"The man is certainly crazy!" exclaimed Marguerite.
"Indeed he is!" said mamma, reading his rambling sentences very slowly: "I should judge him to be perfectly insane, and I only hope he will not come out here to pay his fiancée a visit."
"You know he requests me to send him funds to defray his expenses, Aunt Esther," said Ida quietly; "perhaps the lack of money will avert such a calamity."
"What an unromantic conclusion to a love-letter!" said Gabrielle scornfully.
The conversation turned to the depredations of the neighbors and neighbors' children upon the property. "Mr. Greeley's place" had always been looked upon in the light of public property, and intruders walked and drove through the grounds quite as a matter of course, and helped themselves freely to whatever they liked in the floral, fruit, or vegetable line. The young ladies, however, decided that they had submitted to such conduct quite long enough, and we sent to Sing Sing for some printed handbills warning trespassers off the place.
Two or three days passed, and we had entirely forgotten Ida's erratic admirer, when Gabrielle returned from a morning walk with the information that an intoxicated man was sitting upon the steps of the side-hill house. She met mamma and Ida starting for a little stroll, and communicated this unpleasant news to them. Mamma, however, is not timid, and she walked on with Ida, determined to view the invader from afar, and then summon Bernard to dismiss him.
A figure was sitting, as Gabrielle said, upon the piazza of the new house, but was so motionless that Ida exclaimed laughingly:
"It is a scarecrow placed there by some one in retaliation for our notice to trespassers to keep off the grounds."
As they passed it, however, the scarecrow slowly lifted its head and addressed them with:
"Is this Mr. Greeley's place?"