cotton for him. A thousand to one Miss Vernor is charming; I wonder you don't post off to Smyrna."
"You're joking," he answered, with a wounded air, "and I am terribly serious. Let me tell you the rest. I never suspected this tender conspiracy till something less than a year ago. My father, wishing to provide against his death, informed me of it, solemnly. I was neither elated nor depressed; I received it, as I remember, with a sort of emotion which varied only in degree from that with which I could have hailed the announcement that he had ordered me a dozen new shirts. I supposed that it was under some such punctual, superterrestrial dispensation as this that all young men were married. Novels and poems indeed said otherwise; but novels and poems were one thing and life was another. A short time afterwards he introduced me to a photograph of my predestined, who has a pretty, but an extremely inanimate face. After this his health failed rapidly. One night I was sitting, as I habitually sat for hours, in his dimly lighted room, near his bed, to which he had been confined for a week. He had not spoken for some time, and I supposed he was asleep, but happening to look at him I saw his eyes wide open and fixed on me strangely. He was smiling benignantly, intensely, and in a moment he beckoned to me. Then, on my going to him—'I feel that I sha n't last long', he said, 'but I am
