had tact enough to discover that he had an advantage, and fearful that
some one might come in and interrupt the tete a tete, he magnanimously
resolved to throw all on a single cast, and come to the point at once.

"I think, Miss Monson," he continued, after a very beautiful specimen
of rigmarole in the way of love-making, a rigmarole that might have
very fairly figured in an editor's law and logic, after he had been
beaten in a libel suit, "I think, Miss Monson, you cannot have
overlooked the VERY particular attentions I have endeavored to pay you,
ever since I have been so fortunate as to have made your acquaintance?"

"I!--Upon my word, Mr. Thurston, I am not at all conscious of having
been the object of any such attentions!"

"No?--That is ever the way with the innocent and single-minded! This is
what we sincere and diffident men have to contend with in affairs of
the heart. Our bosoms may be torn with ten thousand distracting cares,
and yet the modesty of a truly virtuous female heart shall be so
absorbed in its own placid serenity as to be indifferent to the pangs
it is unconsciously inflicting!"

"Mr. Thurston, your language is strong--and--a little--a little
unintelligible."

"I dare say--ma'am--I never expect to be intelligible again. When the
'heart is oppressed with unutterable anguish, condemned to conceal that
passion which is at once the torment and delight of life'--when 'his
lip, the ruby harbinger of joy, lies pale and cold, the miserable
appendage of a mang--' that is, Miss Monson, I mean to say, when all
our faculties are engrossed by one dear object we are often incoherent
and mysterious, as a matter of course."

Tom Thurston came very near wrecking himself on the quicksands of the
romantic school. He had begun to quote from a speech delivered by
Gouverneur Morris, on the right of deposit at New Orleans, and which he
had spoken at college, and was near getting into a part of the subject
that might not have been so apposite, but retreated in time. By way of
climax, the lover laid his hand on me, and raised me to his eyes in an
abstracted manner, as if unconscious of what he was doing, and wanted
to brush away a tear.

{Gouverneur Morris = American Federalist leader and diplomat
(1752-1816)--a 1795 American treaty with Spain granted the United
States the right of navigation on the Mississippi River and to deposit
goods at New Orleans without paying customs duties}

"What a confounded rich old