nchet would not know any better than I."

By this resolve she made one woman happy.

But it was not only a woman on whom she had conferred happiness.
Herbert Blanchet was as happy as even his sister could have wished him
to be. The head of the poet swam in delight. He had never before been
so proud and blest. He hung over his volume for hours; he could hardly
get away from it. When he left it for a moment and tried to escape from
its fascinations, he found himself drawn back again into its presence.
He touched fondly its soft, satiny leaves as though they were the cheek
of beauty; he pressed his own cheek against them; he committed all the
follies which we understand and admire in the immemorial raptures of
the young lover or the father of the first born.

"They must see this," he cried aloud. "They can't overlook a volume
like this." "They" being, of course, that public whose opinion he had
always despised--those critics whose praise he had always declared to
be the worst censure to a man of true genius.

To do our poet justice, it must be owned that there was in his breast
for the first time a deep, strong feeling of gratitude. That emotion
came there with a strange, overwhelming force, like that of
intoxication to a man always rigidly sober before. If Minola had had
him crowned a king, she could hardly have done any greater thing for
him. Few men on earth can ever have had their dearest ambition so
sweetly gratified as it was the lot of Herbert, the poet, to find his
ambition gratified now. To have his poems so set before the world would
have been a glory and a rapture, no matter though the patron's hand had
been that of a withered old man or some fat frump of a dowager; but to
be thus lifted to his longed-for pedestal by the hand of a young and
beautiful woman was something which he had never dreamed of asleep, and
seldom allowed even into the dreams of his wild, vain waking hours. The
emotion called up by experience was as new as the experience itself.
Mr. Blanchet felt profoundly grateful. In that moment of excitement he
would probably, if need were, have laid down his life for Minola.

If Minola knew what strange effect had been wrought in the breast of
her poet, she would assuredly have thought her money well laid out,
even although she had wanted it far more than she did. "To making a man
happy, ten pounds," is the peculiar entry on which a famous essay in
the "Spectator" was founded. To make a man grateful