girls and detested by all the puny men in the train, and in good time got
down at his station.

He stopped on the platform to survey the land--and water-privileges of his
new abode.

"The June sunshine is unequalled," he soliloquized, "the river is
splendid, the hills are pretty, and the Highlands, north, respectable; but
the village has gone to seed. Place and people look lazy, vicious, and
ashamed. I suppose those chimneys are my Foundry. The smoke rises as if
the furnaces were ill-fed and weak in the lungs. Nothing, I can see, looks
alive, except that queer little steamboat coming in,--the 'I.
Ambuster,'--jolly name for a boat!"

Wade left his traps at the station, and walked through the village. All
the gilding of a golden sunset of June could not make it anything but
commonplace. It would be forlorn on a gray day, and utterly dismal in a
storm.

"I must look up a civilized house to lodge in," thought the stranger. "I
cannot possibly camp at the tavern. Its offence is rum, and smells to
heaven."

Presently our explorer found a neat, white, two-story, home-like abode on
the upper street, overlooking the river.

"This promises," he thought. "Here are roses on the porch, a piano, or at
least a melodeon, by the parlor-window, and they are insured in the
Mutual, as the Mutual's plate announces. Now, if that nice-looking person
in black I see setting a table in the back-room is a widow, I will camp