he or she writes an occasional poem, it seems as if nothing could have been easier.  “Why, that piece run off jest like ile.  I don’t bullieve,” the unlettered applicant says to himself, “I don’t bullieve it took him ten minutes to write them verses.”  The good people have no suspicion of how much a single line, a single expression, may cost its author.  The wits used to say that Ropers,—­the poet once before referred to, old Samuel Ropers, author of the Pleasures of Memory and giver of famous breakfasts,—­was accustomed to have straw laid before the house whenever he had just given birth to a couplet.  It is not quite so bad as that with most of us who are called upon to furnish a poem, a song, a hymn, an ode for some grand meeting, but it is safe to say that many a trifling performance has had more good honest work put into it than the minister’s sermon of that week had cost him.  If a vessel glides off the ways smoothly and easily at her launching, it does not mean that no great pains have been taken to secure the result.  Because a poem is an “occasional” one, it does not follow that it has not taken as much time and skill as if it had been written without immediate, accidental, temporary motive.  Pindar’s great odes were occasional poems, just as much as our Commencement and Phi Beta Kappa poems are, and yet they have come down among the most precious bequests of antiquity to modern times.

The mystery of the young Doctor’s long visits to the neighboring town was satisfactorily explained by what we saw and heard of his relations with our charming “Delilah,”—­for Delilah we could hardly help calling her.  Our little handmaid, the Cinderella of the teacups, now the princess, or, what was better, the pride of the school to which she had belonged, fit for any position to which she might be called, was to be the wife of our young Doctor.  It would not have been the right thing to proclaim the fact while she was a pupil, but now that she had finished her course of instruction there was no need of making a secret of the engagement.

So we have got our romance, our love-story out of our Teacups, as I hoped and expected that we should, but not exactly in the quarter where it might have been looked for.

What did our two Annexes say to this unexpected turn of events?  They were good-hearted girls as ever lived, but they were human, like the rest of us, and women, like some of the rest of us.  They behaved perfectly.  They congratulated the Doctor, and hoped he would bring the young lady to the tea-table where she had played her part so becomingly.  It is safe to say that each of the Annexes world have liked to be asked the lover’s last question by the very nice young man who had been a pleasant companion at the table and elsewhere to each of them.  That same question is the highest compliment a man can pay a woman, and a woman does not mind having a dozen or more such compliments to string on the rosary of her remembrances.  Whether either of them was glad, on the whole, that he had not offered himself to the other in preference to herself would be a mean, shabby question, and I think altogether too well of you who are reading this paper to suppose that you would entertain the idea of asking it.