flexible curves and factitious glance like the fine young Spartan that he was.  Perhaps an insufficient quality of food may have tended to this asceticism.  He generally avoided Clytie; but one evening, when she returned to the schoolhouse after something she had forgotten, and did not find it until the master walked home with her, I hear that he endeavored to make himself particularly agreeable—­partly from the fact, I imagine, that his conduct was adding gall and bitterness to the already overcharged hearts of Clytemnestra’s admirers.

The morning after this affecting episode Mliss did not come to school.  Noon came, but not Mliss.  Questioning Clytie on the subject, it appeared that they had left the school together, but the willful Mliss had taken another road.  The afternoon brought her not.  In the evening he called on Mrs. Morpher, whose motherly heart was really alarmed.  Mr. Morpher had spent all day in search of her, without discovering a trace that might lead to her discovery.  Aristides was summoned as a probable accomplice, but that equitable infant succeeded in impressing the household with his innocence.  Mrs. Morpher entertained a vivid impression that the child would yet be found drowned in a ditch, or, what was almost as terrible, muddied and soiled beyond the redemption of soap and water.  Sick at heart, the master returned to the schoolhouse.  As he lit his lamp and seated himself at his desk, he found a note lying before him addressed to himself, in Mliss’s handwriting.  It seemed to be written on a leaf torn from some old memorandum book, and, to prevent sacrilegious trifling, had been sealed with six broken wafers.  Opening it almost tenderly, the master read as follows: 

Respected sir—­When you read this, I am run away.  Never to come back.  Never, never, never.  You can give my beeds to Mary Jennings, and my Amerika’s Pride [a highly colored lithograph from a tobacco-box] to Sally Flanders.  But don’t you give anything to Clytie Morpher.  Don’t you dare to.  Do you know what my opinion is of her, it is this, she is perfekly disgustin.  That is all and no more at present from

Yours respectfully,

Melissa Smith.

The master sat pondering on this strange epistle till the moon lifted its bright face above the distant hills, and illuminated the trail that led to the schoolhouse, beaten quite hard with the coming and going of little feet.  Then, more satisfied in mind, he tore the missive into fragments and scattered them along the road.

At sunrise the next morning he was picking his way through the palmlike fern and thick underbrush of the pine forest, starting the hare from its form, and awakening a querulous protest from a few dissipated crows, who had evidently been making a night of it, and so came to the wooded ridge where he had once found Mliss.  There he found the prostrate pine and tasseled branches, but the throne was vacant.