“No wolves prowling about my lambs, if you please,” said

Miss Dorothy.  “I will not allow it.”

She was as good as her word.  I don’t think the boy lives who ever set foot within the limits of Primrose Hall while the seminary was under her charge.  Perhaps if Miss Dorothy had given her young ladies a little more liberty, they would not have thought it “such fun” to make eyes over the white lattice fence at the young gentlemen of the Temple Grammar School.  I say perhaps; for it is one thing to manage thirty-five young ladies and quite another thing to talk about it.

But all Miss Dorothy’s vigilance could not prevent the young folks from meeting in the town now and then, nor could her utmost ingenuity interrupt postal arrangements.  There was no end of notes passing between the students and the Primroses.  Notes tied to the heads of arrows were shot into dormitory windows; notes were tucked under fences, and hidden in the trunks of decayed trees.  Every thick place in the boxwood hedge that surrounded the seminary was a possible post-office.

It was a terrible shock to Miss Dorothy the day she unearthed a nest of letters in one of the huge wooden urns surmounting the gateway that led to her dovecot.  It was a bitter moment to Miss Phoebe and Miss Candace and Miss Hesba, when they had their locks of hair grimly handed back to them by Miss Gibbs in the presence of the whole school.  Girls whose locks of hair had run the blockade in safety were particularly severe on the offenders.  But it didn’t stop other notes and other tresses, and I would like to know what can stop them while the earth holds together.

Now when I first came to Rivermouth I looked upon girls as rather tame company; I hadn’t a spark of sentiment concerning them; but seeing my comrades sending and receiving mysterious epistles, wearing bits of ribbon in their button-holes and leaving packages of confectionery (generally lemon-drops) in the hollow trunks of trees—­why, I felt that this was the proper thing to do.  I resolved, as a matter of duty, to fall in love with somebody, and I didn’t care in the least who it was.  In much the same mood that Don Quixote selected the Dulcinea del Toboso for his lady-love, I singled out one of Miss Dorothy’s incomparable young ladies for mine.

I debated a long while whether I should not select two, but at last settled down on one—­a pale little girl with blue eyes, named Alice.  I shall not make a long story of this, for Alice made short work of me.  She was secretly in love with Pepper Whitcomb.  This occasioned a temporary coolness between Pepper and myself.

Not disheartened, however, I placed Laura Rice—­I believe it was Laura Rice—­in the vacant niche.  The new idol was more cruel than the old.  The former frankly sent me to the right about, but the latter was a deceitful lot.  She wore my nosegay in her dress at the evening service (the Primroses were marched to church three times every Sunday), she penned me the daintiest of notes, she sent me the glossiest of ringlets (cut, as I afterwards found out, from the stupid head of Miss Gibbs’s chamber-maid), and at the same time was holding me and my pony up to ridicule in a series of letters written to Jack Harris.  It was Harris himself who kindly opened my eyes.