have been easier. "Why,
that piece run off jest like ile. I don't bullieve," the unlettered
applicant says to himself, "I don't bullieve it took him ten minutes to
write them verses." The good people have no suspicion of how much a
single line, a single expression, may cost its author. The wits used to
say that Ropers,--the poet once before referred to, old Samuel Ropers,
author of the Pleasures of Memory and giver of famous breakfasts,--was
accustomed to have straw laid before the house whenever he had just given
birth to a couplet. It is not quite so bad as that with most of us who
are called upon to furnish a poem, a song, a hymn, an ode for some grand
meeting, but it is safe to say that many a trifling performance has had
more good honest work put into it than the minister's sermon of that week
had cost him. If a vessel glides off the ways smoothly and easily at her
launching, it does not mean that no great pains have been taken to secure
the result. Because a poem is an "occasional" one, it does not follow
that it has not taken as much time and skill as if it had been written
without immediate, accidental, temporary motive. Pindar's great odes
were occasional poems, just as much as our Commencement and Phi Beta
Kappa poems are, and yet they have come down among the most precious
bequests of antiquity to modern times.

The mystery of the young Doctor's long visits to the neighboring town was
satisfactorily explained by what we saw and heard of his relations with
our charming "Delilah,"--for Delilah we could hardly help calling her.
Our little handmaid, the Cinderella of the teacups, now the princess, or,
what was better, the pride of the school to which she had belonged, fit
for any position to which she might be called, was to be the wife of our
young Doctor. It would not have been the right thing to proclaim the
fact while she was a pupil, but now that she had finished her course of
instruction there was no need of making a secret of the engagement.

So we have got our romance, our love-story out of our Teacups, as I hoped
and expected that we should, but not exactly in the quarter where it
might have been looked for.

What did our two Annexes say to this unexpected turn of events? They
were good-hearted girls as ever lived, but they were human, like the rest
of us, and women, like some of the rest of us. They behaved perfectly.
They congratulated the Doctor, and hoped he would bring the young lady to
the tea-t