It may have been the weather, or it may have been the pie, but I was not impressed favorably with the house.  Perhaps it was the name extending the whole length of the building, with a letter under each window, making the people who looked out dreadfully conspicuous.  Perhaps it was that “Temperance” always suggested to my mind rusks and weak tea.  It was uninviting.  It might have been called the “Total Abstinence” Hotel, from the lack of anything to intoxicate or inthrall the senses.  It was designed with an eye to artistic dreariness.  It was so much too large for the settlement, that it appeared to be a very slight improvement on out-doors.  It was unpleasantly new.  There was the forest flavor of dampness about it, and a slight spicing of pine.  Nature outraged, but not entirely subdued, sometimes broke out afresh in little round, sticky, resinous tears on the doors and windows.  It seemed to me that boarding there must seem like a perpetual picnic.  As I entered the door, a number of the regular boarders rushed out of a long room, and set about trying to get the taste of something out of their mouths, by the application of tobacco in various forms.  A few immediately ranged themselves around the fireplace, with their legs over each other’s chairs, and in that position silently resigned themselves to indigestion.  Remembering the pie, I waived the invitation of the landlord to supper, but suffered myself to be conducted into the sitting-room.  “Mine host” was a magnificent-looking, heavily bearded specimen of the animal man.  He reminded me of somebody or something connected with the drama.  I was sitting beside the fire, mutely wondering what it could be, and trying to follow the particular chord of memory thus touched, into the intricate past, when a little delicate-looking woman appeared at the door, and, leaning heavily against the casing, said in an exhausted tone, “Husband!” As the landlord turned toward her, that particular remembrance flashed before me in a single line of blank verse.  It was this:  “Two souls with but one single thought, two hearts that beat as one.”

It was Ingomar and Parthenia his wife.  I imagined a different denouement from the play.  Ingomar had taken Parthenia back to the mountains, and kept a hotel for the benefit of the Alemanni, who resorted there in large numbers.  Poor Parthenia was pretty well fagged out, and did all the work without “help.”  She had two “young barbarians,” a boy and a girl.  She was faded, but still good-looking.

I sat and talked with Ingomar, who seemed perfectly at home and told me several stories of the Alemanni, all bearing a strong flavor of the wilderness, and being perfectly in keeping with the house.  How he, Ingomar, had killed a certain dreadful “bar,” whose skin was just up “yar,” over his bed.  How he, Ingomar, had killed several “bucks,” whose skins had been prettily fringed and embroidered by Parthenia, and even now clothed him.  How he, Ingomar, had killed several “Injins,” and