hought himself sublimely indifferent to the
laughter of ignoramuses, now fencing against it!

The parlor of the huge pine hotel (a huge unfinished pine hotel is the
starting point of speculative cities), the parlor of the Metropolisville
City Hotel was a large room, the floor of which was covered with a very
cheap but bright-colored ingrain carpet; the furniture consisted of six
wooden-bottomed chairs, very bright and new, with a very yellow rose
painted on the upper slat of the back of each, a badly tattered
hair-cloth sofa, of a very antiquated pattern, and a small old piano,
whose tinny tones were only matched by its entire lack of tune. The last
two valuable articles had been bought at auction, and some of the keys of
the piano had been permanently silenced by its ride in an ox-cart from
Red Owl to Metropolisville.

But intellect and culture are always superior to external circumstances,
and Mr. Charlton was soon sublimely oblivious to the tattered hair-cloth
of the sofa on which he sat, and he utterly failed to notice the stiff
wooden chair on which Miss Minorkey reposed. Both were too much
interested in science to observe furniture; She admired the wonders of
his dragon-flies, always in her quiet and intelligent fashion; he
returned the compliment by praising her flowers in his eager, hearty,
enthusiastic way. Her coolness made her seem to him very superior; his
enthusiasm made him very piquant and delightful to her. And when he got
upon his hobby and told her how grand a vocation the teacher's
profession was, and recited stories of the self-denial of Pestalozzi and
Froebel, and the great schemes of Basedow, and told how he meant here
in this new country to build a great Institute on rational principles,
Helen Minorkey found him more interesting than ever. Like you and me,
she loved philanthropy at other people's expense. She admired great
reformers, though she herself never dreamed of putting a little finger
to anybody's burden.

It took so long to explain fully this great project that Albert staid
until nearly supper-time, forgetting the burden of his sister's unhappy
future in the interest of science and philanthropy. And even when he rose
to go, Charlton turned back to look again at a "prairie sun-flower" which
Helen Minorkey had dissected while he spoke, and, finding something
curious, perhaps in the fiber, he proposed to bring his microscope over
in the evening and examine it--a proposition very grateful t