ent, who must have been in an agony of impatience to be alone with
his beloved, commanded his feelings admirably. He signified his
approbation of the poem by saying that the lines were smooth and the
rhymes absolutely without blemish. The stanzas reminded him forcibly of
one of the greatest poets of the century.

Gifted flushed hot with pleasure. He had tasted the blood of his own
rhymes; and when a poet gets as far as that, it is like wringing the bag
of exhilarating gas from the lips of a fellow sucking at it, to drag his
piece away from him.

"Perhaps you will like these lines still better," he said; "the style is
more modern:--

'O daughter of the spiced South,
Her bubbly grapes have spilled the wine
That staineth with its hue divine
The red flower of thy perfect mouth.'"

And so on, through a series of stanzas like these, with the pulp of two
rhymes between the upper and lower crust of two others.

Clement was cornered. It was necessary to say something for the poet's
sake,--perhaps for Susan's; for she was in a certain sense responsible
for the poems of a youth of genius, of whom she had spoken so often and
so enthusiastically.

"Very good, Mr. Hopkins, and a form of verse little used, I should
think, until of late years. You modelled this piece on the style of a
famous living English poet, did you not?"

"Indeed I did not, Mr. Lindsay,--I never imitate. Originality is, if I
may be allowed to say so much for myself, my peculiar _forte_. Why, the
critics allow as much as that. See here, Mr. Lindsay."

Mr. Gifted Hopkins pulled out his pocket-book, and, taking therefrom a
cutting from a newspaper,--which dropped helplessly open of itself, as
if tired of the process, being very tender in the joints or creases, by
reason of having been often folded and unfolded,--read aloud as
follows:--

"The bard of Oxbow Village--our valued correspondent who writes
over the signature of G. H.--is, in our opinion, more
remarkable for his _originality_ than for any other of his
numerous gifts."

Clement was apparently silenced by this, and the poet a little elated
with a sense of triumph. Susan could not help sharing his feeling of
satisfaction, and without meaning it in the least, nay, without knowing
it, for she was as simple and pure as new milk, edged a little bit--the
merest infinitesimal atom--nearer to Gifted Hopkins, who was on one side
of her, while Clement walked on the