tell you
the secret, though--that girl and I are going to get married. I mean to
ask her the first chance I get. Oh, isn't she a smasher!"

"My dear Billy, shan't you wait a little while to see if you always like
her as well as you do now? Then, too, you'll be older."

"I'm old enough, Uncle Teddy, and I love her dearly. I am as old as the
Kings of France used to be when they got married--I read it in Abbott's
history. But there's the clock striking nine! I must run or I shall get
a tardy mark and perhaps she'll want to see my certificate some time."

So saying, he kissed me on the cheek and set off for school as fast
as his legs could carry him. Oh, Love, omnivorous Love, that sparest
neither the dotard leaning on his staff nor the boy with pantaloons
buttoning on his jacket--omnipotent Love, that, after parents and
teachers have failed, in one instant can make Billy try to become a good
boy!

With both of my nephews hopelessly enamored and myself the confidant
of both, I had my hands full. Daniel was generally dejected and
distrustful; Billy buoyant and jolly. Daniel found it impossible to
overcome his bashfulness, was spontaneous only in sonnets, brilliant
only in bouquets. Billy was always coming to me with pleasant news, told
in his slangy New York boy vernacular. One day he would exclaim: "Oh,
I'm getting on prime! I got such a smile off her this morning as I went
by the window!" Another day he wanted counsel how to get a valentine to
her--because it was too big to shove in a lamppost and she might catch
him if he left it on the steps, rang the bell, and ran away. Daniel
wrote his own valentine, but, despite its originality, that document
gave him no such comfort as Billy got from twenty-five cents' worth of
embossed paper, pink cupids, and doggerel.

Finally Billy announced to me that he had been to play with Jimmy and
got introduced to his girl.

Shortly after this Lu gave what they call "a little company"--not a
party, but a reunion of forty or fifty people with whom the family were
well acquainted, several of them living in our immediate neighborhood.
There was a goodly proportion of young fold and there was to be dancing;
but the music was limited to a single piano played by the German exile
usual on such occasions, and the refreshments did not rise to the
splendor of a costly supper. This kind of compromise with fashionable
gayety was wisely deemed by Lu the best method of introducing Daniel to
the _b