Ten minutes later Theodore and I arrived opposite the house, with the servants straggling after us, and shouted to the distracted group on the porch, “Everybody safe!”

Believe it?  Why how could they?  They knew the road perfectly.  We might as well have said it to people who had seen their friends go over Niagara.

However, we convinced them; and then, instead of saying something, or going on crying, they grew very still—­words could not express it, I suppose.

Nobody could do anything that night, or sleep, either; but there was a deal of moving talk, with long pauses between pictures of that flying carriage, these pauses represented—­this picture intruded itself all the time and disjointed the talk.

But yesterday evening late, when Lewis arrived from down town he found his supper spread, and some presents of books there, with very complimentary writings on the fly-leaves, and certain very complimentary letters, and more or less greenbacks of dignified denomination pinned to these letters and fly-leaves,—­and one said, among other things, (signed by the Cranes) “We cancel $400 of your indebtedness to us,” &c. &c.

(The end thereof is not yet, of course, for Charley Langdon is West and will arrive ignorant of all these things, today.)

The supper-room had been kept locked and imposingly secret and mysterious until Lewis should arrive; but around that part of the house were gathered Lewis’s wife and child, Chocklate, Josie, Aunty Cord and our Rosa, canvassing things and waiting impatiently.  They were all on hand when the curtain rose.

Now, Aunty Cord is a violent Methodist and Lewis an implacable Dunker —­Baptist.  Those two are inveterate religious disputants.  The revealments having been made Aunty Cord said with effusion—­

“Now, let folks go on saying there ain’t no God!  Lewis, the Lord sent you there to stop that horse.”

Says Lewis: 

“Then who sent the horse there in sich a shape?”

But I want to call your attention to one thing.  When Lewis arrived the other evening, after saving those lives by a feat which I think is the most marvelous of any I can call to mind—­when he arrived, hunched up on his manure wagon and as grotesquely picturesque as usual, everybody wanted to go and see how he looked.  They came back and said he was beautiful.  It was so, too—­and yet he would have photographed exactly as he would have done any day these past 7 years that he has occupied this farm.

Aug. 27.  P. S. Our little romance in real life is happily and satisfactorily completed.  Charley has come, listened, acted—­and now John T. Lewis has ceased to consider himself as belonging to that class called “the poor.”

It has been known, during some years, that it was Lewis’s purpose to buy a thirty dollar silver watch some day, if he ever got where he could afford it.  Today Ida has given him a new, sumptuous gold Swiss stem-winding stop-watch; and if any scoffer shall say, “Behold this thing is out of character,” there is an inscription within, which will silence him; for it will teach him that this wearer aggrandizes the watch, not the watch the wearer.