Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/226

 young girl at boarding school, our ideas were largely theoretical, but still we thought they were based on sound sense and a winsome instinct as to comely demeanor. We threw our heart into the task and felt that Louisa Alcott herself could not have counseled more becoming decorum. It was long after midnight when we finished the last reply of a young girl to the young man who had called her by her first name three months before we felt he had any right to do so. We put these last two sections of the manuscript into a drawer of the desk, to give them a final reading the next morning.

Late that night there came a damp fog, one of those pearly Long Island fogs. The desk drawer swelled up and retired from active life. Containing its precious freight, it was immovable. We stood the desk upside down, we tugged frantically at it, we hammered and chiseled and strove but in vain. The hour for mailing the copy approached. At last baffled, we had to speed to a mail-box and post the treatise on Etiquette without those two chapters. The publisher, we knew, would not miss them, though to us they contained the cream of our whole philosophy of politeness, containing our prized aphorisms on Consideration for Others The Basis of Good Manners.

We were never able to get that drawer open again. When we sold the desk to Mr. P. it was still tightly stuck. Some months ago we were passing along Arch street, just under the Reading