nature so
extraordinary as to produce what it never had. To be sure, the
production was accordingly."

He laughed. "What a wonderfully sagacious little mother! your
perceptions are correct as far as you see, but you don't see far
enough. I confess to some disturbance somewhere, but not in the upper
works, as you suppose. His worship the burgermeister's mild punch is
brewed with far too careful a consideration of the tender years of
upper tertia, to do much mischief among us other fellows. Altogether,
the refreshments affect the sober system, and I am afraid your
provender here will have to suffer for it I abominate the trash and
sweet-stuff they feed a fellow with at parties. Come, little mother,
just give us a spoonful more rum in this tea, and cure one giddiness
with another. For, as I said before, there is something wrong about me.
I _am_ hard hit."

He looked at her in mock distress, with a saucy sparkle in his deep
blue eyes. "Walter," she began, in some dismay, "what have you been
about? I trust you have not----?"

The young fellow helped himself to a slice of bread and meat, and fell
to his supper with a ponderous gravity, that was meant to cover a shade
of embarrassment.

"I suppose no man can escape his fate," he said, chewing away with
prosaic complacency, "sooner or later, there always must be a first
time; and when a fellow comes to be nineteen, it becomes an affair of
_amour propre_ to do as others do, and fall in--" he hesitated and she
laughed.

"In love?--I do believe this foolish fellow is trying to persuade
himself and me, that he has fallen in love!"

"No less;" returned the lad, swallowing the tea she had poured out for
him at a gulp; "I am afraid there is every symptom of that fatal
malady."

"Most prominent symptoms: a very unusual appetite; and twelve bars of a
valse, sung so false, as to make the very muscle model in the corner
stop his ears, if he could move his hands. May I enquire to whom these
miracles are to be attributed?"

A sly look of mystery came over his bright face; of which indeed the
chief charm was this first freshness and frankness of early youth.

"Guess," he said; "you see at present I am too intent on filling my
mouth, for any very coherent confession to come out of it."

And he fell to work again, and filled his plate, and cut large pieces
off a bright pink ham. She had drawn her arm-chair close to the table,
and looked quietly into his eyes.

"As if there wer