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most pardonable crime of youth and maiden, and guiltless crime of love in the first degree.

that sweet

So, without troubling themselves to analyze their feelings, they found a piquant pleasure in skating together, she in admiring his tours de force, and he instructing her.

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"Look, Peter!" said Mrs. Skerrett, pointing to the other pair skating, he on the backward roll, she on the forward, with hands crossed and locked; such contacts are permitted in skating, as in dancing. "Your hero and my

heroine have dropped into an intimacy."

"None but the Plucky deserve the Pretty," says Peter. "But he seems to be such a fine fellow, suppose she should n't-"

The pretty face looked anxious.

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"Suppose he should n't," Peter on the masculine behalf returned.

"He cannot help it: Mary is so noble, ing, when she does not disdain to be."

- and so charm

She cannot disdain

He is just as

"I do not believe she can help it. Wade. He carries too many guns for that. fine as she is. He was a hero when I first knew him. His face does not show an atom of change; and you know what Mr. Churm told us of his chivalric deeds elsewhere, and how he tamed and reformed Dunderbunk. He is crystal grit, as crystalline and gritty as he can be."

"Grit seems to be your symbol of the highest qualities. It certainly is a better thing in man than in ice-cream. But, Peter, suppose this should be a true love and should not run smooth?"

"What consequence is the smooth running, so long as there is strong running and a final getting in neck and neck at the winning-post?

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"But," still pleaded the anxious soul, having no anxieties of her wn, she was always suffering for others, — “he seems to be such a fine fellow! and she is so hard to win!"

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"Well, upon compulsion, I admit that you are."

"Then being a fine fellow does not diminish the said fellow's chances of being blessed with a wife quite superfine." "If I thought you were personal, Peter, I should object to the mercantile adjective. Superfine,' indeed!"

"I am personal. I withdraw the obnoxious phrase, and substitute transcendent. No, Fanny dear, I read Wade's experience in my own. I do not feel very much concerned about him. He is big enough to take care of himself. A man who is sincere, self-possessed, and steady, does not get into miseries with beautiful Amazons like our friend. He knows too much to try to make his love run up hill; but let it once get started, rough running gives it vim. Wade will love like a deluge, when he sees that he may, and I'd advise obstacles to stand off."

"It was pretty, Peter, to see cold Mary Damer so gentle and almost tender."

"I always have loved to see the first beginnings of what looks like love, since I saw ours."

"Ours," she said, "it seems like yesterday."

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And then together they recalled that fair picture against its dark ground of sorrow, and so went on refreshing the emotions of that time, until Fanny smiling said,

"There must be something magical in skates, for here we are talking sentimentally like a pair of young lovers."

"Health and love are cause and effect," says Peter, sententiously.

Meanwhile Wade had been fast skating into the good graces of his companion. Perhaps the rap on his head had deranged him. He certainly tossed himself about in a reckless and insane way. Still, he justified his conduct by never tumbling again, and by inventing new devices with bewildering rapidity.

This pair were not at all sentimental. Indeed, their talk was quite technical: all about rings and edges, and heel and toe, what skates are best, and who best use them. There is an immense amount of sympathy to be exchanged on such topics, and it was somewhat significant that they avoided other themes where they might not sympathize so thoroughly. The negative part of a conversation is often as important as its positive.

So the four entertained themselves finely, sometimes as a quartette, sometimes as two duos with proper changes of partners, until the clear west began to grow golden and the clear east pink with sunset.

"It is a pity to go," said Peter Skerrett. "Everything here is perfection and Fine Art; but we must not be unfaithful to dinner. Dinner would have a right to punish us, if we did not encourage its efforts to be Fine Art also."

"Now, Mr. Wade," Fanny commanded, "your most heroic series of exploits, to close this heroic day."

He nimbly dashed through his list. The ice was traced with a labyrinth of involuted convolutions.

Wade's last turn brought him to the very spot of his tumble.

"Ah!" said he. "Here is the oar that tripped me, with 'Wade, his mark,' gashed into it. If I had not this," — he touched Miss Damer's handkerchief,-"for a souvenir, I think I would dig up the oar and carry it home."

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Let it melt out and float away in the spring," Mary said. "It may be a perch for a sea-gull or a buoy for a drowning man."

Here, if this were a long story instead of a short one, might be given a description of Peter Skerrett's house and the menu of Mrs. Skerrett's dinner. Peter and his wife had both been to great pillory dinners, ad nauseam, and learnt what to avoid. How not to be bored is the object

of all civilization, and the Skerretts had discovered the methods.

I must dismiss the dinner and the evening, stamped with the general epithet, Perfection.

"You will join us again to-morrow on the river," said Mrs. Skerrett, as Wade rose to go.

"To-morrow I go to town to report to my Directors." "Then next day."

"Next day, with pleasure."

Wade departed and marked this halcyon day with white chalk, as the whitest, brightest, sweetest of his life.

CHAPTER X.

FOREBODINGS.

JUBILATION! Jubilation now, instead of Consternation, in the office of Mr. Benjamin Brummage in Wall Street.

President Brummage had convoked his Directors to hear the First Semi-Annual Report of the new Superintendent and Dictator of Dunderbunk.

And there they sat around the green table, no longer forlorn and dreading a failure, but all chuckling with satisfaction over their prosperity.

They were a happy and hilarious family now, SO hilarious that the President was obliged to be always rapping to Orderr with his paper-knife.

Every one of these gentlemen was proud of himself as a Director of so successful a Company. The Dunderbunk advertisement might now consider itself as permanent in the newspapers, and the Treasurer had very unnecessarily inserted the notice of a dividend, which everybody knew of already.

When Mr. Churm was not by, they all claimed the honor of having discovered Wade, or at least of having been the first to appreciate him.

They all invited him to dinner, the others at their houses, Sam Gwelp at his club.

They had not yet begun to wax fat and kick. They still remembered the panic of last summer. They passed a unanimous vote of the most complimentary confidence in Wade, approved of his system, forced upon him an increase of salary, and began to talk of "launching out" and doubling their capital. In short, they behaved as Directors do when all is serene.

Churm and Wade had a hearty laugh over the absurdities of the Board and all their vague propositions. "Dunderbunk," said Churm, was a company started on a sentimental basis, as many others are."

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"Mr. Brummage fell in love with pig-iron?"

"Precisely. He had been a dry-goods jobber, risen from a retailer somewhere in the country. He felt a certain lack of dignity in his work. He wanted to deal in something more masculine than lace and ribbons. He read a sentimental article on Iron in the 'Journal of Commerce': how Iron held the world together; how it was nerve and sinew; how it was ductile and malleable and other things that sounded big; how without Iron civilization would stop, and New-Zealanders hunt rats among the ruins of London; how anybody who would make two tons of Iron grow where one grew before was a benefactor to the human race greater than Alexander, Cæsar, or Napoleon; and so on,-you know the eloquent style. Brummage's soul was fired. He determined to be greater than the three heroes named. was oozing with unoccupied capital. He went about among the other rich jobbers, with the newspaper article in his hand, and fired their souls. They determined to be great Iron-Kings,magnificent thought! They wanted to read in the newspapers, 'If all the iron rails made at the Dunderbunk Works in the last six months were put together in a straight line, they would reach twice round our terraque

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