When everything was ready for a start, the Inhabitant insisted that he would go “a piece” with them to show the way, and, mounted on his Indian pony, he kept them company to their destination.  Then the trapper bade Albert an affectionate adieu, and gave a blushing, stammering, adoring farewell to Katy, and turned his little sorrel pony back toward his home, where he spent the next few days in trying to make some worthy verses in commemoration of the coming to the cabin of a trapper lonely, a purty angel bright as day, and how the trapper only wep’ and cried when she went away.  But his feelings were too deep for his rhymes, and his rhymes were poorer than his average, because his feeling was deeper.  He must have burned up hundreds of couplets, triplets, and sextuplets in the next fortnight.  For, besides his chivalrous and poetic gallantry toward womankind, he found himself hopelessly in love with a girl whom he would no more have thought of marrying than he would of wedding a real angel.  Sometimes he dreamed of going to school and getting an education, “puttin’ some school-master’s hair-ile onter his talk,” as he called it, but then the hopelessness of any attempt to change himself deterred him.  But thenceforth Katy became more to him than Laura was to Petrarch.  Habits of intemperance had crept upon him in his isolation and pining for excitement, but now he set out to seek an ideal purity, he abolished even his pipe, he scrupulously pruned his conversation of profanity, so that he wouldn’ be onfit to love her any way, ef he didn’ never marry her.

CHAPTER XV.

AN EPISODE.

I fear the gentle reader, how much more the savage one, will accuse me of having beguiled him with false pretenses.  Here I have written XIV chapters of this story, which claims to be a mystery, and there stand the letters XV at the head of this chapter and I have not got to the mystery yet, and my friend Miss Cormorant, who devours her dozen novels a week for steady diet, and perhaps makes it a baker’s dozen at this season of the year, and who loves nothing so well as to be mystified by labyrinthine plots and counterplots—­Miss Cormorant is about to part company with me at this point.  She doesn’t like this plain sailing.  Now, I will be honest with you, Miss Cormorant, all the more that I don’t care if you do quit.  I will tell you plainly that to my mind the mystery lies yet several chapters in advance, and that I shouldn’t be surprised if I have to pass out of my teens and begin to head with double X’s before I get to that mystery.  Why don’t I hurry up then?  Ah! there’s the rub.  Miss Cormorant and all the Cormorant family are wanting me to hurry up with this history, and just so surely as I should skip over any part of the tale, or slight my background, or show any eagerness, that other family, the Critics—­the recording angels of literature—­take down their pens, and with a sad face joyfully write:  “This