mesquite. Should he dare tell them? Would they believe him, or would
they laugh at him before her? He hesitated, and at last resolved to tell
it privately to the husband. When the meal was ended, and he was made
happy by Mrs. Peyton's laughing acceptance of his offer to help her
clear the table and wash the dishes, they all gathered comfortably in
front of the tent before the large camp fire. At the other fire the rest
of the party were playing cards and laughing, but Clarence no longer
cared to join them. He was quite tranquil in the maternal propinquity
of his hostess, albeit a little uneasy as to his reticence about the
Indian.

"Kla'uns," said Susy, relieving a momentary pause, in her highest voice,
"knows how to speak. Speak, Kla'uns!"

It appearing from Clarence's blushing explanation that this gift was not
the ordinary faculty of speech, but a capacity to recite verse, he was
politely pressed by the company for a performance.

"Speak 'em, Kla'uns, the boy what stood unto the burnin' deck, and said,
'The boy, oh, where was he?'" said Susy, comfortably lying down on Mrs.
Peyton's lap, and contemplating her bare knees in the air. "It's 'bout
a boy," she added confidentially to Mrs. Peyton, "whose father wouldn't
never, never stay with him on a burnin' ship, though he said, 'Stay,
father, stay,' ever so much."

With this clear, lucid, and perfectly satisfactory explanation of
Mrs. Hemans's "Casabianca," Clarence began. Unfortunately, his actual
rendering of this popular school performance was more an effort of
memory than anything else, and was illustrated by those wooden gestures
which a Western schoolmaster had taught him. He described the flames