Oh, no, my Gnome, you knew nothing of it; you did not take it.  But since no one accused you or even suspected you, why could you not have been less aggressive and more sympathetic in your assertions?  But we will plough no longer in that field.  The ploughshare has struck against a rock and grits, denting its edge in vain.  My veil is gone,—­my ample, historic, heroic veil.  There is a woman in Fontdale who breathes air filtered through—­I will not say stolen tissue, but certainly through tissue which was obtained without rendering its owner any fair equivalent.  Does not every breeze that softly stirs its fluttering folds say to her, “O friend, this veil is not yours, not yours,” and still sighingly, “not yours!  Up among the northern hills, yonder towards the sunset, sits the owner, sorrowful, weeping, wailing”?  I believe I am wading out into the Sally Waters of Mother Goosery; but, prose or poetry, somewhere a woman,—­and because nobody of taste could surreptitiously possess herself of my veil, I have no doubt that she cut it incontinently into two equal parts, and gave one to her sister, and that there are two women,—­nay, since niggardly souls have no sense of grandeur and will shave down to microscopic dimensions, it is every way probable that she divided it into three unequal parts, and took three quarters of a yard for herself, three quarters for her sister, and gave the remaining half-yard to her daughter, and that at this very moment there are two women and a little girl taking their walks abroad under the silken shadows of my veil!  And yet there are people who profess to disbelieve in total depravity.

Nor did the veil walk away alone.  My trunk became imbued with the spirit of adventure, and branched off on its own account up somewhere into Vermont.  I suppose it would have kept on and reached perhaps the North Pole by this time, had not Crene’s dark eyes—­so pretty to look at that one instinctively feels they ought not to be good for anything, if a just impartiality is to be maintained, but they are—­Crene’s dark eyes seen it tilting up into a baggage-crate and trundling off towards the Green Mountains, but too late.  Of course there was a formidable hitch in the programme.  A court of justice was improvised on the car-steps.  I was the plaintiff, Crene chief evidence, baggage-master both defendant and examining-counsel.  The case did not admit of a doubt.  There was the little insurmountable check whose brazen lips could speak no lie.

“Keep hold of that,” whispered Crene, and a yoke of oxen could not have drawn it from me.

“You are sure you had it marked for Fontdale,” says Mr. Baggage-master.

I hold the impracticable check before his eyes in silence.

“Yes, well, it must have gone on to Albany.”

“But it went away on that track,” says Crene.

“Couldn’t have gone on that track.  Of course they wouldn’t have carried it away over there just to make it go wrong.”