fearful ordeal he had there passed through. So he hid in the woods all
day, and rehearsed this terrible falsehood, making himself miserable by
repeating those extracts from the catechism which refer to the future
abode of liars.

Though thus foiled in their active investigations, they still held long
consultations on the absorbing topic, and in which, to ARCHIBALD'S
horror, he is often obliged to participate. He has had it on his
tongue's end forty times to tell BELINDA all about his forced marriage
with ANN at the Half-way House. He has even dreamed, on two separate
nights, that he has done so, but he woke up both times in a cold, clammy
sort of ooze, and it has naturally shaken his confidence, and so the
words stick in his throat. And he remembers ANN'S horrible threat of
coming for him when she wants him, and he makes it a point of doing all
his out-door business before dark, and the bare mention of her name will
make him start and glare wildly about him. And still BELINDA courts him
more persistently than ever, and it is a scene calculated to touch the
most rugged nature to watch them together, she smoothing his hair, and
calling him her "Tootsy-pootsy," or reading poetry to him, stopping
between each verse to cast languishing glances at him, and he bearing it
all with that haggard, imbecile look peculiar to an over-courted man.
And as their wedding-day approaches is it any wonder that poor ARCHIBALD
looks forward to it as a condemned criminal to the scaffold, and watches
day by day the setting of the sun with the same air of grim despair.
Once he tried to run away, but BELINDA, in ambush, flanked him and led
him home. Then she sent for his trunk, and made him board there. And so
he is floating along in a hopeless sort of daze, a wretched victim of
diabolical circumstances.

JEFFRY MAULBOY is visiting his brother JUDAS, at Terre Haute. He has