"How could I have spent such a heavenly night of peace and hope if you had not come, dear? The Good Being must have led you to me."

"Huldy," said Levin, after thinking to the range of his knowledge, "maybe thar's a post-office at Cannon's Ferry, an' you kin write a letter to Jack Wonnell fur me."

"Why not to your mother, Levin?"

"Oh, I am ashamed to tell her; it would kill her."

"If we should be found out, Levin, Aunt Patty would kill me. There is no paper here, no ink that I can get, the postage on a letter is almost nineteen cents, and, look! these half-cents are short of the sum by just two."

"I have gold," cried Levin, thinking of the residue of Joe Johnson's bounty.

He put his hand into his pocket, but the money was no longer there.

"Hush!" cried Hulda, "you have been robbed. Everybody is robbed who sleeps here. Grandma can smell gold like the rat that finds yellow cheese."

The individual who had served the breakfast was seen coming towards them, a man in size, with a low forehead, no chin to speak of, a long, crane neck, and a badly scratched and festered face.

"Mister," he said to Levin, "come help me hitch the horses; I'm beat so I can't see how."

Levin started at once, suggesting to Hulda to make search for his missing money, and, when they were in the little stable, the man observed, in a whisper, to Levin:

"By smoke!"

Levin went on putting the bridles and breeching on the horses, when the man said again, with an insinuating grin:

"By smoke!"

"Heigh?" exclaimed Levin.

"By smoke!" the man remarked again, with a very ardent emphasis.

"You must have been in Prencess Anne," Levin said, "to swar 'by smoke.'"

The ill-raised man, with such an inferior head and cranish neck, now slipped around to the front of Levin and looked down on him, and whispered:

"Hokey-pokey!"

The idea crossed Levin's mind that the scullion of Patty Cannon must have gone crazy.

"Whair did you pick up them words, Cy?" Levin asked.

"Hokey-pokey!" answered Cy James, with a more mysterious and impressive sufflation; "Hokey-pokey! By smoke! and Pangymonum, too!"

"Why, Cy! what do you mean? Jimmy Phoebus never swars but in them air words. Do you know Jimmy Phoebus?"

"Pangymonum, too!" hissed Cy James, with every animation. "Hokey-pokey, three! an' By smoke, one!"

He put his long arms on his knees, and bent down like a great goose, and stared into Levin's eyes.

"I never had sense enough," Levin said, "to guess a riddle, Cy Jeems. Them words I have hearn a good man - my mother's friend - use so often that they scare me. My mind's been a-thinkin' on him night an' day. Oh, is he dead?"

"By smoke! Hokey-pokey! an' Pangymonum, too!" the long, lean, excited fellow whispered, with the greatest solemnity.