort the arrival of the steamer on which they had engaged passage. Gloomy, low-hung clouds threatened a heavy downpour at any moment. Over the muddy waste of the waters inside the levee, the forest trees swept their swaying branches with melancholy monotony; ten thousand frogs croaked a chorus of satisfaction at the general humidity of things; outside the levee the river proper (if such an adjective is ever deserved by a river