"Mrs. Libby," said I, rising, "I think I will go back to the city
to-morrow."




A STORY OF THE VERE DE VERE.


The landlord called it an apartment-house, the tenants called their
three or four little closets of rooms, flats, and perhaps if you or I
had chanced to be in West ---- Street, near the river, and had glanced
up at the ugly red brick structure, with the impracticable fire-escape
crawling up its front, like an ugly spider, we should have said it was a
common tenement house.

Druse, however, had thought it, if a trifle dirty, a very magnificent
and desirable dwelling. The entrance floor was tesselated with diamonds
of blue and white; there was a row of little brass knobs and
letter-boxes, with ill-written names or printed cards stuck askew in the
openings above them. Druse did not guess their uses at first, how
should she? She had never in all her fifteen years, been in the city
before. How should one learn the ways of apartment-houses when one had
lived always in a little gray, weather-beaten house, on the very
outskirts of a straggling village in Eastern Connecticut?

It happened like this. One day, Tom, the fourth of the nine hungry and
turbulent children, sent to the store on an errand, returned, bringing a
letter. A letter, that was not a circular about fertilizers, or one of