Today's Stichomancy for David Letterman

the extraordinary situation in which he found himself.

"Louis XI. and I," he said in conclusion, "have just been lying to each other like two pedlers of coconuts. You understand, my girl, that if he follows me, he will get the secret of the hiding-place. The king alone can watch my wanderings at night. I don't feel sure that his conscience, near as he is to death, can resist thirteen hundred thousand crowns. We MUST be beforehand with him; we must find the hidden treasure and send it to Ghent, and you alone--"

Cornelius stopped suddenly, and seemed to be weighing the heart of the sovereign who had had thoughts of parricide at twenty-two years of age. When his judgment of Louis XI. was concluded, he rose abruptly

high, before. I opened my eyes and lay without moving.

"And then I saw the men of the East--they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the color of an Eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a mur- mur, without a sigh, without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the shore, and the brown roofs of

Youth

geese--"spy-geese" we called them--which would be the first to arrive, would probably come over low down and slow, whereas those that followed, scenting danger, might fly high and fast. This, in fact, proved to be the case, for there is no bird more clever than the misnamed goose.

When we had waited about a quarter of an hour Hans said:

"Hist! Goose comes."

As he spoke, though as yet I could not see the bird, I heard its cry of "Honk, honk" and the swish of its strong wings.

Then it appeared, an old spur-winged gander, probably the king of the flock, flying so low that it only cleared the cliff edge by about twenty feet, and passed over not more than thirty yards up, an easy shot.

Marie

Todd with gentle humor, stealing a glance at me. "There's one thing certain: there's nothing takes in this whole neighborhood like anything related to the Bowdens. Yes, I do feel that when you call upon the Bowdens you may expect most families to rise up between the Landing and the far end of the Back Cove. Those that aren't kin by blood are kin by marriage."

"There used to be an old story goin' about when I was a girl," said Mrs. Blackett, with much amusement. "There was a great many more Bowdens then than there are now, and the folks was all setting in meeting a dreadful hot Sunday afternoon, and a scatter-witted little bound girl came running to the meetin'-house door all out o'