means of securing his own. And full of this fine resolve, young Elkhart, the following evening, took his usual place at table, and by the piano afterward, at which last Mr. Clarence did not fail to join them a little later. The ricketty little instrument over which the glances of these rivals occasionally met, threateningly, during subsequent evenings, became, from the first, a battle-ground for both. If Clarence sang and laughed, and was gay and audacious in his flatteries, and affected to overlook our hero's presence, for the most part, the last-named young gentleman was not likely to beat a retreat after the first instinctive recoil before Mother Jones's fusilade, unless by order expressed or implied of bewitching Mary Jones herself. For such a sign, indeed, he watched incessantly, but without jealousy, and with nothing like a scowl upon his face or perdue in the depth of his heart. He did not think to console himself with the trite proverb of "as good fish as she being to find," but in his simplicity believed all perfections met in this little girl with blue eyes, and blue ribbons to her bonnet, and set his hopes upon her accordingly. What delightful conversations those were when Mr. Clarence was absent, or had not yet arrived, and how much more pleasing, because more in keeping with the place and performer, were Miss Mary's bird-like songs, than the fine operatic performances with which she delighted the refined and travelled ear of Mr. Van Trump. Elkhart sometimes talked of art and of his aspirations, of books, of nature, of whatever he loved, and thought this élève of Madame Treubleu loved equally. It is always so with your lovers. Does not young Cuticle, whose talk is chiefly of the hospitals which he has been lately walking in Paris, believe Miss Tompkins (who had resolved to accept him long before he proposed) to be intended by nature for a surgeon's wife, because she would actually—if you are polite enough to take her word for it—prefer a walk of the above kind to even one about the Palais-Royal or on the Boulevards. The fault lies a little on both sides, but in Mary Jones's case there was at least no deception; she liked nature very well, and art, and books, and so on, very well too, and so she did music and admiration, and perhaps equally every thing agreeable you could name. I believe she had the capacity to love earnestly, as afterward appeared, but in
