through the atmosphere of refinement and intellectuality, as “a simple repast.”  To this was occasionally added a refreshment, which I have seen elsewhere only at Sunday-school picnics,—­a mild tap of slightly sweetened water, which tasted as if lemons had formerly been kept in the pail it was made in;—­only for Sunday-schools they make it strong at the outset, and add water during the hymns, with a vague but praiseworthy expectation that, in view of the sacredness of the occasion, there will be some miraculous interposition, as in the case of the widow’s cruse, to keep the beverage up to proof; while Miss Moodle’s liquor preserved throughout the evening a weakness of which generous natures scorned to take advantage beyond the first tumbler.

At this portion of my career I was dawned upon by Miss Tucker.  From mature years I look back with a shudder upon the number of parchmenty sandwiches which I ate, the reservoirs of lemony water which I drank, in order to be in that lovely creature’s society.  I experienced agonies in thinking how much longer it might be before I could get a coat with tails, when I calculated how soon she would be putting up her back hair.  Her eyes were as blue as I was when I thought she liked Briggs; and she had a complexion compared with which strawberries and cream were nowhere.  When she was sent to the piano, to show people what the Moodle system could do in the way of a musical education, I fell into a cataleptic state and floated off upon a flood of harmony.  Miss Moodle and her mits, self and lemon kids, even the sleepless eye of Barker, watching for an indiscretion, upon the strength of which he might defensibly send somebody to bed the next Saturday afternoon, all vanished from before me, swallowed up in a mild glory, which contained but two objects,—­an angel with low neck and short sleeves, and an insensate hippopotamus of a piano, which did not wriggle all over with ecstasy when her white fingers tickled him.

At such moments I would gladly have gone down on all fours, and had a key-board mortised into my side at any expense of personal torture, if Miss Tucker could only have played a piece on me, and herself been conscious of the chords she was awakening inside my jacket.  I loved her to that degree that my hair never seemed brushed enough when I beheld her; and I quite spoiled the shape of my best boots through an elevation of the instep, caused by putting a rolled-up pair of stockings inside each heel, to approximate the manly stature, at our bi-monthly meetings.  Even her friend, Miss Crickey, a mealy-faced little girl, with saffron hair, who had been pushed by Miss Moodle so far into the higher branches, that she had a look of being perpetually frightened to death with the expectation of hearing them crack and let her down from a great height,—­seemed beautiful to me from the mere fact of daily breathing the same air with such an angel, sharing her liquorice-stick, and borrowing her sweet little thimble.