all their days when speaking of a friend.  Were they really christened by that name, any of these numerous Franks?  Perhaps they were, and if so there is nothing to be said.  But if not, was the baptismal name Francis or Franklin?  The mind is apt to fasten in a very perverse and unpleasant way upon this question, which too often there is no possible way of settling.  One might hope, if he outlived the bearer of the appellation, to get at the fact; but since even gravestones have learned to use the names belonging to childhood and infancy in their solemn record, the generation which docks its Christian names in such an un-Christian way will bequeath whole churchyards full of riddles to posterity.  How it will puzzle and distress the historians and antiquarians of a coming generation to settle what was the real name of Dan and Bert and Billy, which last is legible on a white marble slab, raised in memory of a grown person, in a certain burial-ground in a town in Essex County, Massachusetts!

But in the mean time we are forgetting the letter directed to Mr. Frank Mayfield.

“Dear frank,—­Hooray!  Hurrah!  Rah!

“I have made the acquaintance of ‘The Mysterious Stranger’!  It happened by a queer sort of accident, which came pretty near relieving you of the duty of replying to this letter.  I was out in my little boat, which carries a sail too big for her, as I know and ought to have remembered.  One of those fitful flaws of wind to which the lake is so liable struck the sail suddenly, and over went my boat.  My feet got tangled in the sheet somehow, and I could not get free.  I had hard work to keep my head above water, and I struggled desperately to escape from my toils; for if the boat were to go down I should be dragged down with her.  I thought of a good many things in the course of some four or five minutes, I can tell you, and I got a lesson about time better than anything Kant and all the rest of them have to say of it.  After I had been there about an ordinary lifetime, I saw a white canoe making toward me, and I knew that our shy young gentleman was coming to help me, and that we should become acquainted without an introduction.  So it was, sure enough.  He saw what the trouble was, managed to disentangle my feet without drowning me in the process or upsetting his little flimsy craft, and, as I was somewhat tired with my struggle, took me in tow and carried me to the landing where he kept his canoe.  I can’t say that there is anything odd about his manners or his way of talk.  I judge him to be a native of one of our Northern States,—­perhaps a New Englander.  He has lived abroad during some parts of his life.  He is not an artist, as it was at one time thought he might be.  He is a good-looking fellow, well developed, manly in appearance, with nothing to excite special remark unless it be a certain look of anxiety or apprehension which comes over him from time to time.  You remember our old friend