I was sitting in my bed-room sewing away, in placid unconsciousness of outside cold and discomfort, when Charlie got home from his first hunt of the season.

“No water, Lulie?” and the monster took hold of my nice pitcher with a pair of muddy, half-frozen hands.

“On the gallery, dear, just where mother used to keep it;” and I smiled up at him angelically.

With a muttered something or other, poor Charlie bounded out to the back gallery.  He came back in a minute, his hands as muddy and cold as ever.

“Look here, Lulie:  the water’s all frozen in that confounded tin basin out there.”

“I’ll have it thawed out for you,” I said sweetly, rising as I spoke.

“I say, wifey”—­and the great, handsome fellow came close up to me with his mud and his burs—­“do you think it’s exactly fair, when a fellow’s been out all the morning shooting ducks for your dinner, to make him stand out on the gallery such a day as this and scrub the mud off his frozen hands?”

“That’s the way mother did,” was all my answer.

“Look here, Lulie, I cry quits.  If you’ll only let a body off this once, you may keep house on your own plan, little lady, and I’ll never tell you how mother did it again so long as I live.”

“Well, then, don’t, that’s a dear,” I replied, “for you’ll only make me dislike her memory, without doing any good.  Just be patient with me, Charlie, and maybe after a while I’ll be as good a housekeeper as your mother was before me.  The mistake you and all other men make is, in comparing your wives at the end of their first year of housekeeping with your mothers, whose housekeeping you knew nothing about until it was of ever so many years’ duration.  I’m young yet, but I’m improving in that matter every day, Charlie.”

With which little moral lecture I gave Charlie a kiss, and some water to wash the mud from his poor red hands.

Moral.—­My dear girls, don’t you ever marry a man that cannot take his affidavit he never had a mother, unless it is expressly stipulated in the marriage contract that he is never to tell you how his mother did it.

J.R.  HADERMANN.

The Red Fox:  A Tale of New Year’s Eve.

It was New Year’s Eve, 184-.  I and my two little boys, children of five and seven, were alone in the house.  My husband had been unexpectedly called away on business, and the servant had gone to her friends to spend the coming holiday.

It was drawing toward night.  The cold shadows of the winter twilight were already falling.  A dull red glow in the west told where the sun was going down.  Over the rest of the sky hung heavy gray clouds.  A few drops of rain fell from time to time, and the wind was rising, coming round the corner of the house with a long, mournful howl like that of a lost hound.

I am not a very nervous person, but I did not like the idea of spending by myself the long evening that would come after the children’s bed-time.