182 TROTTYS WEDDING TOUR. eating your necktie! Alta! we never thought of the cam- phene-burner.” “Nor the condensed beef. Bib, if you must stand on your head, don’t do it on the boiled eggs. I’m afraid they were n’t done very hard. Yes, here’s the waterproof and the rubbers — and —”’ “‘ Tie mother’s bonnet for her, do! She’ll never get off. O, he says he’s late to the train already! Good by, mother !” “Good by —write— Bib — Baby — Alta— Your father — Bag — Purse — up stairs— No, it is n't — Be — good — girls —”’ In a shower of forever uncompleted sentences mother rolled off. The tortured air quivered and sank into graceful silence. The frantic coachman lashed his horses up the hill, and Bib tumbled out of the window. Alta and I stayed only to see him picked up and tumbled in again, and then came slowly into the house and sat down, and drew the longest breath we ’d drawn since school was out. “I do not regard,” said Alta, after a prolonged silence, in which she had sat fanning her blazing cheeks with a waste- paper basket, and pensively considering the entry-lamp, to which two pairs of forgotten shawl-straps, a rubber boot, the baby’s mosquito-netting, and a few other indispensables to the journey, yet hung as tender souvenirs of the inventive abilities of Bib,“ I do not regard the Franco-Prussian war as an undertaking to be compared with the getting off of a