RESPECTED SIR: When you read this, I am run away. Never to come back. Never Never NEVER. You can give my beeds to Mary Jennings, and my Amerika’s Pride [a, highly colored lithograph from a tobacco box] to Sally Flanders. But don’t you give anything to Clytie Morpher. Don’t you dair to. Do you know what my opinion is of her, it is this, she is perfekly disgustin. That is all and no more at present from MELISSA SMITH.
The master mused for some time over this characteristic epistle. As he was mechanically refolding it his eye caught a sentence written on the back in pencil, in another handwriting, somewhat blurred and indistinct from the heavy incisive strokes of M’liss’s pen on the other side. It seemed to be a memorandum belonging to the book from which the leaf was originally torn:—
July 17th. 5 hours in drift—dipping west—took out 20 oz.; cleaned up 40 oz. Mem.—saw M. S.
“July 17th,” said the master, opening his desk and taking out a file of the “Red Mountain Banner.” “July 17th,” he repeated, running over the pages till he came to a paragraph headed “DISTRESSING SUICIDE.” “July 17th—why, that’s the day Smith killed himself. That’s funny!”
In a strict etymological sense there was nothing so very ludicrous in this coincidence, nor did the master’s face betray any expression of the kind. Perhaps the epithet was chosen to conceal the vague uneasiness which it produced in his mind. We are all of us more affected by these coincidences than we care to confess to one another. If the most matter-of-fact reader of these pages were to find a hearse standing in front of his door for three consecutive mornings, although the circumstance might be satisfactorily explained,—shall I go further and say, because the circumstance might be satisfactorily explained,—he would vaguely wish it hadn’t happened. Philosophize as we may, the simple fact of two remote lines crossing each other always seems to us of tremendous significance, and quite overshadows the more important truth that the real parallels of life’s journey are the lines that never meet. It will do us good to remember these things, and look more kindly on our brothers of Borrioboola-Gha and their fetich superstitions, when we drop our silver in the missionary box next Sabbath.
“I wonder where that memorandum came from,” said the master, as he rose at last and buttoned up his coat. “Who is ‘M. S.’? M. S. stands for manuscript and Melissa Smith. Why don’t”—But checking an impulsive query as to why people don’t make their private memoranda generally intelligible, the master put the letter in his pocket and went home.
At sunrise the next morning he was picking his way through the palm-like fern and thick underbrush of the pine forest, starting the hare from its form, and awakening a querulous protest from a few dissipated crows, who had evidently been making a night of it, and so came to the wooded ridge where he had once found M’liss. There he found the prostrate pine and tessellated branches, but the throne was vacant. As he drew nearer, what might have been some frightened animal started through the crackling limbs. It ran up the tossed arms of the fallen monarch, and sheltered itself in some friendly foliage. The master, reaching the old seat, found the nest still warm; looking up in the intertwining branches, he met the black eyes of the errant M’liss. They gazed at each other without speaking. She was first to break the silence.
“What do you want?” she asked curtly.
The master had decided on a course of action. “I want some crab apples,” he said humbly.
“Shan’t have ’em! go away! Why don’t you get ’em of Clytemnerestera?” It seemed to be a relief to M’liss to express her contempt in additional syllables to that classical young woman’s already long-drawn title. “Oh, you wicked thing!”