So saying, he kissed me on the cheek and set off for school as fast as his legs could carry him.  O Love, omnivorous Love, that sparest neither the dotard leaning on his staff nor the boy with pantaloons buttoning on his jacket,—­omnipotent Love, that, after parents and teachers have failed, in one instant can make Billy try to become a good boy!

With both of my nephews hopelessly enamored, and myself the confidant of both, I had my hands full.  Daniel was generally dejected and distrustful; Billy buoyant and jolly.  Daniel found it impossible to overcome his bashfulness; was spontaneous only in sonnets, brilliant only in bouquets.  Billy was always coming to me with pleasant news, told in his slangy New-York boy vernacular.  One day he would exclaim,—­“Oh, I’m getting on prime!  I got such a smile off her this morning as I went by the window!” Another day he wanted counsel how to get a valentine to her,—­because it was too big to shove in a lamp-post, and she might catch him if he left it on the steps, rang the bell, and ran away.  Daniel wrote his own valentine; but, despite its originality, that document gave him no such comfort as Billy got from twenty-five cents’ worth of embossed paper, pink cupids, and doggerel.  Finally, Billy announced to me that he had been to play with Jimmy, and got introduced to his girl.

Shortly after this Lu gave what they call “a little company,”—­not a party, but a reunion of forty or fifty people with whom the family were well acquainted, several of them living in our immediate neighborhood.  There was a goodly proportion of young folk, and there was to be dancing but the music was limited to a single piano played by the German exile usual on such occasions, and the refreshments did not rise to the splendor of a costly supper.  This kind of compromise with fashionable gayety was wisely deemed by Lu the best method of introducing Daniel to the beau monde,—­a push given the timid eaglet by the maternal bird, with a soft tree-top between him and the vast expanse of society.  How simple was the entertainment may be inferred from the fact that Lu felt somewhat discomposed when she got a note from one of her guests asking leave to bring along her niece, who was making her a few weeks’ visit.  As a matter of course, however, she returned answer to bring the young lady and welcome.

Daniel’s dressing-room having been given up to the gentlemen I invited him to make his toilet in mine, and, indeed, wanting him to create a favorable impression, became his valet pro tem., tying his cravat, and teasing the divinity-student look out of his side-hair.  My little dandy Billy came in for another share of attention, and when I managed to button his jacket for him so that it showed his shirt-studs “like a man’s,” Count d’Orsay could not have felt a more pleasing sense of his sufficiency for all the demands of the gay world.

When we reached the parlor we found Pa and Ma Lovegrove already receiving.  About a score of guests had arrived.  Most of them were old married couples, which, after paying their devoirs, fell in two like unriveted scissors,—­the gentlemen finding a new pivot in pa and the ladies in ma, where they mildly opened and shut upon such questions as severally concerned them, such as “the way gold closed,” and “how the children were.”