When the details of their wedding were under discussion, Crombie said to Blanche:  “Oughtn’t we to have an old shoe thrown after the carriage as we drive away?”

She smiled; looked him full in the eyes with a peculiar tenderness in which there was a bright, delicious sparkle of humor.  “No; old shoes are much too useful to be wasted that way.”

Somehow she had possessed herself of that particular, providential pair; and, though I don’t want anybody to laugh at my two friends, I must risk saying that I suspect Mrs. Crombie of preserving it somewhere to this day, in the big new house up-town.

THE DENVER EXPRESS
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BY A. A. HAYES

Augustus Alien Hayes (born in New England in 1837, died in 1892) was the author of two works relating to the Far West which have placed on permanent record an interesting phase, now forever past, of the development of civilisation in that region.  “New Colorado and the Santa Fe Trail” is a descriptive book yielding the information of fact concerning the pioneer period of settlement in that region; and “The Denver Express” is a stirring piece of fiction vividly reproducing the spirit of those days when the forces of social order introduced by the railroad were battling with the primitive elements of vice and crime.  The latter story, which is here reproduced, appeared in an English magazine, “Belgravia,” where it was most favorably received by readers whose appetite for such fiction had already been whetted by the tales of Bret Harte.

THE DENVER EXPRESS
BY A. A. HAYES
[Footnote:  From “Belgravia” for January, 1884]

Any one who has seen an outward-bound clipper ship getting under way, and heard the “shanty-songs” sung by the sailors as they toiled at capstan and halliards, will probably remember that rhymeless but melodious refrain—­

“I’m bound to see its muddy waters,
 Yeo ho! that rolling river;
Bound to see its muddy waters,
 Yeo ho! the wild Missouri.”

Only a happy inspiration could have impelled Jack to apply the adjective “wild” to that ill-behaved and disreputable river which, tipsily bearing its enormous burden of mud from the far Northwest, totters, reels, runs its tortuous course for hundreds on hundreds of miles; and which, encountering the lordly and thus far well-behaved Mississippi at Alton, and forcing its company upon this splendid river (as if some drunken fellow should lock arms with a dignified pedestrian), contaminates it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

At a certain point on the banks of this river, or rather—­as it has the habit of abandoning and destroying said banks—­at a safe distance therefrom, there is a town from which a railroad takes its departure, for its long climb up the natural incline of the Great Plains, to the base of the mountains; hence the importance to this town of the large but somewhat shabby building serving as terminal station.  In its smoky interior, late in the evening and not