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.

I was asked beforehand, if this would be a wise gift, and I said “Yes, the very wisest of all;” I know the colored race, and I know that in Lewis’s eyes this fine toy will throw the other more valuable testimonials far away into the shade.  If he lived in England the Humane Society would give him a gold medal as costly as this watch, and nobody would say:  “It is out of character.”  If Lewis chose to wear a town clock, who would become it better?

Lewis has sound common sense, and is not going to be spoiled.  The instant he found himself possessed of money, he forgot himself in a plan to make his old father comfortable, who is wretchedly poor and lives down in Maryland.  His next act, on the spot, was the proffer to the Cranes of the $300 of his remaining indebtedness to them.  This was put off by them to the indefinite future, for he is not going to be allowed to pay that at all, though he doesn’t know it.

A letter of acknowledgment from Lewis contains a sentence which raises it to the dignity of literature: 

“But I beg to say, humbly, that inasmuch as divine providence saw fit to use me as a instrument for the saving of those presshious lives, the honner conferd upon me was greater than the feat performed.”

That is well said. 
                    Yrs ever
                                   mark.