n colors, raspberries, currants,
and such, after a solemn thing like this happening.--The conceit seemed
to please the young fellow. If you will believe it, when we came down
to breakfast the next morning, he had carried it out as follows. You
know those odious little "saaes-plates" that figure so largely at
boarding-houses, and especially at taverns, into which a strenuous
attendant female trowels little dabs, sombre of tint and heterogeneous
of composition, which it makes you feel homesick to look at, and into
which you poke the elastic coppery teaspoon with the air of a cat
dipping her foot into a wash-tub,--(not that I mean to say anything
against them, for, when they are of tinted porcelain or starry
many-faceted crystal, and hold clean bright berries, or pale virgin
honey, or "lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon," and the teaspoon is of
white silver, with the Tower-stamp, solid, but not brutally heavy,--as
people in the green stage of millionism will have them,--I can dally
with their amber semi-fluids or glossy spherules without a
shiver,)--you know these small, deep dishes, I say. When we came down
the next morning, each of these (two only excepted) was covered with a
broad leaf. On lifting this, each boarder found a small heap of solemn
black huckleberries. But one of those plates held red currants, and was
covered with a red rose; the other held white currants, and was covered
with a white rose. There was a laugh at this at first, and then a short
silence, and I noticed that her lip trembled, and the old gentleman
opposite was in trouble to get at his bandanna handkerchief.

--"What was the use in waiting? We should be too late for Switzerland,
that season, if we waited much longer."--The hand I held trembled in
mine, and the eyes fell meekly, as Esther bowed herself before the feet
of Ahasuerus.--She had been reading that chapter, for she looked
up,--if there was a film of moisture over her eyes, there was also the
faintest shadow of a distant smile skirting her lips, but not enough to
accent the dimples