"MELISSA P. EASTERBROOK." I laid it down and sighed. "A New England schoolmarm!" I exclaimed, with a groan. "It sounds rather terrible. A dove-coloured dress and a pair of gray spectacles! I fancy I can picture her to myself: a tall and bony person of a certain age, with corkscrew curls, who reads improving books and has views of her own about the fulfilment of prophecy." But as my spirits went down so Lucy's went up, like the old man and woman in the cottage weather-glass. "That looks more promising," she said. "The spectacles are good. Perhaps, after all, dear Bernard may escape. I don't think he's at all the sort of person to be taken with a dove-coloured bonnet." For some days after Bernard came home from Cambridge we chaffed a good deal among ourselves about Miss Melissa Easterbrook. Bernard took quite my view about the spectacles and dress. He even drew on an envelope a fancy portrait of Miss Easterbrook, as he said himself, "from documentary evidence." It represented a typical schoolmarm of the most virulent order, and was calculated to strike terror into the receptive mind of ingenuous youth on simple inspection. At last the day came when we were to go to Liverpool. We arrived at St. Pancras in very good time, and looked about on the platform for a tall and hard-faced person of transatlantic aspect, arrayed in a dove-coloured dress and a pair of gray spectacles. But we looked in vain; nobody about seemed to answer to the description. At last Bernard turned to my wife with a curious smile. "I think I've spotted her, mother," he said, waving his hand vaguely to the right. "That lady over yonder--by the door of the refreshment-room. Don't you see? That must be Melissa." For we knew her only as Melissa already among ourselves; it had been raised to the mild rank of a family witticism. I looked in the direction he suggested, and paused for certainty. There, irresolute by the door, and gazing about her timidly with inquiring eyes, stood the prettiest, tiniest, most shrinking little Western girl you ever saw in your life--attired, as she said, in a dove-coloured dress, with bonnet to match, and a pair of gray spectacles. But oh, what a dove-coloured dress! Walter Crane might have designed it--one of those perfect travelling costumes of which the America girl seems to possess a monopoly; and the spectacles--well, the spectacles, though undoubtedly real, added just a touch of piquancy to an otherwise almost painfully timid and retiring little figure.