ees; some
young ladies produced books and bright bits of fancy-work, while
Gabrielle, Arthur and I, with our pretty captain, Miss Murray, and one
of her attendant cavaliers, decided to pass away the time by playing a
game--no trivial game, however; neither "consequences" nor
fortune-telling, but an eminently scientific one entitled "Twenty
Questions." For the benefit of the uninitiated I will remark that the
oracle chooses a subject (silently), and the others are allowed to put
twenty questions to him to enable them to divine it--usually commencing
with "Is the object that you have in your mind to be found in the
animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdom?"

Gabrielle is very clever in this somewhat abstruse game, for she
possesses her mother's spirit of inquiry and love of reasoning, and she
passes entire evenings with Arthur, pursuing the most perplexing and
intangible subjects. She and Arthur are admirably matched in this
game; for if she is unparalleled in the quickness with which she will
follow up a clue and triumphantly announce the mysterious object, after
asking eighteen or nineteen questions, Arthur is no less adroit in
selecting unusual subjects, and so artfully parrying her questions as
to give her the least possible assistance. I often hear them call to
each other--

"I have chosen a subject; you will never in the world guess it!"

Then follows an hour of questions and reasoning, with inferences drawn
and rejected, and a display of sophistry that would do credit to a more
fully fledged lawyer than Arthur is at present.

Yesterday, after dinner, they launched into one of their games, and
Gabrielle guessed after eighteen questions what would have required
forty, I am sure, from any one else--the eighty-eighth eye of a fly!

Another was even more puzzling. The object belonged, Arthur assured
her, to the vegetable kingdom, the color was white, and he had often
met it within a dozen yards of the railway station. "A daisy," was the
first and natural solution, but she was, he assured her, very far
adrift. "A telegraph post," she next announced, but she was again
unsuccessful. At this point I left them; but after an hour had passed
Gabrielle ran up to my room to tell me that she had guessed it--a polka
dot upon one of her morning dresses!

The object chosen by Arthur at the picnic was the right horn of the
moon. Gabrielle, this time, sat beside me and enjoyed the perplexity
of the questioners, for not unt