ends, what would be the hideous gloom of this terrestrial ball if
there were no girls! Oh woman! softener of man's rugged nature! What--
in the words of the poet." He carefully refrained from saying what
poet!

"What were earth and all its joys;
what were wealth with all its toys;
what the life of men and boys
But for lovely woman?

"What if mothers were no more;
If wives and sisters fled our shore,
And left no sweethearts to the fore--
No sign of darling woman?

"What dreary darkness would ensue--
what moral wastes devoid of dew--
If no strong hearts of men like you
Beat for charming woman?

"Who would rise at duty's call;
Who would fight to win or fall;
Who would care to live at all,
Were it not for woman?"

Prolonged and rapturous cheers greeted this effusion, in the midst of
which the enthusiastic Jerry MacGowl sprang to his feet, waved his glass
above his head--spilling half of its contents on the pate of a bald
skipper who sat next to him--and cheered lustily.

"Men of the Ramsgate lifeboat," shouted Queeker, "I call on you to
pledge the ladies--with all the honours!"

It is unnecessary to say that the call was responded to with a degree of
enthusiasm that threatened, as Dick Moy said to Jack Shales, "to smash
all the glasses an' blow the roof off." In the midst of the noise and
confusion Queeker left the hall, ascended to the gallery, and sat
himself down beside Fanny Hennings, with an air of intense decision.

"Oh, Mr Queeker!" exclaimed Fanny.

"Listen, Fanny," said the tall uncle at that moment, "they are giving
one of the most important toasts of the evening--The Royal National
Lifeboat Institution."

Fanny tried to listen, and had caught a few words, when she felt her
hand suddenly seized and held fast. Turning her head quickly, she
beheld the face of Queeker turned to bright scarlet.

What more she heard or saw after that it would be extremely difficult to
tell. Perhaps the best way of conveying an idea of it is to lay before
the reader the short epistle which Fanny penned that same night to her
old friend Katie Hall. It ran thus:--

"RAMSGATE.

"OH, KATIE! DARLING KATIE!--He has done it _at last_! Dear fellow!
And so like himself too--so romantically, so poetically! They were
toasting the Lifeboat Institution at the time. He seized my hand.
`Fanny,' he said, in the deep manly tones in which he had just made the
most brilliant speech of the e