moon
and other celestial bodies, and also indulged in "lines" to various
terrestrial bodies, such as the lily or the snowdrop, or something
equally drooping or pale. Queeker never by any chance addressed the
sun, or the red-rose, or anything else suggestive of health and vigour.
Yet his melancholy soul could not resist Katie,--which was this angel's
name,--because, although she was energetic, and vigorous, and
matter-of-fact, not to say slightly mischievous, she was intensely
sympathetic and tender in her feelings, and romantic too. But her
romance puzzled him. There was something too intense about it for his
taste. If he had only once come upon her unawares, and caught her
sitting with her hands clasped, gazing in speechless adoration at the
moon, or even at a street-lamp, in the event of its being thick weather
at the time, his love for her would have been without alloy.

As it was, Queeker thought her "desperately love-able," and in his
perplexity continued to write sonnets without number to the moon, in
which efforts, however, he was singularly unsuccessful, owing to the
fact that, after he had gazed at it for a considerable length of time,
the orb of night invariably adopted black ringlets and a bright sunny
complexion.

George Durant--which was the name of the bald fat little elderly
gentleman--was Katie's father. Looking at them, no one would have
thought so, for Katie was tall and graceful in form; and her
countenance, except when lighted up with varying emotion, was grave and
serene.

As Mr Durant looked at it just then, the gravity had deepened into
severity; the pretty eyebrows frowned darkly at the book over which they
bent, and the rosy lips represented a compound of pursing and pouting as
they moved and muttered something inaudibly.

"What is it that puzzles you, Katie?" asked her father, laying down the
paper.

"'Sh!" whispered Katie, without lifting her head; "seventeen,
twenty-two, twenty-nine, thirty-six,--one pound sixteen;--no, I _can't_
get it to balance. Did you ever know such a provoking thing?"

She flung down her pencil, and looked full in her father's face, where
fun had, for the time, so thoroughly conquered and overthrown benignity,
that the frown vanished from her brow, and the rosy lips expanded to
join her sire in a hearty fit of laughter.

"If you could only see your own face, Katie, when you are puzzling over
these accounts, you would devote yourself ever after to drawing