Another custom of the place I also fell in with, which was, to keep an evening-school.  All the schoolmasters had kept one from time immemorial.  This evening-school I really enjoyed.  Plenty of charming girls, too big or too busy to waste their daylight upon books, came from great distances, bringing their brothers and their beaux, all intent upon having a good time and getting on in their ciphering.  Teaching them was a pleasure, for they felt the need of knowledge.  I feel bound to say, however, that imparting knowledge was not my only pleasure.  In intervals of leisure, before or after school, or at recess, I found much that was worthy attention.  Seated at my desk, wrapped in my dignity, I watched, with many a sidelong glance, the progress of rustic love-making.  I only mean by this, that from their general movements I constructed such love-stories as seemed to me probable.  I learned who went with whom, who wished they could go with whom, who could and who couldn’t, who did and who didn’t.

Did I not go into the business on my own account?  That is by no means an improper question.  In fact, I might have expected it.  Some have, no doubt, considered it a settled thing that I fell in love with the bright-eyed beauty, before mentioned, or with the pink-cheeked; but I beg that such fancies may be brushed away, that all may be in readiness to receive the true queen, who in due time will come to take possession of her kingdom.  For I will be honest with you, and not, like most story-tellers, try to pull wool over your eyes all the way through.  I will say openly, that I did first see the girl who was afterwards my wife in that cold little village of Norway.  Cold it seems not to me now, in the light of so many warm, sunshiny memories!

When my evening-school had been in operation a few weeks, I noticed, one evening, at the end of the back-form on the girls’ side a new face.  The owner of this new face was very quietly studying her book, a thin, blue-covered book, Temple’s Arithmetic.  She was dressed in black,—­not fine, glossy black, but black that was gray, rusty, and well worn.  A very small silk handkerchief of the same color was drawn over her shoulders and pinned where its two corners met her gown in front, making a sort of triangle of whiteness,—­some would say, “revealing a neck and throat pure and white as a lily-leaf”; and they would say no more than the truth, only I never like to put things in that way.  Just so white was her face.  Her hair was black, soft, but not what the other girls would have called smooth, or “slick.”  It was pulled away behind her ears, and fixed up rather queerly in a great bunch behind, as if the only aim were to get it out of the way.  The upper part of her face was the most striking,—­the black eyebrows upon such a white, straight forehead.  I am rather particular in describing this new face, because—­well, perhaps because I remember it so distinctly.  While I was studying her as, I might perhaps say, a work