“The one I was sketching on the day I first met you was labelled—‘Gettysburg, July 3rd, 1863.’ Maybe that was it.”
“I will go around to-morrow and examine it. It would be very odd, Pandora dearest, if it should be mine. Wouldn’t it?”
“Very. But I want you to make me a promise. If it should be yours, will you get it and give it to me?”
“If I can I will. But what on earth do you want it for?”
“For two reasons I want it: first, because if I am to marry you I have a legal right to all of you; and, second, because my George Washington has been standing upon one leg beside the cherry-tree for three weeks now, for the reason that I can’t make a satisfactory study of his other leg.”
“Pandora, I will gratify you if human energy is equal to the task. The impulses of an undying affection, not less than a fervid regard for the interests of high art, shall nerve me to the work.”
“Thank you, darling!” she said.
Then the carriage stopped at the M’Duffy front door. Pandora alighted, rang the bell, kissed her hand and disappeared, while the Major drove home in ecstasy to brood upon his unexpected happiness, and to fit himself with a Government leg that was numbered among the best in his collection.
The next morning he went around to the Medical Museum and examined Exhibit 1307 in Case 25, being the leg which Pandora had proposed to pass on to immortality by attaching a representation of it to her picture of George Washington.
The Major could not say with positiveness that the leg was his, but his impression that it belonged to him was strengthened by certain scars that seemed to be familiar, among them one which called up memories of a dog-bite obtained in a Clarion County orchard away back in the years of his boyhood.