at all events there are no dangerous morasses in them.  No matter how much it rains, people get their comfortable meals three times a day. Here, rain means a risk of starvation (if the little wooden bridge between us and the town were to be swept away) and a certainty of short commons.  A wet morning means damp bread for breakfast and a thousand other disagreeables.  No, I have no patience with the pampered Londoners, who want perpetual sunshine in addition to their other blessings, for saying one word about discomfort.  They are all much too civilized and luxurious, and their lives are made altogether too smooth for them.  Let them come out here and try to keep house on the top of a hill with servants whose language they don’t understand, a couple of noisy children and a small income, and then, as dear Mark Twain says, “they’ll know something about woe.”

DINNER IN A STATE PRISON.

An invitation to take dinner with a friend in the State’s prison was something new and exciting to a quiet little body like me, and I re-read Ruth Denham’s kindly-worded note to that effect, and thought how odd it was that we should meet again in this way after ten years’ separation and all the changes that had intervened in both our lives.  We had parted last on the night of our grand closing-school party, after having been friends and fellow-pupils for five years.  She was then fifteen, and the prettiest, brightest and cleverest girl at Lynnhope.  I was younger, and felt distinguished by her friendship, and heart-broken at the idea of losing her, for she was going abroad with her family, while I remained to complete my studies at the institute.

I had plenty of letters the first year, but then her father died, and with him went his reputed fortune.  A painful change occurred in the position of the Welfords in consequence, and Ruth became a teacher, as I heard, until she met and married a young man from the West, whither she returned with him immediately after the ceremony.  She had written to me once after becoming Ruth Denham, and her letter was kind and cordial as her old self, but the correspondence thus renewed soon ceased.  I was also an orphan, but a close attendant at the couch of my invalid aunt; and Ruth’s new strange life was too crowded with pressing duties to permit her to write regularly to her girlhood’s companion, whom she had not seen for years.  My aunt had now recovered so far as to indulge a taste for travel.  We were on our way by the great railroad to the Pacific coast, and we stopped at the small capital of one of the newest States to discover that Ruth Denham was a resident there, the wife of the lieutenant-governor, who was consequently the warden of the State prison.  The note I held in my hand was in answer to one I had despatched to her an hour before by the hands of a Chinaman from the hotel, and it was as glad and affectionate as I could wish: