that she shall be continually played upon--if not by one person, then
by another. Nature overloads a tendency in order to make it carry
straight along its course against the interference of other tendencies;
and she will sometimes provide a girl with a great many young men at
the start, in order that she may be sure of one husband in the end.
The precautionary swarm in Sylvia's case seems multitudinous enough to
supply her with successive husbands to the end of her days and in the
teeth of all known estimates of mortality. How unlike Georgiana!

I think of Georgiana as the single peach on a tree in a season when
they are rarest. Not a very large peach, and scarcely yet yielding a
blush to the sun, although its long summer heat is on the wane; growing
high in the air at the end of a bough and clustered about by its
shining leaves. But what beauty, purity, freshness! You must hunt to
find it and climb to reach it; but when you get it, you get it
all--there is not a trace left for another. But Sylvia! I am afraid
Sylvia is like a big bunch of grapes that hangs low above a public
pathway: each passer-by reaches up and takes a grape.

I caught some one taking a grape the other evening--a sort of green
grape. Sylvia has been sending bouquets to the gosling who was her
escort on the evening of her Commencement--him of the duck trousers and
webbed feet. On one occasion I have observed her walking along the
borders of my garden in his company and have overheard her telling him
that _he_ could come in and get flowers whenever he wished. I wish I
might catch him once.

To cap the climax, after twilight on the evening in question, I
strolled out to my arbor for a quiet hour with thoughts of Georgiana.
Whom should I surprise in there but Sylvia and the gosling! deep in the