“John,” she said, before I had taken my seat, “I wish you would look in my room, and bring me my handkerchief.  You will find it in the pocket of my blue dress.”

I went to execute the commission.  When I pulled the handkerchief out of her pocket, something else came with it and fell on the floor.  I picked up the object and looked at it.  It was Julius’s rabbit’s foot.

THE GRAY WOLFS HA’NT

It was a rainy day at the vineyard.  The morning had dawned bright and clear.  But the sky had soon clouded, and by nine o’clock there was a light shower, followed by others at brief intervals.  By noon the rain had settled into a dull, steady downpour.  The clouds hung low, and seemed to grow denser instead of lighter as they discharged their watery burden, and there was now and then a muttering of distant thunder.  Outdoor work was suspended, and I spent most of the day at the house, looking over my accounts and bringing up some arrears of correspondence.

Towards four o’clock I went out on the piazza, which was broad and dry, and less gloomy than the interior of the house, and composed myself for a quiet smoke.  I had lit my cigar and opened the volume I was reading at that time, when my wife, whom I had left dozing on a lounge, came out and took a rocking-chair near me.

“I wish you would talk to me, or read to me—­or something,” she exclaimed petulantly.  “It’s awfully dull here today.”

“I’ll read to you with pleasure,” I replied, and began at the point where I had found my bookmark:—­

“’The difficulty of dealing with transformations so many-sided as those which all existences have undergone, or are undergoing, is such as to make a complete and deductive interpretation almost hopeless.  So to grasp the total process of redistribution of matter and motion as to see simultaneously its several necessary results in their actual interdependence is scarcely possible.  There is, however, a mode of rendering the process as a whole tolerably comprehensible.  Though the genesis of the rearrangement of every evolving aggregate is in itself one, it presents to our intelligence’”—­

“John,” interrupted my wife, “I wish you would stop reading that nonsense and see who that is coming up the lane.”

I closed my book with a sigh.  I had never been able to interest my wife in the study of philosophy, even when presented in the simplest and most lucid form.

Some one was coming up the lane; at least, a huge faded cotton umbrella was making progress toward the house, and beneath it a pair of nether extremities in trousers was discernible.  Any doubt in my mind as to whose they were was soon resolved when Julius reached the steps and, putting the umbrella down, got a good dash of the rain as he stepped up on the porch.

“Why in the world, Julius,” I asked, “didn’t you keep the umbrella up until you got under cover?”