“Hallo, Eph!”

It was one of the men from whom he took fish—­a plain-spoken, sincere little man.

“Why wa’n’t you down to town-meet’n’?”

“I was busy,” said Eph.

“How’d ye like the news?”

“What news?”

There was never any good news for him now.

“Hain’t heard who’s selected town-clerk?”

“No.”

Had they elected Eliphalet, and so expressed their settled distrust of him, and sympathy for the man whom he had injured?

“Who’s elected?” he asked, harshly.

“You be!” said the man; “went in flyin’, all hands clappin’ and stompin’ their feet!”

An hour later the doctor drove up, stopped, and walked toward the kitchen door.  As he passed the window, he looked in.

Eph was lying on his face, upon the settle, as he had first seen him there, his arms beneath his head.

“I will not disturb him now,” said the doctor.

* * * * *

One breezy afternoon, in the following summer, Captain Seth laid aside his easy every-day clothes, and transformed himself into a stiff broadcloth image, with a small silk hat and creaking boots.  So attired, he set out in a high open buggy, with his wife, also in black, but with gold spectacles, to the funeral of an aunt.  As they pursued their jog-trot journey along the Salt Hay Road, and came to Ephraim Morse’s cottage, they saw Susan sitting in a shady little porch, at the front door, shelling peas, and looking down the bay.

“How is everything, Susan?” called out Captain Seth; “’bout time for Eph to be gitt’n’ in?”

“Yes,” she answered, nodding and smiling, and pointing with a pea-pod; “that’s our boat, just coming up to the wharf, with her peak down.”

THE DENVER EXPRESS.

By A.A.  Hayes.

I.

Any one who has seen an outward-bound clipper ship getting under way and heard the “shanty-songs” sung by the sailors as they toiled at capstan and halliards, will probably remember that rhymeless but melodious refrain—­

   “I’m bound to see its muddy waters
     Yeo ho! that rolling river;
   Bound to see its muddy waters
     Yeo ho! the wild Missouri.”

Only a happy inspiration could have impelled Jack to apply the adjective “wild” to that ill-behaved and disreputable river, which, tipsily bearing its enormous burden of mud from the far North-west, totters, reels, runs its tortuous course for hundreds on hundreds of miles; and which, encountering the lordly and thus far well-behaved Mississippi at Alton, and forcing its company upon this splendid river (as if some drunken fellow should lock arms with a dignified pedestrian), contaminates it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.