sed to share her faithful heart, if Myrtle had not
bewitched him with her unconscious and innocent sorceries. As for poor,
modest Bathsheba, she thought nothing of herself, but was almost as much
fascinated by Myrtle as if she had been one of the sex she was born to
make in love with her.

The first rival Cyprian was to encounter in his admiration of Myrtle
Hazard was Mr. Gifted Hopkins. This young gentleman had the enormous
advantage of that all-subduing accomplishment, the poetical endowment.
No woman, it is pretty generally understood, can resist the youth or man
who addresses her in verse. The thought that she is the object of a
poet's love is one which fills a woman's ambition more completely than
all that wealth or office or social eminence can offer. Do the young
millionnaires and the members of the General Court get letters from
unknown ladies, every day, asking for their autographs and photographs?
Well, then!

Mr. Gifted Hopkins, being a poet, felt that it was so, to the very depth
of his soul. Could he not confer that immortality so dear to the human
heart? Not quite yet, perhaps,--though the "Banner and Oracle" gave him
already "an elevated niche in the Temple of Fame," to quote its own
words,--but in that glorious summer of his genius, of which these spring
blossoms were the promise. It was a most formidable battery, then, which
Cyprian's first rival opened upon the fortress of Myrtle's affections.

His second rival, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, had made a half-playful
bet with his fair relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, that he would bag a girl
within twelve months of date who should unite three desirable qualities,
specified in the bet, in a higher degree than any one of the five who
were on the matrimonial programme which she had laid out for him,--and
Myrtle was the girl with whom he meant to win the bet. When a young
fellow like him, cool and clever, makes up his mind to bring down his
bird, it is no joke, but a very serious and a tolerably certain piece of
business. Not being made a fool of by any boyish nonsense,--passion and
all that,--he has a great advantage. Many a woman rejects a man because
he is in love with her, and accepts another because he is not. The first
is thinking too much of himself and his emotions,--the other makes a
study of her and her friends, and learns what ropes to pull. But then it
must be remembered that Murray Bradshaw had a poet for his rival, to say
nothing of