success. She seemed to take pains to avoid pleasing the young
carpenters, coachmen, and journeyman printers she met on these
occasions. With her head full of fantastic dreams, she imagined
herself a mere visitor at these simple entertainments of the common
people, and criticised the participants to herself with kindly sarcasm.
If she ever consented to dance, it was with the air with which she
fancied a duchess might open a ball of her servants. Once, in a round
game at a "surprise" party, it came her turn to be kissed by a young
blacksmith, who did his duty in spite of her struggles with strong arms
and a willing heart. Mr. Browning makes a certain queen, mourning over
her lofty loneliness, wish that some common soldier would throw down
his halberd and clasp her to his heart. It is doubtful if she would
really have liked it better than Miss Maud did, and she was furious as
a young lioness. She made herself so disagreeable about it that she
ceased to be invited to those lively entertainments; and some of the
most eligible of the young "Cariboos"--a social order of a secret and
mysterious rite, which met once a week in convenient woodsheds and
stable-lofts--took an oath with hands solemnly clasped in the intricate
grip of the order, that "they would never ask Miss Matchin to go to
party, picnic, or sleigh-ride, as long as the stars gemmed the blue
vault of heaven," from which it may be seen that the finer sentiments
of humanity were not unknown to the Cariboos.

Maud came thus to be eighteen, and though she was so beautiful and so
shapely that no stranger ever saw her without an instant of glad
admiration, she had had no suitor but one, and from him she never
allowed a word of devotion. Samuel Sleeny, a carpenter who worked with
her father, and who took his meals with the family, had fallen in love
with her at first sight, and, after a year of dumb hopelessness, had
been so encouraged by her father's evident regard that he had opened