meet with some dreadful humiliation before he got the collection back into the chancel.  It was a terrible strain on us, and his horrid unconsciousness that he was anything but perfect, and that the rest of us were anything more than so many paving stones to be walked on, was aggravating to a degree.  Nothing unusual happened, however, and the service came to an end, and with it came to us all another surprise, but this time the surprise gave Wilkins a pain, and I had a front seat when the blow was dealt.

It had occurred to the immaculate rival of all the manhood of Dumfries Corners that he would honor Araminta with his society on the way home from church, and he and I reached her side after service at one and the same moment.

“May I have the pleasure of seeing you home?” said Wilkins, twirling his mustache with a “resist me if you can” smile on his lips.

“Don’t let me interfere,” said I, dryly, and was about to turn away.

“Thank you, Mr. Wilkins,” replied Araminta, “but Mr. Smithers has already asked me.”

It was a beautiful, lovely, sweet lie.  I hadn’t done anything of the sort, but I’d meant to, of course, and perhaps Araminta had become a mind reader.  Wilkins got a little flushy around his cheek-bones, and posted off to Fiametta, but she and Burnham were already en route and apparently reconciled.  So it went with all.  Wilkins was left.  Even my sister, who, lacking Wilkins, would have to walk home with the minister’s wife, declined, and the fall of the great man was complete.  Mary Brown was the only one remaining in the field, and when he fled to her she said she wasn’t going home.

“Well, then,” said Wilkins, “let me take you to wherever you are going?”

“Thank you,” returned Miss Brown, “I’m not going there either,” and she joined Araminta and myself, much to our delight, for we have no secrets from her.  And then it all came out.

The girls had not loved us less, or Wilkins more, but they had resolved to keep Lent with unusual rigor this year.

They had sworn us off and taken up Wilkins for penance.

Hard on Wilkins?

Not a bit of it.  He’s as conscious of his rectitude and as unconscious of his unpopularity as ever.

Only he is a little more outspoken about women than he used to be, and somehow or other he has let it creep out that he “doesn’t find them interesting.”

“They can’t even learn to dance without tripping a fellow up,” says he.

THE MAYOR’S LAMPS

The serpent had crept into Eden.  The Perkins household for ten years had been little less than Paradise to its inmates, and then in a single night the reptile of political ambition had dragged his slimy length through those happy door-posts and now sat grinning indecently at the inscription over the library mantel, a ribbon mosaic bearing the sentiment “Here Dwells Content” let into the tiles thereof.