“A was an Archer, and shot at a frog.”

I should even prefer Archer.  It needn’t be Insatiate Archer.  So I kept turning over and over the painful subject, one evening,—­I mean, of course, in my mind, for I had not really broached this matter of legislative action.  Luckily, “he” had brought in the new edition of George Herbert’s Works.  We were reading aloud, and “he” read the chapter of “The Parson in Sacraments.”  At the foot was an extract from “The Parish Register” of Crabbe, which he read, unconscious of the way in which I mentally applied it.  Indeed, I think he scarcely thought of his own name at that time.  But I did, twenty-four times in every day.  This was the note:—­

  “Pride lives with all; strange names our rustics give
  To helpless infants, that their own may live;
  Pleased to be known, they’ll some attention claim,
  And find some by-way to the house of fame. 
  ‘Why Lonicera wilt thou name thy child?’
  I asked the gardener’s wife, in accents mild. 
  ‘We have a right,’ replied the sturdy dame;
  And Lonicera was the infant’s name.”

He stopped reading just here, to look at the evening paper, which had been brought in.  I read something in it, and then we all went to sit on the piazza, with the street-lamp shining through the bitter-sweet vine, as good as the moon, and the conversation naturally and easily turned on odd names.  I told what I had read in the paper:  that our country rivalled Dickens’s in queer names, and that it wasn’t for a land that had Boggs and Bigger and Bragg for governors, and Stubbs, Snoggles, Scroggs, and Pugh among its respectable citizens, to accuse Dickens of caricature.  I turned, a little tremulously, I confess, to “him,” saying,—­

“If you had been so unfortunate as to have for a name Darius Snoggles, now, for instance, wouldn’t you have it changed by the Legislature?”

I shivered with anxiety.

“Certainly not,” he replied, with perfect unconsciousness.  “Whatever my name might be, I would endeavor to make it a respectable one while I bore it.”

Laura sat the other side of me, and softly touched me.  So I only asked, if that great star up there was Lyra; but all the time Anodyne, Ambergris, Abner, Albion, Alpheus, and all the names that begin with A, rolled through my memory monotonously and continually.

After we went up-stairs that night, and while I was trying in vain to do up my hair so as to make a natural wave in front, (sometimes everything goes wrong,) Laura said,—­

“Delphine!”

My mother mixed romance with good practical sense, and very properly said that girls with good names and tolerable faces might get on in the world, but it took fortune to make your Sallies and Mollies go down.  She had good taste, too, and didn’t name either of us Louisa Prudence, like an unfortunate I once saw; and we were left, with our nice cottage covered with its vine of bitter-sweet and climbing