Page:A Literary Courtship (1893).pdf/96

 Miss Lamb always had a very kind way of referring things to me, but I did not deceive myself for a moment.

"Speaking of names," I said, "what a pity that Pike's Peak could not have been called something else."

"Yes," said John. "Aside from its ugliness, it is absurd to call a great round dome like that by such a spikèd name."

"We thought so, too, at first," said Miss Lamb. "We decided it ought to be called the 'Manitou.' That would have been both sonorous and significant. But after a while we got to like Pike's Peak, perhaps because it was so grotesquely inappropriate, and when our Swedish parlor-maid called it 'the Pike,' we felt that that could not be improved upon, and 'the Pike' it has remained in our vocabulary."

Undeniably Miss Lamb had humor. But then, so had Leslie Smith. Some of the poems were as sparkling as others were lugubrious. They were evidently the work of a many-sided genius. It