—­I wonder how I got here, or how I am to get back again.  I started for Fontdale, and I find myself in a mending-basket.  As I know no good in tracing the same road back, we may as well strike a bee-line and begin new at Fontdale.

We stopped at Fontdale a-cousining.  I have a veil, a beautiful—­have, did I say?  Alas!  Troy was.  But I must not anticipate—­a beautiful veil of brown tissue, none of your woolleny, gruff fabrics, fit only for penance, but a silken gossamery cloud, soft as a baby’s check.  Yet everybody fleers at it.  Everybody has a joke about it.  Everybody looks at it, and holds it out at arms’ length, and shakes it, and makes great eyes at it, and says, “What in the world”—­, and ends with a huge, bouncing laugh.  Why?  One is ashamed of human nature at being forced to confess.  Because, to use a Gulliverism, it is longer by the breadth of my nail than any of its contemporaries.  In fact, it is two yards long.  That is all.  Halicarnassus fired the first gun at it by saying that its length was to enable one end of it to remain at home while the other end went with me, so that neither of us should get lost.  This is an allusion to a habit which I and my property have of finding ourselves individually and collectively left in the lurch.  After this initial shot, everybody considered himself at liberty to let off his rusty old blunderbuss, and there was a constant peppering.  But my veil never lowered its colors nor curtailed its resources.  Alas! what ridicule and contumely failed to effect, destiny accomplished.  Softness and plenitude are no shields against the shafts of fate.

I went into the station waiting-room to write a note.  I laid my bonnet, my veil, my packages upon the table.  I wrote my note.  I went away.  The next morning, when I would have arrayed myself to resume my journey, there was no veil.  I remembered that I had taken it into the station the night before, and that I had not taken it out.  At the station we inquired of the waiting-woman concerning it.  It is as much as your life is worth to ask these people about lost articles.  They take it for granted at the first blush that you mean to accuse them of stealing.  “Have you seen a brown veil lying about anywhere?” asked Crene, her sweet bird-voice warbling out from her sweet rose-lips.  “No, I ’a’n’t seen nothin’ of it,” says Gnome, with magnificent indifference.

“It was lost here last night,” continues Crene, in a soliloquizing undertone, pushing investigating glances beneath the sofas.

“I do’ know nothin’ about it. I ’a’n’t took it”; and the Gnome tosses her head back defiantly.  “I seen the lady when she was a-writin’ of her letter, and when she went out ther’ wa’n’t nothin’ left on the table but a hangkerchuf, and that wa’n’t hern.  I do’ know nothin’ about it, nor I ‘a’n’t seen nothin’ of it.”