"I don't remember. Some paper, I rather think. It's one of those good
things that get about without anybody's knowing who says 'em. Sounds like
Coleridge."

"That's what I call a compliment worth having," said Byles Gridley to
himself, when he got home. "Let me look at that passage."

He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and got so much interested,
reading on page after page, that he did not hear the little tea-bell, and
Susan Posey volunteered to run up to his study and call him down to tea.




CHAPTER V

THE TWINS.

Miss Suzan Posey knocked timidly at his door and informed him that tea
was waiting. He rather liked Susan Posey. She was a pretty creature,
slight, blonde, a little too light, a village beauty of the second or
third grade, effective at picnics and by moonlight,--the kind of girl
that very young men are apt to remember as their first love. She had a
taste for poetry, and an admiration of poets; but, what was better, she
was modest and simple, and a perfect sister and mother and grandmother to
the two little forlorn twins who had been stranded on the Widow Hopkins's
doorstep.

These little twins, a boy and girl, were now between two and three years
old. A few words will make us acquainted with them. Nothing had ever