open at its own sweet will.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bopp, though carrying his heart upon his sleeve,
believed his secret buried in the deepest gloom, and enjoyed all the
delightful miseries lovers insist upon making for themselves. When
Dolly was quiet and absent, he became pensive, the lesson dragged,
and people fancied they were getting tired of the humbug; when Dolly
was blithe and bland, he grew radiant, exercised within an inch of
his life as a vent for his emotions, and people went home declaring
gymnastics to be the crowning triumph of the age; and when Dolly was
capricious, Mr. Bopp, became a bewildered weathercock, changing as
the wind changed, and dire was the confusion occasioned thereby.

Like the sage fowl in the story, Dick said nothing, but "kept up a
terrible thinking," and, not having had experience enough to know
that when a woman says No she is very apt to mean Yes, he took Dolly
at her word. Believing it to be his duty to warn "Old Bopp," he
resolved to do it like a Roman brother, regardless of his own
feelings or his sister's wrath, quite unconscious that the motive
power in the affair was a boyish love of ruling the young person who
ruled every one else.

Matters stood thus, when the town was electrified by a general
invitation to the annual jubilee at Jollyboys Hall, which this
spring flowered into a masquerade, and filled the souls of old and
young with visions of splendor, frolic, and fun. Being an amiable
old town, it gave itself up, like a kind grandma, to the wishes of
its children, let them put its knitting away, disturb its naps, keep
its hands busy with vanities of the flesh, and its mind in a state
of chaos for three mortal weeks. Young ladies were obscured by