rties, and young women.

"Why don't you dress up, and go gallivantin' about 'mong the gals?" his
old mother used to say. But he would only laugh, and pshaw, and walk off
to the shore. And I, watching his erect gait and firm tread, would
wonder how it was that one good-looking young man should be so different
from all other good-looking young men. Still, there was a sort of
sheepishness about the eyes, and that was probably why he never turned
them, when meeting the girls, but strode along, looking straight ahead,
as if they had been so many fence-posts.

Fanny J---- once laid a wager with me that she would make him bow. She
contrived a plan to meet him as he returned from the Square. I hid
behind the stone wall, and peeped through the chinks. Just as they met,
she almost let the wind blow her bonnet off, hoping to catch his eye.
But he looked so straight forward into the distance that I was alarmed,
thinking there might be a loose horse coming, or a house afire. That was
in the first of my staying there. We were afterwards great friends. He
liked me, because I was good to the old folks, and to Emily,--and had a
sort of respect for me, because I was the oldest, and because I could
talk, and because of the great thick books in my room. I respected him,
because I had seen the world and its shams, and knew him to be good all
the way through, and because he couldn't talk, and also, perhaps,
because he was so much bigger and handsomer than I. In fact, I should
have felt quite downhearted about my own looks, if I hadn't learned from
books--not the thick ones--that sallow-looking men, with dark eyes, are
interesting.

David's mother approved of steady habits, but for all that she would
rather have had him waste some of his time, and be like the rest of his
kind.

"Poor David!" she would say, sometimes, "if anybody could only make him
think he _was_ somebody, he'd _be_ somebody. But he 'a'n't got no
confidence."

"Mother," I would answer, "don't worry about David. He's good, and
goodness is as good as anything."

She liked to have me call her mother. I had been there so long that I
almost filled the place of one of her lost ones. Besides, I had no
mother of my own, and no real home.

Miss Joey, not being past thirty, had a plan in her head. Her head was
small,--so was she,--but the plan was large enough and good enough.

This plan, however, was upset, and by her own means, even before the
prospect of its being carried