Mrs. Judge Robinson, from one sidelong glance, brought off detailed intelligence of the bonnet’s checkered past.

The elder Miss Eubanks decried the mannishness of cane-bearing; and Mrs. Westley Keyts, entering the shop as Miss Caroline was bowed out, declared that her silk stockings were of a hue hardly respectable, and that she wore shoes “twice too small for her.”

The eyes of the suddenly urbane Westley glistened when he overheard this, but he fell to dissecting a beef without further sign.

For better or worse, Miss Caroline and Little Arcady had exchanged impressions of each other.

I met her by chance that morning and was charmed by her flattering implication of reliance upon myself.  She made me feel that our understanding was secret and our attachment romantic.  To complete her round of our commercial centre I escorted her to the Argus office.  Her greeting of Solon Denney was a thing to behold with unalloyed delight.  They seemed to understand each other at once.  Two minutes after Solon had looked up in some astonishment from his dusty, over-piled desk, they were arrayed as North and South in a combat of blithest raillery.

Miss Caroline sat in Solon’s battered chair with the missing castor, surveyed his exchange-laden desk with a humorous eye, and seized the last Argus, skimming its local columns with a lively interest and professing to be enthralled by its word-magic.  She read stray items that commended themselves to her critical judgment, such as, “A wind blew last week that you could lean up against like the side of the house;” or “Westley Keyts has a bran-new ‘No Admittance!’ sign over the door of his slaughter-house.  We don’t see why.  He could put up a ’Come one, come all!’ sign and still not get us into the place.  They’re messy.”

Further she read, “Some fiend with sub-human instincts ravaged our secret hoard of eating-apples while we were out meeting the farmers last Saturday afternoon.  We wish they had been of no value to any one except the owner.”  And then, in her sprightliest manner, and with every sign of enjoyment, she went on to an item during the reading of which I think we both flushed a little, Solon and I:—­

“The United States Is

“Some grammar sharp down East says you must say ‘The United States are.’  But we guess not.  Opinions to that effect prevailed widely to the south of us some years ago, but the contrary was proved, we believe.  The United States is, brother, ever since Appomattox, and even the grammar book should testify to its is-ness—­to its everlasting and indivisible oneness.”

She carried it off so finely that I knew Miss Caroline had recovered from the fatigues of her journey.

“I shall write you an item myself,” she exclaimed, and seizing a stubby pencil, she wrote rapidly:—­

“A battered and ungrammatical old woman from the valley of Virginia has settled in our midst.  She will always believe that the United States are, but she is harmless and otherwise sane.”