e patronizingly, and passed on. I never renewed
tender relations with Miss Gibbs's young ladies. All this occurred
during my first year and a half at Rivermouth.

Between my studies at school, my out-door recreations, and the hurts my
vanity received, I managed to escape for the time being any very serious
attack of that love fever which, like the measles, is almost certain to
seize upon a boy sooner or later. I was not to be an exception. I was
merely biding my time. The incidents I have now to relate took place
shortly after the events described in the last chapter.

In a life so tranquil and circumscribed as ours in the Nutter House, a
visitor was a novelty of no little importance. The whole household awoke
from its quietude one morning when the Captain announced that a young
niece of his from New York was to spend a few weeks with us.

The blue-chintz room, into which a ray of sun was never allowed to
penetrate, was thrown open and dusted, and its mouldy air made sweet
with a bouquet of pot-roses placed on the old-fashioned bureau. Kitty
was busy all the forenoon washing off the sidewalk and sand-papering the
great brass knocker on our front-door; and Miss Abigail was up to her
elbows in a pigeon-pie.

I felt sure it was for no ordinary person that all these preparations
were in progress; and I was right. Miss Nelly Glentworth was no ordinary
person. I shall never believe she was. There may have been lovelier
women, though I have never seen them; there may have been more brilliant
women, though it has not been my fortune to meet them; but that there
was ever a more charming one than Nelly Glentworth is a proposition
against which I contend.

I don't love her now. I don't think of her once in five years; and
yet it would give me a turn if in the course of my daily walk I should
suddenly come upon her eldest boy. I may say that her eldest boy was
not playing a prominent part in this life when I first made her
acquaintance.

It was a drizzling, cheerless afternoon towards the end of summer that
a hack drew up at the door of the Nutter House. The Captain and Miss
Abigail hastened into the hall on hearing the carriage stop. In a moment
more Miss Nelly Glentworth was seated in our sitting-room undergoing
a critical examination at the hands of a small boy who lounged
uncomfortably on a settee between the windows.

The small boy considered himself a judge of girls, and he rapidly came
to the following conclusions: