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Show arriving slippers now began to fall off. For ten minutes nothing came, and he was just starting down to ask the landlady if she couldn't put a cot in the hall so he could go to bed, when in came another box. It was from Jane just her luck, of course, to be late and strike him when he was all worked up to the bursting point. But let us draw a veil over the scene right here and leave the poor man alone as he opens Jane's box. It was not more than half-past nine the next morning when the Rev. Mr. Stanwix mounted the Wilkinson steps and tugged at the door bell. He asked for Jane. It seemed rather queer, but they ushered him into the parlor and sent Jane in. Well, to make a long story short, It wasn't ten minutes until he had the thing all fixed up. He had his chair drawn close up beside ' her end of the sofa. "Jane," he was saying, "I've loved you ever since the first day I saw you, but I never knew it until I opened your box." "Then you liked them, did you? I'm so glad," murmured Jane. "I should say I did! Why, it's one of the finest meerschaums I ever paw, and that Tobacco used to be my favorite favor-ite brand at college. But, Jane, how did you know I used to smoke, and was dying to begin again?" Jane had stopped breathing at the word meerschaum. Now she caught her breath, and for once In her life rose to the occasion and didn't put her foot in it. She simply looked up at him and smiled demurely. "Oh, I guessed it," she said. "It was the best guess you ever made. I should have died last night amidst that awful landslide of slippers If I hadn't smoked about half of that tobacco. I mean to keep on smoking same state, you will see that you ought to give him something made with your own fair hands, and you can't make an easy chair. So slippers it had to be for the Rev. M. Stanwix, especially after his landlady had been sounded on the subject and reported that the poor man didn't have a slipper to his name. Well, the result was, of course, that the whole hundred and thirty-six" marriageable mar-riageable ladies at Appleburg went to work on slippers; and a few of the flock who already had husbands also began slippers, out of the goodness of their hearts, probably, or maybe thinking think-ing that they might be widows some day and might as well have a pair to their credit. The slaughter of plush and embroidery materials was something some-thing cyclonic, and the local shoemaker shoe-maker had to sit up nights pegging on soles. Even unfortunate little Jane Wilkinson went at a pair hammer and tongs, though everybody said she hadn't a ghost of a show. In the first place Jane was too young her older sister Katharine was conceded to have a right to enter for the contest, but it was universally held that Jane had no right to compete at all. Besides being be-ing too young she was really nineteen or twenty she was also plain. She might have a certain girlish prettiness, but not the beauty which the wife of so handsome a shepherd as the Rev. Mr. Stanwix should have. Furthermore, Further-more, Jane was in no other way adapted adapt-ed for the position she had been a good deal of a tomboy, and was yet, for that matter; she was frivolous and careless, and was always putting her foot in it. The first time the pastor had called at the Wilkinson house, and while Katherine was entertaining him in the parlor in the most approved ap-proved and circumspect manner, Jane had blundered in, and inside of five ()' The Dominie used to complain sometimes some-times about the character of the stories the rest of us told. He said they were too economical in their use of the element ele-ment of truth. And truth was so cheap, and also so interesting, he would say. We were always ready to admit that It was interesting, but were not so free to acknowledge its cheapness. cheap-ness. Like other exotics it seemed to us expensive. Fiction, being so much more easily produced, appeared to be the true mental provender in the Corn Cob Club, a social institution where we decided questions of great pith and moment by the aid of the civilizing And ennobling influence of tobacco incinerated in-cinerated in cob-pipes. The Dominie haj quit smoking when he entered the ministry, but he always said the cobs smelt good, so we had hopes of his reclamation; besides, the air was usually usu-ally so thick that he absorbed enough to bring him up, in a large measure, to the high philosophic plane occupied by the rest of us. It happened on Christmas Eve that somebody told a story appropriate enough to the season so far as the subject sub-ject went, but palpably impossible considered con-sidered as a happening. At least the Dominie said it was, and threatened to tell a Christmas story himself; and (being counseled by the Professor, wio ,was classical in his language, to "blane away," the good man complied as follows: fol-lows: There used to be a young man named Stanwix who was rector of a "MOVED INTO THE HALL." now that is, if you don't object, dear?" , Jane scored again. "I rather like the smell of good tobacco," to-bacco," she said. Saturday Evening Post. minutes asked him why he 'didn't get married all the girls said he ought to. Jane had explained to everybody that she meant it as a joke, but it haa generally been pronounced ill-timed and in bad taste. But poor Jane kept working away on her slippers regardless of the talk Everybody said that Jane's slippers wouldn't fit, or that they would both be for one foot, or that she would get the heels sewed on the toe end. or something. Jane finally put on the finishing touches and then packed them in a pasteboard box and tied it with pink ribbon. Then she got her other Christmas presents ready. She had a lot of handkerchiefs hand-kerchiefs for an aunt, and a shopping bag for a married sister, and a little knit shawl for her grandmother, and a pair of skates for a boy cousin, and various other things for divers other persons, including a fine meerschaum pipe and a pound of his favorite smoking smok-ing tobacco for her brother who was at college, and who wouldn't be home till New Year's. Each thing she carefully care-fully put up In a box or bundle and laid it away. The day before Christmas was a never-to-be-forgotten time for the Rev. Mr: Stanwix. Slippers just came down on him like an Egyptian plague. Along about four o'clock Stanwix got crowded out of his room slippers piled half way to the ceiling and had to put a chair out in the hall and sit there with an atlas of the world in his lap writing his Christmas sermon on it. Mighty tough sermon it was, too, and got tougher as the slippers continued contin-ued to arrive. Fact is, he was getting pretty mad; and every new pair sent his temperature up five degrees. Consequently, Con-sequently, at ten o'clock he was just boiling. Of course he couldn't swear, but the way he tramped up and down that hall and ground his teeth really amounted to the same thing. The "WHY DON'T YOU GET MARRIED?" church at a little town in,New Jersey called Appleburg. Very amiable young man, not long In the ministry, and unmarried. un-married. Nice-looking chap, too, and a bright fellow, but he had his trials at Appleburg. Mainly it was the women wo-men they thought he ought to marry, and of course they were right. But thinking so wasn't enough for those dear Appleburg ladies; with the true feminine desire to help they resolved to see that he did marry. But here again they showed a universal feminine femi-nine trait by refusing to combine and work together. They all labored hard enough, but independently, and eacli with a view to inducing the minister to marry a different woman. It had been going on thus for somo months when Christmas approached. Now of course there isn't much you can give any man for Christmas slippers slip-pers and pipes and shot-guns and slippers. slip-pers. And in the case of a parson it's still worse you've got to drop off the pipes and shotguns, leaving only slippersand slip-persand slippers. Of course there are book-marks and easy chairs, but the first are trivial and the latter expensive; expen-sive; besides, if he is unmarried and you are of the opposite sex, and in the |
