. But really I don't think it would pay now.

Chapter Eighteen--A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go

If the reader supposes that I lived all this while in Rivermouth without
falling a victim to one or more of the young ladies attending Miss
Dorothy Gibbs's Female Institute, why, then, all I have to say is the
reader exhibits his ignorance of human nature.

Miss Gibbs's seminary was located within a few minutes' walk of the
Temple Grammar School, and numbered about thirty-five pupils, the
majority of whom boarded at the Hall--Primrose Hall, as Miss Dorothy
prettily called it. The Prim-roses, as we called them, ranged from
seven years of age to sweet seventeen, and a prettier group of sirens
never got together even in Rivermouth, for Rivermouth, you should know,
is famous for its pretty girls.

There were tall girls and short girls, rosy girls and pale girls, and
girls as brown as berries; girls like Amazons, slender girls, weird
and winning like Undine, girls with black tresses, girls with auburn
ringlets, girls with every tinge of golden hair. To behold Miss
Dorothy's young ladies of a Sunday morning walking to church two by two,
the smallest toddling at the end of the procession, like the bobs at the
tail of a kite, was a spectacle to fill with tender emotion the least
susceptible heart. To see Miss Dorothy marching grimly at the head of
her light infantry, was to feel the hopelessness of making an attack on
any part of the column.

She was a perfect dragon of watchfulness. The most unguarded lifting of
an eyelash in the fluttering battalion was sufficient to put her on the
lookout. She had had experiences with the male sex, this Miss Dorothy
so prim and grim. It was whispered that her heart was a tattered album
scrawled over with love-lines, but that she had shut up the volume long
ago.

There was a tradition that she had been crossed in love; but it was the
faintest of traditions. A gay young lieutenant of marines had flirted
with her at a country ball (A.D. 1811), and then marched carelessly away
at the head of his company to the shrill music of the fife, without so
much as a sigh for the girl he left behind him. The years rolled on, the
gallant gay Lothario--which wasn't his name--married, became a father,
and then a grandfather; and at the period of which I am speaking his
grandchild was actually one of Miss Dorothy's young ladies. So, at
least, ran the story.

The lieutenant himself was dead these many ye