ntleman who spends his force in tawdry compliments.

A visit to your home wakens ardor by contrast as much as by absence.
Madge, so gentle, and now stealing sly looks at you in a way so
different from her hoidenish manner of school-days, you regard
complacently as a most lovable, fond girl,--the very one for some fond
and amiable young man whose soul is not filled, as yours is, with higher
things! To Nelly, earnestly listening, you drop only exaggerated hints
of the wonderful beauty and dignity of this new being of your fancy. Of
her age you scrupulously say nothing.

The trivialities of Dalton amaze you: it is hard to understand how a man
within the limit of such influences as Miss Dalton must inevitably
exert, can tamely sit down to a rubber of whist, and cigars! There must
be a sad lack of congeniality;--it would certainly be a proud thing to
supply that lack!

The new feeling, wild and vague as it is,--for as yet you have only most
casual acquaintance with Laura Dalton,--invests the whole habit of your
study; not quickening overmuch the relish for Dugald Stewart, or the
miserable skeleton of college Logic, but spending a sweet charm upon the
graces of Rhetoric and the music of Classic Verse. It blends
harmoniously with your quickened ambition. There is some last appearance
that you have to make upon the college stage, in the presence of the
great worthies of the State, and of all the beauties of the town,--Laura
chiefest among them. In view of it you feel dismally intellectual.
Prodigious faculties are to be brought to the task.

You think of throwing out ideas that will quite startle His Excellency
the Governor, and those very distinguished public characters whom the
college purveyors vote into their periodic public sittings. You are
quite sure of surprising them, and of deeply provoking such scheming,
shallow politicians as have never read Wayland's "Treatise," and who
venture incautiously within hearing of your remarks. You fancy yourself
in advance the victim of a long leader in the next day's paper, and the
thoughtful but quiet cause of a great change in the political programme
of the State. But crowning and eclipsing all the triumph, are those dark
eyes beaming on you from some corner of the church their floods of
unconscious praise and tenderness.

Your father and Nelly are there to greet you. He has spoken a few calm,
quiet words of encouragement, that make you feel--very wrongfully--that
he is a cold m