Oh! she was a lovely girl,
    So pretty and so fair,
  With gentle, love-lit eyes,
    And wavy, dark brown hair.

  I loved the gentle girl,
    But, oh!  I heaved a sigh
  When first she told me she could see
    Out of only one eye.

  But soon I thought within myself
    I’d better save my tear and sigh
  To bestow upon an older person I know
    Who has more than one eye.

  She is brave and intelligent
    Too.  She is witty and wise. 
  She’ll accomplish more now than another person I know
    Who has two eyes.

  Ah, you need not pity her!
    She needs not your tear and sigh. 
  She’ll make good use, I tell you,
    Of her one remaining eye.

  In the home where we are hastening,
    In our eternal Home on High,
  See that you be not rivalled
    By the girl with only one eye.[*]

[*]Miss Sylvia could not have been speaking seriously when she wrote that she had “composed” this poem.  It is known to be the work of another hand, though Sylvia certainly tampered with the original and produced a version of her own.  J. L. A.

Having thus dealt a thrust at Georgiana, Sylvia seems to have turned in the spirit of revenge upon her mother; and when she came home some days ago she brought with her a distant cousin of her own age—­a boy, enormously fat—­whom she soon began to decoy around the garden as her mother had been decoyed by the general.  Further to satirize the similarity of lovers, she one day pinned upon his shoulders rosettes of yellow ribbon.

Sylvia has now passed from Scott to Moore; and several times lately she has made herself heard in the garden with recitations to the fat boy on the subject of Peris weeping before the gates of Paradise, or warbling elegies under the green sea in regard to Araby’s daughter.  There is a real aptness in the latter reference; for this boy’s true place in nature is the deep seas of the polar regions, where animals are coated with thick tissues of blubber.  If Sylvia ever harpoons him, as she seems seriously bent on doing, she will have to drive her weapon in deep.

Yesterday she sprang across to me with her hair flying and an open letter in her hand.

“Oh, read it!” she cried, her face kindling with glory.

It turned out to be a letter from the great Mr. Prentice, of the Louisville Journal accepting a poem she had lately sent him, and assigning her a fixed place among his vast and twinkling galaxy of Kentucky poetesses.  The title of the poem was, “My Lover Kneels to None but God.”

“I infer from this,” I said, gravely, “that your lover is a Kentuckian.”

“He is,” cried Sylvia.  “Oh, his peerless, haughty pride!”

“Well, I congratulate you, Sylvia,” I continued, mildly, “upon having such an editor and such a lover; but I really think that your lover ought to kneel a little to Mr. Prentice on this one occasion.”