In the centre was a double row of booths for the sale of articles not so strictly useful, and here the young people congregated. All the girls of Octavius seemed to have been gathered here—the pretty ones and the plain ones, the saucy ones and the shy, the maidens who were "getting along" and the damsels not yet out of their teens. Stiff, spreading crinolines brushed juvenile pantalettes, and the dark head of long, shaving-like ringlets contrasted itself with the bold waterfall of blonde hair. These girls did not know one another very well, save by little groups formed around the nucleus of a church association, and very few of them knew Miss Parmalee at all, except, of course, by sight. But now, astonishing to relate, she recognized them by name as old friends, shook hands warmly right and left, and blithely set them all to work and at their ease. The idea of selling things to young men abashed them by its weird and unmaidenly novelty. She showed them how it should be done—bringing forward for the purpose a sheepishly obstinate drug-store clerk, and publicly dragooning him into paying eighty cents for a leather dog-collar, despite his protests that he had no dog and hated the whole canine species, and could get such a strap as that anywhere for fifteen cents—all amid the greatest merriment. Her influence was so pervasive, indeed, that even the nicest girls soon got into a state of giggling familiarity with comparative strangers, which gave their elders concern, and which in some cases it took many months to straighten out again. But for the time all was sparkling gaiety. On the second and final evening, after the oyster supper, the Philharmonics played and a choir of girls sang patriotic songs. Then the gas was turned down and the stereopticon show began. As the last concerted achievement of the firm of Pulford & Shull, this magic-lantern performance is still remembered. The idea of it, of course, was Julia's. She suggested it to Marsena, and he gladly volunteered to make any number of positive plates from appropriate pictures and portraits for the purpose. Then she pressed Newton Shull into the service to get a stereopticon on hire, to rig up the platform and canvas for it, and finally to consent to quit his post among the Philharmonics when the music ceased, and to go off up into the gallery to work the slides. He also, during Marsena's absence one day, made a slide on his own account. Mr. Shull had not taken very kindly to the idea when Miss Julia first broached it to him. "No, I don't know as I ever worked a stereopticon," he said, striving to look with cold placidity into the winsome and beaming smile with which she confronted him one day out in the reception-room. She had never smiled at him before or pretended even to know his name. "I guess you'd better hire a man up from Tecumseh to bring the machine and run it himself."