Saying this, he lifted with his own ministerial fingers a small table from a corner of the room, and placed it in front of the youthful couple, with the men all ready laid out. Ericson's eyes sparkled at the sight of his favourite game; and he determined to display his utmost skill, and teach his antagonist a few secrets of the art of (mimic) war. But determinations, as has been remarked by several sages, past and present, are sometimes vain. Nothing, one would think, could be so likely to restore a man's self-possession as a quiet game of chess--an occupation as efficacious in soothing the savage breast as music itself. But Ericson seemed still agitated from the contradictions he had encountered from the free-spoken Christina, and threw a little more politeness into his manner than he had hitherto vouchsafed to show, when he invited her to be his adversary in a game. "But, if I beat you?" she said ominously, holding up one of the fair fingers to which his attention had been so particularly called, and implying by the question, if you get angry when I only refuse your toast, won't you eat me if I am the winner at chess? "But, if I beat you?" she said. "That will not be the only occasion on which you will have triumphed over me, you--you"----He seemed greatly at a loss for a word, and concluded his speech with--"beauty!" This expression, which was, no doubt, intended for the most complimentary he could find, was accompanied with a look of admiration so long, so broad, and so impudent, that she blushed, and a squeeze of her hand so hard, so rough, and so continued, that she screamed. She threw a glance of inexpressible disdain on the insolent wooer, and looked for protection to her father; but that venerable individual was at that moment so sound asleep on one of the sofas at the other end of the room, that no noise whatever could have awakened him. Ericson seemed totally unmoved by all the contempt she could express in her looks, and probably thought he was in a thriving condition, from the fact (somewhat unusual) of his being looked at at all. She lost her temper altogether. She covered her cheek, which was flushed with anger, with the little hand that was reddened with pain, and resolved to play her worst to spite her ill-mannered antagonist. But all her attempts at bad play were useless. The board shook beneath the immense hands of Ericson, who was in a tremendous state of agitation, and hardly knew the pieces. He pushed then hither and thither--made his knights slide along with the episcopal propriety of bishops, and made his bishops caracole across the squares with the unseemly elasticity of knights. His game got into such confusion, that Christina could not avoid winning, and at last--enjoying the victory she had determined not to win--she cried out, with a voice of triumph, "Check to the king by the queen."