Of course this knowledge came to me gradually; but even that first evening, as Van Zandt and Miss Solander passed near us in the waltz, I could see that he was wonderfully taken with his fair partner. For the next few days he was more or less the victim of some little sisterly traps that were set with great tact and amused Northrup and me immensely. Then my young gentleman escaped and made great running, distancing “Buttons,” “The Wafer,” “Balaam's Ass,” and the rest of what Nell called the “fry,” and crowding Hinton closely for what each felt was his life's race for a prize that might be for neither of them. They were a nice, manly, generous pair of rivals, and I never saw either take an unfair advantage of the other. I remember one day I was fishing, when they both rushed down to their boats and started for the island at racing stroke. Just as they were abreast of me Van Zandt, who was leading, broke a rowlock, and Hinton forged ahead; but the moment he saw what had occurred he backed water, tossed Harry an extra rowlock, waited until he had put it in, and then away they went again. Which was the favored one it was for some time difficult to decide, as the girl was evidently used to a great deal of attention, and accepted it gracefully and even gratefully; but yet somehow as though it was a matter of course. She took many things as matters of course, by the way, among others her beauty, of which she was as little vain as a flower is of its color or perfume, and she labored under the pleasant delusion that men liked her simply because she could dance and ride and row and shoot and play tennis. There was another thing she played beside tennis, and that was the banjo, and it seemed to me that her rich, flexible contralto, the liquid tingle of the banjo and the Spanish words of the song she loved best to sing, made a harmony as soft and sweet as the fragrant, moonlit nights of her Southern home. Until I read the generous and intelligent praise of the banjo by the gifted pen of America's greatest writer of romance, I had been rather diffident of expressing my liking for this charming instrument, partly because it was rather impressed upon me by my parents, who were a little tinged with Puritanism, that it was low, and partly because a musical friend, whose opinion in matters harmonic I always deferred to, disliked it; but, under the rose, I thought it delicious, and many years ago I used to wander pretty often to a beer garden in New York, where an old darky named Horace touched the strings with a master's hand and drew from them the half sad, half merry, but wholly sweet melodies of his child-hearted race, which always struck some responsive chord in me that no other music ever did.