He stopped reading just here, to look at the evening paper, which had been brought in. I read something in it, and then we all went to sit on the piazza, with the street-lamp shining through the bitter-sweet vine, as good as the moon, and the conversation naturally and easily turned on odd names. I told what I had read in the paper: that our country rivalled Dickens's in queer names, and that it wasn't for a land that had Boggs and Bigger and Bragg for governors, and Stubbs, Snoggles, Scroggs, and Pugh among its respectable citizens, to accuse Dickens of caricature. I turned, a little tremulously, I confess, to "him," saying,-- "If you had been so unfortunate as to have for a name Darius Snoggles, now, for instance, wouldn't you have it changed by the Legislature?" I shivered with anxiety. "Certainly not," he replied, with perfect unconsciousness. "Whatever my name might be, I would endeavor to make it a respectable one while I bore it." Laura sat the other side of me, and softly touched me. So I only asked, if that great star up there was Lyra; but all the time Anodyne, Ambergris, Abner, Albion, Alpheus, and all the names that begin with A, rolled through my memory monotonously and continually. After we went up-stairs that night, and while I was trying in vain to do up my hair so as to make a natural wave in front, (sometimes everything goes wrong,) Laura said,-- "Delphine!" My mother mixed romance with good practical sense, and very properly said that girls with good names and tolerable faces might get on in the world, but it took fortune to make your Sallies and Mollies go down. She had good taste, too, and didn't name either of us Louisa Prudence, like an unfortunate I once saw; and we were left, with our nice cottage covered with its vine of bitter-sweet and climbing rose, fifteen hundred dollars each, and our names, Delphine and Laura. Not a bad heritage, with economy, good looks, and hearts to take life cheerily. Still it is plain enough that a fifty-dollar note for the bride was not to be despised nor overlooked. In fact, with the exception of Polly's present of a brown earthen bowl and a pudding-stick, it was the first approach to a wedding-gift that I had yet received. And this note was trouble the second. But of that, by-and-by. "Delphine!" said Laura, softly. Some people's voices excoriate you, Laura's was soft and soothing. "Well!" "Don't say any more to--to Mr. Sampson about names." "Oh, dear! hateful!" "Delphine, be thankful it's no worse!" "How could it be worse,--unless it were Hog-and-Hominy? I never knew anything so utterly ridiculous! America! Columbia! Yankee-Doodle! I'd rather it had been Abraham!" All this I almost shouted in a passion of vexation, and Laura hastily closed the window.