being employed by the enterprising proprietors of this or that celebrated resort to use his gifts for their especial benefit.  There are no doubt many persons who remember the old sign and the old tavern and its four chief personages presently to be mentioned.  It is to be hoped that they will not furnish the public with a key to this narrative, and perhaps bring trouble to the writer of it, as has happened to other authors.  If the real names are a little altered, it need not interfere with the important facts relating to those who bear them.  It might not be safe to tell a damaging story about John or James Smythe; but if the slight change is made of spelling the name Smith, the Smythes would never think of bringing an action, as if the allusion related to any of them.  The same gulf of family distinction separates the Thompsons with a p from the Thomsons without that letter.

There are few pleasanter places in the Northern States for a summer residence than that known from the first period of its settlement by the name of Arrowhead Village.  The Indians had found it out, as the relics they left behind them abundantly testified.  The commonest of these were those chipped stones which are the medals of barbarism, and from Which the place took its name,—­the heads of arrows, of various sizes, material, and patterns:  some small enough for killing fish and little birds, some large enough for such game as the moose and the bear, to say nothing of the hostile Indian and the white settler; some of flint, now and then one of white quartz, and others of variously colored jasper.  The Indians must have lived here for many generations, and it must have been a kind of factory village of the stone age,—­which lasted up to near the present time, if we may judge from the fact that many of these relics are met with close to the surface of the ground.

No wonder they found this a pleasant residence, for it is to-day one of the most attractive of all summer resorts; so inviting, indeed, that those who know it do not like to say too much about it, lest the swarms of tourists should make it unendurable to those who love it for itself, and not as a centre of fashionable display and extramural cockneyism.

There is the lake, in the first place,—­Cedar Lake,—­about five miles long, and from half a mile to a mile and a half wide, stretching from north to south.  Near the northern extremity are the buildings of Stoughton University, a flourishing young college with an ambitious name, but well equipped and promising, the grounds of which reach the water.  At the southern end of the lake are the edifices of the Corinna Institute, a favorite school for young ladies, where large numbers of the daughters of America are fitted, so far as education can do it, for all stations in life, from camping out with a husband at the mines in Nevada to acting the part of chief lady of the land in the White House at Washington.