hy,
that piece run off jest like ile. I don't bullieve," the unlettered
applicant says to himself, "I don't bullieve it took him ten minutes
to write them verses." The good people have no suspicion of how much a
single line, a single expression, may cost its author. The wits used to
say that Ropers,--the poet once before referred to, old Samuel Ropers,
author of the Pleasures of Memory and giver of famous breakfasts,--was
accustomed to have straw laid before the house whenever he had just
given birth to a couplet. It is not quite so bad as that with most of us
who are called upon to furnish a poem, a song, a hymn, an ode for some
grand meeting, but it is safe to say that many a trifling performance
has had more good honest work put into it than the minister's sermon
of that week had cost him. If a vessel glides off the ways smoothly and
easily at her launching, it does not mean that no great pains have been
taken to secure the result. Because a poem is an "occasional" one, it
does not follow that it has not taken as much time and skill as if
it had been written without immediate, accidental, temporary motive.
Pindar's great odes were occasional poems, just as much as our
Commencement and Phi Beta Kappa poems are, and yet they have come down
among the most precious bequests of antiquity to modern times.

The mystery of the young Doctor's long visits to the neighboring town
was satisfactorily explained by what we saw and heard of his relations
with our charming "Delilah,"--for Delilah we could hardly help calling
her. Our little handmaid, the Cinderella of the teacups, now the
princess, or, what was better, the pride of the school to which she had
belonged, fit for any position to which she might be called, was to be
the wife of our young Doctor. It would not have been the right thing to
proclaim the fact while she was a pupil, but now that she had finished
her course of instruction there was no need of making a secret of the
engagement.

So we have got our romance, our love-story out of our Teacups, as I
hoped and expected that we should, but not exactly in the quarter where
it might have been looked for.

What did our two Annexes say to this unexpected turn of events? They
were good-hearted girls as ever lived, but they were human, like
the rest of us, and women, like some of the rest of us. They behaved
perfectly. They congratulated the Doctor, and hoped he would bring the
young lady to the tea-table where she had p