“What happened after our departure I learned from Perkins, on the return of the Shelldrakes to Norridgeport, in September.  Mrs. Shelldrake stoutly persisted in refusing to make Hollins’s bed, or to wash his shirts.  Her brain was dull, to be sure; but she was therefore all the more stubborn in her resentment.  He bore this state of things for about a week, when his engagements to lecture in Ohio suddenly called him away.  Abel and Miss Ringtop were left to wander about the promontory in company, and to exchange lamentations on the hollowness of human hopes or the pleasures of despair.  Whether it was owing to that attraction of sex which would make any man and any woman, thrown together on a desert island, finally become mates, or whether she skilfully ministered to Abel’s sentimental vanity, I will not undertake to decide:  but the fact is, they were actually betrothed, on leaving Arcadia.  I think he would willingly have retreated, after his return to the world; but that was not so easy.  Miss Ringtop held him with an inexorable clutch.  They were not married, however, until just before his departure for California, whither she afterwards followed him.  She died in less than a year, and left him free.”

“And what became of the other Arcadians?” asked Mr. Johnson.

“The Shelldrakes are still living in Norridgeport.  They have become Spiritualists, I understand, and cultivate Mediums.  Hollins, when I last heard of him, was a Deputy Surveyor in the New York Custom-House.  Perkins Brown is our butcher, here in Waterbury, and he often asks me,—­’Do you take chloride of soda on your beefsteaks?  ’He is as fat as a prize ox, and the father of five children.”

“Enos!” exclaimed Mrs. Billings, looking at the clock, “it’s nearly midnight!  Mr. Johnson must be very tired, after such a long story.  The Chapter of the A.C. is hereby closed!”

* * * * *

SNOW.

All through the long hours of yesterday the low clouds hung close above our heads, to pour with more unswerving aim their constant storm of sleet and snow,—­sometimes working in soft silence, sometimes with impatient gusty breaths, but always busily at work.  Darkness brought no rest to these laborious warriors of the air, but only fiercer strife:  the wild winds rose; noisy recruits, they howled beneath the eaves, or swept around the walls, like hungry wolves, now here, now there, howling; at opposite doors.  Thus, through the anxious and wakeful night, the storm went on.  The household lay vexed by broken dreams, with changing fancies of lost children on solitary moors, of sleighs hopelessly overturned in drifted and pathless gorges, or of icy cordage upon disabled vessels in Arctic seas; until a softer warmth, as of sheltering snow-wreaths, lulled all into deeper rest till morning.