"Poh! what nonsense!" her friend replies, and changes the topic. But she did not dismiss it from her mind, for that very evening she wrote a name in the fly-leaf of her Italian grammar which, when her chum looked over her shoulder, she hid, or attempted to hide, with quite a show of color, and some confusion. But Miss Columbia having pulled away the hand, in school-girl fashion, read it and laughed.
"Ah! you naughty, funny thing!" said she, "'Mrs. Clarence Van Trump!' Ah, won't some body be jealous!"
Now, although tender-hearted little Mary Jones repented on that occasion, and actually shed tears upon her pillow after her chum was asleep, and called herself I don't know how many hard names for her hard-heartedness in forgetting, for an instant, all the good qualities of one Thomas Elkhart, and how devoted to her, and what a genius he was, and a great deal more; it was not in the nature of a young lady on the point of leaving boarding-school, and whose patronym was merely Jones, to despise the probability, or shun at all times the thought, of being one day received into the distinguished connection of the great Van Trump family. Was not that family the most aristocratic in America, and possessed of estates and tenantry which made them almost resemble the dear old romantic barons of feudal times? Had not old Van Trump, the major-general, pounded over and over again upon the floor or ground, as the case might be, with his splendid gold-headed cane, the better to enforce his views, and averred that—"A Van Trump, Sir, is fit to marry a princess, Sir, and ought, by right, to hold the position of perpetual chief magistrate of this country, Sir, without the fiddle-faddle of the ballot-box!" And was not the old patroon who lived in her (Mary Jones') own village, but had very little to do with any body there, so dreadfully proud that people said he ate with nothing less than gold spoons? gold spoons—think of that! The idea of one of this distinguished family paying court to so undistinguished a maiden as Miss Mary Jones was perhaps enough to turn the head of a school-girl who had devoured any quantity of romances during the past eighteen months, and was not wiser or more experienced than girls in their teens usually are.
But crotchets such as these are not the offspring of young heads
