ntlemen.

Miss Lynch stood at one end of the room between the richly curtained
windows and immediately in front of a narrow, gold-framed mirror which
reached from the frescoed ceiling to the floor and reflected her
gracious figure to advantage. She was listening with interested
attention to Mr. Gillespie, the noted mathematician, whose talk was
worth hearing in spite of the fact that he stammered badly. His subject
tonight happened to be the versatility of "Mr. P-P-Poe."

"He might have been an eminent m-m-mathematician if he had not elected
to be an eminent p-p-poet," he was saying.

To her right Mr. Willis's daughter, Imogen, was flirting with a tall,
lanky young man with sentimental eyes, a drooping moustache and thick,
straight, longish hair, whose lately published ballad, "Oh, Don't You
Remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?" was all the rage.

To her left the Minerva-like Miss Margaret Fuller whose critical papers
in the _New York Tribune_ were being widely read and discussed, was
amiably quarreling with Mr. Horace Greely, and upon a sofa not far away
Mr. William Gilmore Simms, the novelist and poet, was gently disagreeing
with Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith in her contention for Woman's Rights.

At the opposite end of the room a lovely woman in a Chippendale chair
was the central figure of a group of ladies and gentlemen each of whom
hung upon her least word with an interest amounting to affection. She
was a woman who looked like a girl, for thirty years had been kind to
her. Glossy brown hair parted in the middle and brushed smoothly down in
loops that nearly covered her ears framed an oval face, with delicate,
clear-cut features, pale complexion and eyes as brown and melting as a
gazelle's.

She was none other than Mrs. Frances Osgood, the author, or authoress,
as she would have styled herself, of "The Poetry of Flowers"--so much
admired by her contemporaries--whose husband, Mr. S.S. Osgood, the well
known artist, had won her heart while painting her portrait.

Conspicuous in the group of literary lights surrounding her was Dr.
Griswold in whose furtive glance, had she been less free from guile, she
might have read an admiration fiercer than that of friendship or even of
platonic love, and to whose fires she had unwittingly added fuel by
expressing admiration for his poems--Mr. Poe's opinion to the contrary.

Mr. Locke, author of "The Moon Hoax," was of the group; and the Reverend
Ralph Hoyt, who was a poet as wel